1: an overview - enneagramdimensions.net · but german tarot teacher hajo banzhaf devotes an entire...

chapter 1: an overview – 1

1: An Overview

You know what the issue is with this world? Everyone wants a magical solution to their problem and no one believes in magic.

– Mad Hatter in the TV series Once Upon a Time

In 2016, a group of 12 people were deposited sans clothing, food, or water into the wilderness of the African plain to see whether they could last for 40 days in a hostile environment. Could they make it to the end?

Most did not; only four succeeded. One of them was Stacey Osorio, a biol-ogy student from Stites, Idaho. Stacey had participated in a previous 21-day challenge with a single partner in Croatia, but was pulled from the competi-tion after only eight days when a burn wound she’d acquired two days earlier became seriously infected.

When she signed up for the 40 day challenge, she was determined to suc-ceed. And she did, despite a weight loss of 40 pounds (1 pound per day)! For Stacey, the experience wasn’t just about redemption. It was about participating in a wilderness quest.

On the last day—despite her weariness, pain, and hunger—Stacey was in a jubilant mood. She joyfully proclaimed: “I was given the opportunity for a hero’s journey. I took it, and I won!”

“I won!” Those two words capture a special moment, the kind we all yearn for in life.

It’s that moment when we know that everything we’ve had to take on—every obstacle, every defeat, every failure, and every tortuous moment of self-doubt and recrimination—was worth all that effort. Against all odds, we managed to persevere. And now we know ourselves in a new way: as someone simultane-ously heartened by our achievements and humbled by our limitations.

Of course, most of us aren’t about to set forth naked into the wilderness, much as we might admire the fortitude of those who do. Nevertheless, the

2 – the fool’s excellent adventure

popularity of books like the Harry Potter series; films like The Hunger Games, Divergence and Star Wars series, and TV’s Once Upon a Time testify to the ad-miration we feel for heroes and our secret longing to become a hero, too.

Consider the character of Henry, the 10-year-old protagonist in Once Upon a Time. Adopted as a baby, he starts out looking for someone else to save his home of Storybrooke. He needs help because the town is populated by fairy tale characters who, due to a curse, don’t remember their true identity.

Henry travels to Boston to find Emma, who is secretly his birth mother. Emma starts out as a reluctant hero, but gradually becomes the “savior” that everyone was hoping for, including Henry. But meanwhile, Henry is growing up. At some point down the road, he realizes he doesn’t just want to sit on the sidelines; he wants to become part of the action. Finally, he gets sufficiently exasperated to proclaim: “I’m done reading about heroes. I want to be one!”

That’s the moment when Henry’s journey really begins. But for most of us, the heroic quest seems like a dream. It’s something we

read about or see on TV, not something that happens to us. There are several reasons for this.

One is that we find it hard to imagine ourselves as heroes. This is often because we tend to see heroes as quite different than us—bolder, braver, and (usually) better-looking! And this kind of Hollywood image is hard to live up to. In real life, nobody ever does—especially heroes. Real heroes are not per-fect people. They make mistakes, experience failures, and usually possess the same character flaws as the rest of us, flaws like laziness, impatience, jealousy, or timidity. What makes them heroes is not their strengths but their willing-ness to try—and to just keep on trying, no matter what comes. Anyone can decide to try—which means that we all qualify as potential heroes.

A second barrier to “hero-hood” is modern culture, whose cynicism in-forms us that heroism is a lost ideal, never to be found again. None of us start out cynical, but as we grow up, we grow out of our belief in myths, legends, and fairy tales, because we are informed that they’re not real. Not wanting to be seen as a crazy person, we decide to forget about all that stuff about heroes, magic, and questing after impossible goals. The new goal is to be successful in the real world of material—the world that many call Flatland.

Although this quest for success may bring material rewards, it’s not very fulfilling. It leaves a hole that we’re never quite able to fill. In the words of Matt Ragland in his blog on the Huffington Post, “Most days, our life’s story does not feel heroic, but mundane. Even…with a happy family and meaningful work, the slow creep of the status quo invades our life…The question is: What are you going to do about it?”1

Cynicism is a big problem for Emma at the beginning of her Storybrooke quest. As a hip but hardened bail bondsman living in a Boston high-rise, she finds the whole “saving Storybrooke” story preposterous. No way does she be-


lieve that magic is real, much less that she was born to be a savior of anything, even herself. It is only the sweet innocence of Henry, her long-lost son, that begins to melt the armor around her heart.

A third barrier for would-be heroes is a lack of self-understanding. When we truly understand ourselves, we know what matters most and are motivated to act. But at the beginning of the hero’s journey, almost no one knows him- or herself very well. However, any kind of motivation that gets the hero out of the door will do. The main thing is that it’s compelling enough to draw the hero onto his path and keep him there until he can’t easily retreat. For when he can’t go forwards and can’t go back, he is forced to go within—and that’s when he finally begins to understand what the journey really means.

