Why I Capitalize "Enneagram"

And Why I Don't Like Doing It

Photo by Mark Rasmuson on Unsplash

I have been studying and working with the Enneagram for almost 10 years now, and it only occurred to me yesterday to double-check something: is the word “Enneagram” always capitalized? Now that I’m writing the word almost 20 times per post, I need to know.

A quick survey of some of the established organizations in the field suggests the answer is yes, capitalize it. The Enneagram Institute and The Narrative Enneagram capitalize the word every time it appears on their website. It shows up less frequently on their website, but The Diamond Approach are also consistent in their capitalization of “Enneagram.”

Capitalizing seems the clear consensus among experts, but part of me wants to leave it lower-case. The fact that I could study the material for almost a decade without consciously noticing how people were writing the word is perhaps telling.

My best guess as to the cause of this blind spot is that I am only now waking up to a tension in how the Enneagram is shared and promoted. On the one hand, there is a widely-held desire for the material to be as accessible and useful to as many people as possible. I have this desire myself. On the other hand, the stylistic choices made on behalf of this desire for accessibility can cover up some of the history and diverse uses of the symbol.

“The Enneagram,” in the way that I’ve been using it so far, and the way that most people use it, is actually short for the The Enneagram of Personality Types. The Enneagram of Personality Types is what The Enneagram Institute, The Narrative Enneagram, Integral Coaching Canada, and many other organizations, coaches, and podcasts are working with. And they almost never use the full title. I don’t blame people for not using the whole thing, I’ve typed it out twice and I’m already sick of it. Imagine how grating it could get repeated out loud in lectures, workshops, and on podcasts. “Enneagram” is already a lot of syllables. I suppose we could call it the EoPT or EPT, but to me that reads like piling more jargon on an already dense system. Plus, eventually we’d still have to explain what the E stands for and we’re back where we started.

According to The Enneagram Institute, The Enneagram of Personality Types is a modern synthesis of a number of ancient wisdom traditions put together by Oscar Ichazo in the mid-20th century. The word “Enneagram” refers to the symbol itself, from the Greek ennea meaning “nine” and gramma meaning “something drawn.” It translates to something like “nine-sided drawing” or “nine-pointed shape.”

Enneagram symbol depiction by Adamantia Klonaris

The symbol itself goes back further than Ichazo’s work in the 1960s, back to George Gurdjieff who reintroduced it to the modern world through sacred dances and movements so his participants could understand and embody the processes represented by the relationships between the points of the symbol. Gurdjieff was interested in a peculiar kind of typology: he would let his advanced students know what type of idiot he thought they were. However, the Enneagram Institute asserts that Gurdjieff did not use the Enneagram symbol to systematize how he understood character and personality. That particular systematization didn’t happen until Ichazo started to work with the symbol. It’s unclear to me if “Enneagram” was even the name given to the symbol before Ichazo.

Most sources seem in agreement that the symbol itself is ancient and that Gurdjieff was working with something kept alive and passed along through ancient times. However, it is frustratingly difficult to pin down who did the passing along and what they believed they were passing along. Riso and Hudson of the Enneagram Institute put it this way: “It is said to have originated in Babylon around 2500 B.C., but there is little direct evidence that this is so.[…] The theories underlying the diagram can be found in the ideas of Pythagoras, Plato, and some of the Neoplatonic philosophers.”¹

When tracing the history of the Enneagram, I try to make a careful distinction between the symbol and the personality system it’s most frequently associated with because it’s possible to use the symbol for more than just a personality typing system. I mentioned Gurdjieff’s dances and movements along the symbol earlier, though I know little about the processes he was trying to have his dancers experience. In The Regenerative Life, business consultant Carol Sanford uses the Enneagram symbol as a framework to map the nine key roles she sees as fundamental to driving societal change².

In interviews I’ve heard with her, Sanford is actually quite critical of using the Enneagram as a typology system. In her Regenerative Society Enneagram, she emphasizes that many people are going to play several of these key roles in their lives and that we are not naturally born to play any of them exclusively.

This gets to the heart of my resistance to the capital-E “Enneagram.” I think there could be many interesting, insightful ways to work with the symbol; perhaps some ancient, some current, and some still to come. To refer to the Ichazo-derived Enneagram of Personality Types that most of the people reading this are already familiar with as The Enneagram risks glossing over some of the possibilities inherent in the symbol.

So why then, after all my research and reservations, am I still capitalizing “Enneagram?” Part of it is what I pointed out at the beginning: the convention has been set and I don’t want to add extra layers of confusion and complication on top of a name and symbol that are already hopelessly esoteric to many.

My other consideration is the murkiness of what exactly it was that Ichazo discovered and made his own. My best guess, based on everything I’ve come across so far, is that Ichazo was a brilliant synthesizer of spiritual and philosophical traditions. The symbol and all of the precursors and antecedents to his system were out there well before Ichazo’s work at his Arica Institute. Even so, putting it all together in the way that he did was the birth of something new and significant. To use a familiar analogy: touch screens, cell phones, and data plans all existed before the iPhone, and the iPhone was a revolutionary piece of technology that has shaped our relationship with information.

Calling the Ichazo-derived Enneagram of Personality Types, “The Enneagram” and capitalizing it may not tell the symbol’s whole story, but it marks a clear beginning of the symbol’s modern chapter.

---

Announcements: Subscriber Chat and Q&As

Thank you to my first group of paid subscribers. Your contributions help me keep this project going and affirm that my writing has value.

Paid subscribers now have access to Book of Changes Subscriber Chat. This is a conversation space that’s a lot like Slack or a group chat. I’ll post Enneagram, coaching, and personal development updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Better yet, paid subscribers can also post their questions on those topics in subscriber chat and I will answer them in periodic Q&As.

Free posts available to everyone will continue at the same pace. I love writing them. Free subscribers can continue to expect to hear from me every second Wednesday afternoon.

1. Riso, Don Richard, and Russ Hudson. The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types. Bantam Books, 1999. Page 19

2. Sanford’s application of the Enneagram is interesting, but I don’t think her book is very good. I also found her critique of the Enneagram of Personality Types to be shallow. I can get into it further if people are interested, but I don’t think she’s well-known across my audience.