A bonus episode, recorded at the International Enneagram Association conference in Minneapolis.
Creek, Abram, Lindsey, and Lee sat down with Dr. Jerome Wagner and Patrick O'Leary — two Jesuits who first met the Enneagram in a Chicago graduate seminar in the early 1970s, taught by a famously dull theology professor named Bob Ochs who had gone away for a year with Claudio Naranjo and come back in bell bottoms and a flowered shirt. Fifty-four years later, they're still asking the question that runs underneath this entire conversation: is this something, or is this nothing?
They walk us through what the Enneagram actually was before it was everywhere — an oral tradition shared among fifteen people in a room — and what changed when they decided to write it down. That decision cost them $75,000 in legal fees when Oscar Ichazo's Eureka Institute sued them, a case that ended in summary judgment on the grounds that this material was never anyone's to own.
We also get their attempt to sort the essentials from everything added since: the Sufis gave us the circle, Gurdjieff added the numbers, Ichazo added the centers and the instincts. Everything after that, they'd argue, is sub-theory worth testing rather than inheriting.
It's a rare chance to hear this history from the people who were actually in the room — and it ties directly into everything we explored in Season 5.
Resources mentioned
The Enneagram Spectrum: An Introduction — Jerome P. Wagner
Nine Lenses on the World: The Enneagram Perspective — Jerome P. Wagner
The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective — Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert
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