When Henry first arrives at Emma’s door, she sees herself as virtually worthless—as a modern-day survivor who is secretly ashamed of abandoning her son. So when she agrees to go with Henry to Storybrooke, it is out of guilt, not love. But once there, she becomes curious about the town and its strange inhabitants. Curiosity gives way to intrigue, and intrigue gives way to tender-ness, as she becomes closer to Henry and motivated to ensure his welfare. At some point, she finds she cannot leave him. That’s when she is compelled to face Ragland’s pointed question: “What are you going to do about it?”

This is the most important question we will ever ask ourselves: the ques-tion of how to throw off our social conditioning in order to discover who we re-ally are and what we’re meant to do in life. That’s the hero’s quest in a nutshell. It’s not about retreating into fantasy to duck out of the realities of life but about reacquainting ourselves with the true nature of the world and our role within it, so that we, like Henry, feel ready to jump into the story and make it our own.

The Modern Hero’s JourneyJungian author Sue Mehrtens contrasts the classical hero’s journey—with

its emphasis on physical courage, daring acts, and public rewards—with the modern hero’s journey, which more often involves moral courage, inner work, and unsung acts. She observes that “the new hero is brave, but not in the sense of the firemen or soldiers under fire. Far more subtle, but no less arduous, is the bravery of the soul’s journey into the ‘mystery’ that is man.”2

The tarot provides a natural entryway into this mysterious hero’s journey, which is why so many authors of tarot books allude to it in their writings. In the world of the tarot, everyone is a potential hero. And the world is a place in which to have adventures.

As Karen Hamaker-Zondag, author of Tarot as a Way of Life (1997) notes, “the hero lives in each of us…we are the hero of our own lives” (p. 55). In the tarot, the hero is symbolized by Key 0, The Fool, who starts out as an “inno-cent abroad, ” full of anticipation but lacking life experiences. As The Fool pro-


gresses through the 21 cards (Keys)3 of the Major Arcana, he has the potential to become The Hero, depending upon how he responds to the challenges he encounters along the way. So it’s not surprising to hear that “when this card appears in your reading, be ready for adventure.”4

Anthony Louis speaks of the Fool’s movement through the major arcana as an “archetypal story of human development,” noting that each of the major arcana cards is associated with an archetypal experience in life. But he also notes that these archetypes only come fully to life when the Fool begins to consciously engage with them, citing Jung’s comment that the archetypes are a “dry river bed that becomes active only when water begins to flow” (p. 45). The water is the pool of inner awareness, and it begins to flow as the Fool be-gins to awaken his inner hero.

In The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages (1947/1990), esoteric tarot author Paul Foster Case observes that

the Tarot…is a symbolic wheel of human life. We might, indeed, arrange these twenty-two pictures in a circle, with the keys equally spaced, like figures on a clock face. Then, when we had gone round the circle from 0 to 21, we should, in completing the circuit, arrive at 0 again. This is an important clue to some of the deeper meanings of the Tarot. Ponder it well, and from within you will come to more light than we could shed in page after page of explanation (p. 26).

In the last sentence, Case is strongly hinting at the power of imagery (and the imagination) to connect us with the deepest part of our being. It explains why tarot is so much more than just a deck of cards.

Among Jungian tarot authors, the hero’s journey is often associated with the process of individuation. Such authors often devote an entire chapter to the hero’s journey, because it’s a metaphor for that process. But German tarot teacher Hajo Banzhaf devotes an entire book to it: Tarot and the Journey of the Hero (2000). Initially, he describes the hero’s journey as a path of healing marked by meaningful signposts “on the path to a treasure that is hard to find, …[the treasure of] wholeness or individuation” (p. 12). Later, he provides a more lyrical description:

The journey of the hero is the oldest story in the world…It is woven into myths, fairy tales, and legends that tell us how a person sets out to accomplish the great work. It is the story behind all these stories, which to this very day are always told in the same way under countless names in all languages and cultures over and over again…As the oldest story in the world, it is also an exemplary story, a parable for the human being’s path in life. This is what makes it so interesting, and this is why it must be told time and again: so that we never forget why we are on the Earth and what we have to do here (p. 17).

Here Banzhaf alludes to deeper dimensions of the hero’s journey, dimen-sions that allude to the soul’s purpose in life and the importance of discovering that purpose. His evocative style invites us not simply to read the words, but


to experience their meaning as we are reading. To that end, the book contains many color illustrations of both tarot cards (Pamela Coleman Smith’s much-copied images of the major arcana), and works of art depicting the archetypal dimensions of each card. Even the paper is high-quality, making the book a pleasure to read.

