THE ENNEAGRAM: A LIVING TEACHING, Part 2

Essence Types of the Enneagram

If the Enneagram reveals how processes unfold in time, it also shows how essence takes form within us.

Each point of the Enneagram resonates with one of the seven classical luminaries – Moon, Venus, Mercury, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Together they trace a celestial choreography of essence. The current flows from Moon to Venus, Venus to Mercury, Mercury to Saturn, from Saturn to Mars, Mars to Jupiter, and from Jupiter back to the Lunar sphere – the Solar principle steady at the centre.

As the planets trace their orbits around the sun in outer space, so essence moves through our inner space, shaping the mandala of our microcosm.

Each planet represents an archetypal quality visible in temperament, movement, and emanation. Every being moves under a particular influence – lunar, martial, jovial – felt in the curve of a gesture, the rhythm of breath, the timbre of a voice. The ancients saw these as planetary signatures. The Enneagram maps their interplay.

Mercury darts from pillar to post like the celestial messenger, or the red blood cells in our bodies. Saturn holds up the world with structure and overview. Venus lolls. Mars sets boundaries.

In Gurdjieff’s language, essence is the core each human being is born with – pristine individuality, unconditioned by adaptation.

To sense essence is to feel the subtle gravity of a being: perhaps your own.

These essence types are not fixed labels but archetypal aspects of being. To see the Enneagram in this way is to witness essence in motion. This is very different from freezing it into traits.

Drawing on the older planetary tradition – in which the six points and the centre correspond to Moon, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, and Sun – the Enneagram becomes a roadmap for the quality of being we are born with. This essence precedes personality, which is the mask shaped by life to protect us.

Essence is movement. Personality, a mask. Most often, personality constricts essence, but it is also through precisely this friction that essence matures.

The Enneagram’s types are universal centres of gravity that attract matter and shape it into specific forms. Seen in this way, they cease to be static categories and become currents in a unified cosmic field.

The Enneagram essence types arise from universal centres of gravity that attract matter and draw it into form. Seen in this way, they cease to be static categories and become currents in a unified cosmic field.

Each point on the Enneagram is associated not only with a physical type that is, in turn, associated with a planet, but can also be extended to metal oxides, colours, deadly sins, national characteristics, days of the week, endocrine glands, or psychological traits.

Any process may be placed on the Enneagram to reveal its context and living dynamic.

It is a compass for materializing form. But the Enneagram also lives within the body – in breath, digestion, and perception.

The Food Diagram

Gurdjieff’s Food Diagram places three flows of transformation within the Enneagram’s lines: food, air, and impressions. This is the alchemy – the transubstantiation of foods – that unfolds within the body.

Physical food enters the stomach, air fills the lungs, and impressions are received through the senses. Each follows its own octave of transformation which requires the introduction of a subtler energy at the “shock” points 3, 6 and 9. As a result of these shocks the food octave continues the transformation of substances into increasingly finer energies through the human metabolism.

Physical digestion proceeds mechanically, and generates the highest form energy available in the human body: sex energy.

However, for the digestion of sensory impressions to proceed, conscious awareness is required at the moment of reception. With such awareness, also known in the Gurdjieff teaching as self-remembering, perceptions can be transformed into nourishment for the growth of essence. Without the introduction of this conscious “shock”, impressions pass through us undigested. This inhibits the growth of essence and only personality, our protective shield, can grow.

It is through directed attention at the intervals of the inner octave that we have the potential to engender higher states of consciousness in our being-presence.

The diagram shows how body, breath, and consciousness together create a ladder of transformation, corresponding to the inner alchemy of transubstantiation. The numbers refer to what Gurdjieff termed “hydrogens”, essential building blocks of the universe.

In Gurdjieff’s system, everything that exists – physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual – is material, but matter can be more or less subtle. He uses the term hydrogen for the finest and most active forms of matter, and oxygen, nitrogen, carbon as other relative types in his alchemical diagram.

Each hydrogen has a density or vibrational rate corresponding to its number in the octave – the denser the hydrogen, the more material and mechanical it is; the finer the hydrogen, the more conscious and spiritual.

The Enneagram is not abstract metaphysics, but a physiology of awakening.

The Perennial Philosophy

The Enneagram endures because it speaks to, and from, something eternal.
Beneath the noise of personality lies a lawful universal unfolding. These are the principles of transformation that are inscribed in all of us, and in all things.

The symbol shows us our potential: the potential to act consciously, and that this can occur only when fundamental cosmic laws are recognised, harmonised and observed. This order is written within us from birth, waiting to be read.

To read it is to encounter your soul.

The Enneagram was never meant to be used to label personality traits or optimise careers. It is a universal symbol of transformation, to be approached through study, sensation, feeling and practice. It is a key to becoming.

Because it is a dynamic system, Gurdjieff taught it not through theory, but through movement. In his sacred dances, also known as Movements, pupils trace its inner flow with their entire presence, sensing and feeling its laws rather than merely thinking them.

He warned that without preparation and guidance, the symbol risks becoming static – a dead scheme to hang dogma on rather than a living means of insight.

The Enneagram of Personality treats the figure as a grid for categorising ego-behaviour. It has been severed from its cosmological and somatic roots, and in that form lends itself easily to marketing and “self-improvement”. Such reductionism turns this geometry of transformation into little more than a personality horoscope.

To study the Enneagram is to cultivate attention. It is not self-improvement. It is awakening.

By studying it closely while observing one’s own patterns of behaviour, mechanical repetitions become more noticeable – and we become more sensitive to the possibility of intervening so that consciousness can bloom.

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