It’s not hard to see why this book is so popular with readers. However, for me, it contained an additional bonus: a way of explaining the 22 aspects of the hero’s journey in a way that turns out to be compatible with another system that can describe our inner journey: the enneagram.

Like the tarot, the enneagram can be used to describe the stages of the hero’s journey (as the process enneagram). It can also be used to identify nine personality types (as the personality enneagram). As we will see, there is a di-rect relationship between the two approaches, such that Type 1 on the ennea-gram possesses traits that correspond to Stage 1 on the process enneagram. The same is true for every point on the ennea-gram.

If we take the example of Point 1, it is asso-ciated on the personality enneagram with focus, determination, and taking the initiative; it is as-sociated on the process enneagram with the first stage in a new process or project (where we de-velop a vision and determine goals). If we take the example of Point 2, it is associated on the personality enneagram with love, nurturance, and support; it is associated on the process ennea-gram with emotionally investing in change, so-cial support for new ventures, and giving new ideas the nurturance they need to develop. It we take the example of Point 3, it is associated on the personality enneagram with enthusiasm, hard work, and concrete aspirations; it is associ-ated on the process enneagram with productive activity, perpetual motion, and goal-orientation.

These parallels are consistent from Points 1–9, such that each point on the enneagram is associated with certain attributes, whether we are talking about personality or process. I began to realize that these parallels can be explained numerologically by the principle that two things identified by the same num-ber are usually similar in nature, assuming that the number has symbolic meaning.

In the case of both the enneagram and tarot, the numbers we see have definite symbolic meaning (see Chapter 9). As a result, we might expect to see meaningful correspondences between those points on the enneagram and the Keys in the tarot that have exactly the same number. And indeed, from the first


time I looked at the two systems together, I saw parallels between Point 1 on the enneagram and Key 1 in the tarot, Point 2 and Key 2 in the tarot, etc.

But what happens when we reach the tarot Keys higher than nine? That will take a little more explaining. One of the easiest ways to begin is

by looking at the tarot using Banzhaf ’s approach for exploring the hero’s jour-ney. Banzhaf describes the journey by referring to three stages: the Arc of the Day, Arc of the Night, and Resolution (the goal of the journey). The Arc of the Day describes nine “root” archetypes that are in need of development; the Arc of the Night describes nine archetypal challenges, each of which is associated with one of the nine archetypes. The Resolution (the goal) depict nine states of higher consciousness that are the result of integrating the “Day” qualities with the “Night” qualities. This approach is based on the Jungian idea of integrating the opposites within our nature.

Table 1-1 arranges these stages using the 22 cards of the major tarot. The rows depicts these three stages; the columns depict nine variants on the hero’s journey, based on which archetype is being emphasized.

The Rows. In this table, Row 1 shows the tarot Keys in the Arc of the Day; Row 2, those in the Arc of the Night; and Row 3, the three “goal” Keys that depict the Resolution (the goal of the journey). The Fool is separate, for it is he who makes the journey through the 21 stages.

The Columns. There are nine columns of tarot Keys; the Keys in the same column are meaningfully related, because the first depicts a particular archetype to be developed and the second a shadow quality of that same ar-chetype. The two must be reconciled both for healing and the development of higher qualities. For example, if we look at the top card in the fourth column, we see The Emperor (4), a card which symbolizes an individual at the height of his powers. But if we look at the Key just below it, Death (13), a king lies dead on the ground, because no power can resist the call of Death. Together, these cards reveal that, although it’s natural to develop a sense of personal identity, we must eventually transcend it (“die” to it), in order to rediscover a sense of self that is more all-encompassing. On this table, this goal state is not shown for Columns 4–9 is not shown, because there is no card in the tarot beyond The World (21). Later, we will explore what is would be like to completely fill in the third row (see the frontispiece for an overview and Chapters 10–14 for details). For now, it suffices to say that whenever we see an archetype and its shadow, there is always an implied Resolution, whether seen or not.

Now to return to the idea of linking the enneagram and the tarot: if we want to look for correspondences between the nine enneagram types and the 22 tarot Keys, we have to come up with some way to logically associate the numbers over nine with the single-digit numbers. If we look at Table 1-1, we see that Key 1 (The Magician) is in the same column as The Wheel of For-


tune (Key 10), and The Sun (Key 19). Does that mean that Enneagram Point 1 should be related to Tarot Keys 1, 10, and 19? Yes, it does, because they are all related through their cross-sums, where the cross-sum of a number greater than 9 equals the sum of each digit within the number, e.g.:

Key 10 = 1 + 0 = 1 Key 19 = 1 + 9 = 10 and 1 + 0 = 1

So using cross-sum arithmetic, Keys 1, 10, and 19 all share the same single-digit value: 1. The same is true of the Keys in each column: they all reduce to one of the nine single-digit numbers. As a result, many tarot authors have discussed the similarities among tarot cards with the same “root” number (see Chapter 9).

What no one has yet discussed, however, is the possibility of using the link-ing the tarot with the enneagram through their shared root number. But the en-neagram is a system with nine points, so it would make sense to check it out.

I was not aware of the cross-sums approach when I initially started working with these systems about 20 years ago. Nevertheless, I began to notice parallels between tarot cards and enneagram points sharing the same number. I noticed, for example, how the Two of Cups in the tarot and Twos on the enneagram both focus on feelings of affection and close personal relationships; how the tarot’s Hierophant strongly resembles the intellectual and teacherly Five on the ennea-gram; how the enigmatic Seven of Swords depicts one of the defining aspects of the tricky but clever Enneagram Seven; and how the Nine of Pentacles—with its lady at home in the garden—seems a lot like the nature-loving Type 9 on the enneagram. These are just a few examples; there are many more, as we will see.

At first, I only noticed the most obvious parallels; it took me longer to work out relationships that were more subtle. But when I discovered cross-sums, the pieces really began to fit together. The more correspondences I noticed, the more useful I found this understanding for my enneagram and tarot work. (See Appendix C for ways to use the enneagram in tarot work.)

My Own Journey in a NutshellMy interest in the hero’s journey goes back to a time in my life when I felt

anything but heroic. I wasn’t raised religious; in fact, I wasn’t raised anything. So I grew up with a sense of living in a world without much depth or purpose. So when adolescence hit, I suddenly saw the world “as it really is”: full of hy-pocrisy and lies. Or so I thought, as a disillusioned teen. The truth was, anger and cynicism was my only defense against a broken heart. How could I live in a world devoid of magic and mystery?

It turned out I couldn’t. Within a month of learning for college, I found myself in a Buddhist group. There I learned the most valuable lesson of my life: that there was something beyond the dense world of material life. My experi-


ences as a newbie Buddhist gave me the motivation to discover more about this “something.”

I learned a lot from Buddhism, but I didn’t stay in that group forever. It turns out that I’m the kind of person that doesn’t stick to one path. Instead, I pursue the same lessons from diverse perspectives. So I’ve followed many paths, with many interludes and changes of direction. In the late 1990s, I be-gan a Sufi meditation practice which involved Jungian dream work. That woke up a desire to better understand archetypal imagery, which is how I became drawn to the tarot. But at the same time I was getting involved with tarot, I was also getting acquainted with the enneagram. I got far enough after several years of working with both systems to notice distinct parallels between them. But I could not go farther in my comparisons at that point, because they are both complex systems. I had to focus on one at a time.

I ended up focusing on the enneagram. Although I was at first a reluctant en-neagram student, I eventually delved deeply into the system—deeply enough to write numerous articles and three books. I hadn’t planned on writing any. But it turned out that I had a unique “take” on the enneagram that was not reflected in any book I read. So I wrote the kind of books that I’d originally hoped to read.

Let me explain. When I first encountered the enneagram in the early 1990s, I really didn’t like it. It took me a long time to overcome that initial dislike, which was due to the negative way that most authors described the nine ennea-gram personality types. I was used to working with systems like the Jungian-inspired Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which describes personality using four preference pairs (introvert/extrovert; thinking/feeling; intuition/sensing; and judging/perceiving) to generate 16 personality types. The opti-mism seen in Jung’s psychology is clearly reflected in books on the MBTI.

The MBTI helped me understand why I found it hard to settle into a con-ventional job. I discovered that I’m an INFJ5 in that system, which means that I often have difficulty fitting into conventional careers: INTJ’s have an abun-dance of creative energy but often find it hard to discover the right channel for it. And we like to work alone, not in a group.

Learning this gave me a great sense of relief; I’d been feeling like the pro-verbial square peg trying to fit into a round hole. It didn’t solve all my career problems but it did help me stop questioning myself. I loved learning about personality with the MBTI, because it not only restored my faith in myself but helped me understand other people.

I wanted to learn more. That’s how I got curious about the enneagram. One day, I was browsing in the personality section of a bookstore. I leafed through a couple of enneagram books. But I quickly noticed that the descriptions of per-sonality types were less positive than the ones in the MBTI books. Instead of emphasizing personality differences, they emphasized personality deficiencies.

Wow. Why did they do that? Why so negative?


It took me years to find out.

Enneagram Explorations What I discovered is that the negative attitude towards personality can

be traced back mostly to the views of three extremely influential enneagram pioneers: Oscar Ichazo, Claudio Naranjo, and A. H. Almaas. None of these individuals seemed to have a very positive view of human personality.

But influential as they have been, they were not the ones to initially unveil the enneagram to the public. It was the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff who first revealed the enneagram figure to his students, just before World War I. He implied that the enneagram, like the qabala, is a foundational system in Western occultism. But he also said it couldn’t not be found in historical records: “It was given such significance by those who knew, that they considered it necessary to keep the knowledge of it secret.”6 For reasons known only to himself, Gurdjieff decided that this was the right moment in history to reveal the enneagram to this stu-dents. When his teachings were later published by P. D. Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous (1949/2001), they became available to the general public.

In 1969, a South American spiritual teacher, Oscar Ichazo, began to teach what we now call the personality enneagram. Ironically, Ichazo has never called it the personality enneagram, because he calls the nine points of the enneagram to represent “ego fixations.” He has traditionally taught that, when ego begins to develop, it displaces our essence [our pure and undefiled original state] “and man falls from essence into personality….Once man is within ego consciousness he is driven by fear and desire. He can find no real happiness until desire is extinguished and he returns to his essence.”7 Ichazo’s goal has been to “destroy ego-dominated thought.” 8, 9

Ichazo taught the enneagram of ego fixations for the first time in 1969 in Santiago, Chile, but is best known for the enneagram teachings disseminated to a group of Americans in who travelled to Arica, Chile, for a nine-month retreat. The group included dolphin researcher John Lilly and psychoanalyst Claudio Naranjo. Although the group was pledged to secrecy, Naranjo began teaching the enneagram to his students (also pledging them to secrecy), arousing Ichazo’s wrath. However, the secret once again slipped out, coming to the attention of various interested parties, among them Helen Palmer, a gifted psychic, who began teaching enneagram classes all over the San Francisco Bay Area. Within a few years, the enneagram was being opening taught by a number of people within the Bay Area and beyond, primarily as a method for identifying mental fixations (distorted thinking) and the emotional “passions” (distorted feeling).

As a psychoanalyst with a neo-Freudian perspective, Naranjo has always been particularly interested in the passions and the role they play in creating mental illness and social dysfunction. But his view of ego seems to be as reli-


gious as it is psychological. For at the very beginning of one of his books, he says of his enneagram work that, “beyond [the] work of self-observation and [self-] confrontation…the work proceeds to a holy war against the ego.”10 To characterize the work of the enneagram as “a holy war” tells us that there is little chance of converting Naranjo to the view that personality is a potential asset.

A. H. Almaas was one of Naranjo’s first students. He went on to found his own organization, the Ridhwan School, which has many students in the ennea-gram community. In his book on the enneagram, Facets of Unity (1999), he reiter-ates Ichazo’s idea that we each begin life as infants in a state of unified awareness (“essence”) but soon come under the influence of “delusions of separation that take nine separate forms” [i.e., as nine cognitive fixation types]. These delusions, he says, develop as a result of “the inadequacy of the early holding environment.” There is no possibility, according to Almaas, that our early environment might actually be good enough to produce a healthy personality. (Ironically, Donald Winnicott—who is the originator of the holding environment idea—held a very different view. Winnicott was an optimist and was at pains to reassure 1950s-era moms that they don’t have to be perfect to provide “good enough mothering.”)

These three individuals—Ichazo, Naranjo, and Almaas—view enneagram work as a means of helping us minimize the influence of our enneagram fixa-tion (by replacing it with a Holy Idea) and our passion (by replacing it with a virtue). In my view, they take a very narrow view of personality, as an arrested state of ego development characterized by an immature preoccupation with self. From my perspective, however, this approach is grounded in the kind of dualism that keeps us in a perpetual “good vs bad” inner battle, which is why I find it unproductive.

Compare this approach with Jung’s approach to psychological work, which focuses mainly on the goal of achieving individuation: the integration of all aspects of the psyche into a greater whole. Ironically, Jung defines the goal of inner work as the development of “that fullness of life which is called personal-ity.” Jung goes on to say that “the great liberating deeds of world history have spring from leading personalities.”11

Jung is the great champion of personality, because he sees it as what dif-ferentiates the psyche. Of course, what he means by personality is the mature, individuated self that is capable of assuming individual responsibility and ex-ercising community leadership. For Jung, inner work is about restoring psy-chic wholeness by integrating all of the psyche’s fragmented parts, especially its despised shadow aspects. He sees these shadow aspects as the keys that hold the secret to wholeness, because the shadow is home to the primal mate-rial (prima materia) that “is never that which it appears to be, because it always contains the opposite.”12 By transforming our shadow qualities, we are able to develop the kind of integrated personality that is capable of mental discern-ment, emotional compassion, and spiritual refinement.13


The conclusion I drew from my first several years of enneagram research is that the early teachers of the enneagram all share a negative view of human nature, a view that strongly influenced the way the enneagram was taught to their students—and to subsequent generations of students. However, the en-neagram itself is value-neutral; it can be taught through the prism of any kind of belief system. Someone with a more potential-oriented view can interpret its teachings differently. And this is what I set out to do in my books and ar-ticles.

In my first book, The Positive Enneagram (2009), I explored parallels be-tween the personality enneagram and Gurdjieff’s process enneagram, because the latter treats the nine points on the enneagram circle as stages of transfor-mation rather than transformational barriers. In the second, Archetypes of the Enneagram (2010), I interpreted the enneagram from a soul-oriented perspec-tive based on the work of Carl Jung and James Hillman. In my third, The Inte-gral Enneagram (2013), I looked at the enneagram through the prism of Ken Wilber’s integral system, which depicts personality development as a neces-sary and progressive stage in inner work. And at the 2013 International Ennea-gram Association Convention, I gave a well-received talk on this book, but it did not make the kind of impact necessary to shift the views of opinion leaders in the field. At the 2014 convention, I presented research on positive psychol-ogy that demonstrates the benefits of focusing on human potential rather than human limitation. Again, the talk was well-attended and the audience recep-tive; I was privately complimented on my work by several colleagues. Even so, it was clear to me that the original paradigm that launched the field was still firmly in place—and probably would remain in place so long as those who originated the anti-ego paradigm remained influential in the field.

It was at that point that my thoughts began to turn once again to the tarot.

Re-enter the TarotAfter I finished writing my last book in 2013, I started getting into the tarot

again, this time with the idea of trying to see whether a case could be made for real correspondences between the tarot and the enneagram.

That is when I re-discovered Banzhaf ’s ideas. Although I read his book when it was first published in 2000, I did not then have the background in either the tarot or the enneagram to fully grasp its significance. But when I re-read it in 2013, its implications leapt out in a way that was impossible to ignore. I wrote a 50-page article, “The Hero’s Journey through the Enneagram,” for the Enneagram Monthly in 2014, planning to follow up with articles looking at each of the nine types as heroes-in-the-making. But that didn’t quite happen, because I went through a period when I was simply unable to write. (After


writing over 50 articles for Enneagram Monthly since 2006 and three books in five years, I was probably suffering from burnout.)

So instead, I read—adding yet more tarot books and articles to my bur-geoning collection. I also joined several tarot study groups, which gave me a more practical education that could be gained from reading books or using the tarot for solo meditation. Two and a half years later, my vacationing “writ-ing muse” suddenly returned. I re-read my original article, planning to use it as a template for the book. But I found it wanting, both because it was written entirely for an enneagram audience and because I had learned new things as the result of my forced sabbatical from writing.

As a result, I had to re-write the article from scratch, which took about four times longer than writing the original! Now that I knew more, I encountered more problems that required addressing, especially concerning the roots of the tarot and the numerical values that were associated with each tarot card.The result was Appendix E, which could easily have evolved into a book all by itself (more on this below).

I retain an interest in demonstrating the benefits of working with the en-neagram from a more optimistic perspective, and this shows up in the present book as an advocacy for adopting the Hermetic philosophy that informs most tarot work for enneagram work. Hermeticists see human nature as essentially divine, not sinful or neurotic. From a Hermetic perspective, the nine ennea-gram types might be described as nine kinds of divine potential and the hero’s journey as the means by which to befriend and develop that potential.

At this point, there is very little written either on the hero’s journey on the enneagram or on the relationship between the tarot and the enneagram. The only material on the latter comes from an online article by Richard Dagan that briefly explores the relationships between the enneagram, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and the tarot. Using the approach pioneered by An-geles Arrien and Mary Greer, Dagan uses cross-sum addition to calculate his Destiny card (based on the sum of the digits of his birthday), in an effort to find out whether it might be the same as his enneagram type (which in his case, it was not).14 It is not the same for me, either (my enneagram type is Four and my tarot Destiny card is Nine, the Hermit). But there is a relationship, in that I’m not just a Four, but a Four that leans towards Point 5 (such that Five would be called my “wing” type).15 On the enneagram circle, Point 9 on the enneagram is across from Point 4—and can thus balance the energy associated with Point 4. (Interestingly, Dagan appears to have the exact same configuration as mine; he identifies himself as a Four/Five and his Destiny card as Key 9!)

It is possible that there are some interesting relationships to explore between the enneagram types and our Destiny card. But that will not be our primary focus here. For it is enough of a challenge in a book like this to lay the ground-


work for linking the enneagram with the tarot; only then are further elabora-tions possible.16

Why This Book?As noted earlier, my main goal in this book is to explore the parallels between

the tarot and enneagram using the hero’s journey as a metaphor for the process of individuation. But more specifically, my aim to present readers with a back-ground in either system with a way to see it from a different angle, thereby ex-panding their understanding. Readers with enneagram experience will no doubt find some of the information on the enneagram fairly basic; readers with a knowl-edge of the tarot will likely have the same experience with the tarot descriptions. So the reader is invited to skim those sections that cover familiar ground.

ScopeIn the interests to keeping the main focus on the interaction between the

tarot and enneagram, I decided to include system-specific information on only those aspects of both systems that are particularly relevant to linking the two. In the case of the tarot, this means focusing mainly on the symbolism of the major arcana (not the minor arcana or court cards);17 in the case of the ennea-gram, this means focusing on the numeric symbolism of the nine enneagram points (which is seldom discussed in enneagram books).

However, there is more system-specific information on the enneagram for three main reasons. First, the enneagram is a more inherently abstract system. Without a description of its nine points and their interrelationships, it’s virtu-ally impossible to understand it. Second, the enneagrammatic approach that I use involves both the personality and process enneagrams, and few if any au-thors have attempted to describe the relationship between them, as I do here. Third, the tarot is an inherently more transparent system, because its images speak to most people, even tarot beginners. Also, there is a fair amount of de-scription of the elements of the cards when I am describing the hero’s journey in the tarot (Chapters 5 and 12–14; see also Appendix A for brief descriptions of all 78 tarot cards.)

Organization & Other DetailsOrganization. The book is organized into four main sections plus five

appendixes.

▶ Part I introduces the hero’s journey, the tarot, and the enneagram. Chapter 1—the one you are reading right now—provides an overview of the book; Chapter 2 introduces the Western Esoteric Tradition that gave birth to the tarot; Chapter 3 introduces the magico-philosophical system of Hermeticism, because it is the basis


for much tarot work; Chapter 4 explores the hero’s journey as conceived by Joseph Campbell and mapped (by me) onto the enneagram; and Chapter 5 relates the hero’s journey as it unfolds in the 22 Keys of the tarot.

▶ Part II offers a fairly detailed introduction to the enneagram. Chapter 6 in-troduces the personality enneagram; Chapter 7 describes the nine personality types of the enneagram; Chapter 8 describes the process enneagram and shows how the personality and process enneagrams are two applications of one system.

▶ Part III discusses Pythagorean number symbolism and how it can be used along with the enneagram to “fill in” Table 1-1, generating a nine-path, 27-Key tarot. Chapter 9 focuses on number symbolism and why it matters; Chapter 10 introduces the idea of developing a 27-card major arcana and examines two decks that have 27 cards; And Chapter 11 introduces an enneagram-oriented approach to a 27-card major arcana and its nine paths comprised of three Keys each.18

▶ Part IV: This section describes nine paths in detail and how they relate to the enneagram; Chapter 12 describes Paths 1–3, Chapter 13, Paths 4–6, and Chapter 14, Paths 7–9.

▶ Appendixes: Appendix A provides a brief description of all 78 tarot cards; Appendix B discusses ways to discover your enneagram type; Appendix C describes ways to use the enneagram in tarot work; Appendix D looks at one way to map the minor tarot onto the enneagram; and Appendix E describes the relationship between the tarot and qabala.

I should also mention that Appendix E is more complex than most of the chapters in this book, because it not only introduces the qabala and describes its potential relationship to the enneagram and tarot, but the decision by the Order of the Golden Dawn to reinterpret the numeric values associated with the tarot using qabalistic rather than Pythagorean numerology. This reinter-pretation not only undermines the integrity of the tarot as an independent sys-tem but the ability to numerically relate it to any system other than the qabala (e.g., the enneagram).

Style Conventions. Here are listed certain approaches I take that may require explanation.

▶ As mentioned earlier, I refer to the 22 cards of the major arcana as Keys, rather than cards or trumps; so The Fool is described as Key 0, the Magician as Key 1, etc. I like the term “Key” because it reminds me that the function of the major arcana is to unlock the inner doors that enable us to find our way home.

▶ I don’t capitalize the names of most systems or approaches—e.g., the ennea-gram, tarot, major arcana, minor arcana, hero’s journey, qabala, sephira, sephi-roth—although many people do. This is not out of a lack of respect for these systems but because these terms are used so many times throughout this book.


When reading the same term over and over, it’s becomes tiring to see Every-thing In Capital Letters. Exceptions include terms that are so generic that a non-capital might create confusion (e.g., “Tree of Life” for the qabalistic Tree of life). However, in direct quotes, I use the style conventions of the person quoted.

▶ Cited sources are referenced by book title, author’s name, year of publication and the publisher. There are chapter endnotes for cited materials and a refer-ence section at the book’s end for all books, articles, and major online articles. If a source is available online as a pdf, I try to indicate where to find it.

This book is about the hero’s journey, but it is also a journey itself. It’s a journey for me, the writer, that started on a piece of napkin as I was drinking coffee at Starbucks one day. As the journey continued, I learned things not only about the hero’s journey on the enneagram and tarot, but about my own inner journey as I composed this book.

I realized just the other day that there are basically two kinds of books: dead and living. Dead books are the ones that seem “flat” and without any kind of ani-mating spark. While they may inform us, they seldom beckon us onward. Living books are the ones whose words spring off the page, pulling at us to read further. This book came alive for me as I wrote. I hope it will for you, too.


Notes1 See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-ragland/the-heros-journey-using-

a_b_4893165.html.

2 “Jung’s Hero: the New Form of Heroism,” The Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences; see http://jungiancenter.org/jungs-hero-the-new-form-of-heroism/.

3 Like many tarot writers, I refer to the 22 cards of the major arcana as Keys to highlight their symbolic significance.

4 Lerner, Isha & Mark. Inner Child Cards (Bear: 1992/2002), p. 42.C

5 In the Jungian-inspired MBTI, an INFJ = a Introverted Intuitive Feeling Judger.

6 This quote of G. I. Gurdjieff ’s, like many of those on his enneagram teachings, comes from P. D. Ouspensky’s account of Gurdjieff ’s work as related in In Search of the Miraculous (Harcourt: 1949/2001), p. 287.

7 There is a logical problem with the impossibility of the idea of “returning to essence that has been addressed both by Ken Wilber and tarotist Gareth Knight. Wilber critiques A. H. Almaas on this point (see The Eye of Spirit, Shambhala: 2001, footnote 11, p. 365) or my condensed version on pp. 90–92 in The Integral Enneagram (Geranium Press: 2013). Knight comments that “no created being can attain to its essence. Were any created being to…[do so],… it would by that very fact become uncreate (Qabalistic Symbolism, Weiser: 1965/2001, p. 68).

8 Interviews with Oscar Ichazo (Arica: 1982), pp. 9 – 10, 13.

9 Oscar Ichazo has never revealed exactly where the idea came to him to look at the nine enneagram points as revealing distinctive differences among human beings; each time he is asked, he says something different. So it’s doubtful if we’ll ever really know the whole truth. The one thing that those of us who work with the system know for certain—and upon which we can all agree—is that it is a profound system that is extremely rewarding to work with, whatever perspective we adopt for that work.

10 Ennea-type Structures (Gateways: 1990), p. 1.

11 The Development of Personality (Princeton Univ. Press, R. F. C. Hull, trans.: 1981), p. 167.

12 See http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot.com/2015/03/carl-jung-on-prima-materia.html.

13 Carl Jung is not the only who advocates the reconciling of the opposites; it is also a cor-nerstone of qabalistic thinking. Thus, in Qabalistic Symbolism (Weiser: 1965/2001), Gareth Knight says that the path of human beings “is one of equilibrium between the opposites (p. 47). Interestingly, Knight also discusses vice and virtue in the context of the energy centers (sephi-roth) on the Tree of Life, observing that “these are not…part of the Sephirah itself but are the reactions of the human psyche to it…really a Sephirah has no vice” (p. 48). So while we are free to speak of virtues or vices in relationship to the enneagram types, sephiroth on the Tree of Life, or in any other context, we are not speaking of a characteristic intrinsic to the thing itself.

14 See http://richarddagan.com/zulu.php.

15 See Chapter 6 for a discussion of wing types.


16 The material on the enneagram connecting points in Chapter 6 offers an introduction to using the enneagram to explore relationships between people and between the nine archetypal forces within the individual psyche. This is a good starting point for anyone interesting in walking down that road.

17 Appendix D describes how specific combinations of suits and numbers in the minor arcana demonstrate a potential link between the enneagram and tarot.

18 If we include The Fool, the enneagram-inspired approach I’m proposing could generate 28 major arcana Keys (see frontispiece). But The Fool is in some sense not really part of the major arcana (or he at least occupies a unique position within it!). I should also mention here that at this point, there is no physical tarot deck to accompany this book because generating such a deck would considerably delay the publication of the book. However, it can easily be used with your favorite 78-card deck (see Chapter 11). Also, there are images that can be used to understand how this approach works; for an overview, please see the frontispiece; for details, check out Chapters 12–14.

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