Ancient Egypt, the Enneagram, and "Building a Soul"

Ancient Egypt, the Enneagram, and Building a Soul

At this point, most Enneagram enthusiasts are aware that there are links between Ancient Egypt and the Enneagram. However, because there’s no singular, easy to understand one-to-one connection, it can be difficult for someone approaching the topic to appreciate the significance and relevance. There’s no evidence that the Egyptians used or knew of the Enneagram or classified people according to types. There’s no known discovery of an ancient Enneagram symbol found on temple walls or on a special papyrus. In my view, there are three majorly significant links between the Enneagram and Ancient Egypt that make the study of either deeply enriching to both subjects that would be useful and interesting to Enneagram enthusiasts new to this topic.

The first is the Ennead of Heliopolis or Pesedjet of Innu. The name, “Ennead”, is obviously evocative of the Enneagram, but Ennead is merely a term for an arrangement of Nine. Ennead doesn’t necessarily mean Enneagram. However, the Ennead of Heliopolis is a cosmogony of nine deities, the oldest-known Egyptian Pantheon which I do believe is a precedent for not only the wisdom of the Enneagram, but other, more esoteric systems. The Ennead of Heliopolis or Pesedjet of Innu bears no known relation to the symbol of the Enneagram.

I believe the Ennead of Heliopolis was the ancestor system of the likes of the Kabbalah and, potentially, even the logismoi of Evagrius, which is currently used, in an adapted form, as the Seven Deadly Sins and the Enneagram of Passions. Every attempt to link the Enneagram typology with the Pesedjet that I’ve seen falls short for a number of reasons, primarily because it is only factoring in a small part of what the Pesedjet is meant to represent.

The second primary link between the Enneagram and Egypt is the influence Egypt had on G.I. Gurdjieff, the Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher who introduced the Enneagram to the world. Gurdjieff’s work and influence very much lives on in the way the Enneagram is used, understood, and worked with. Gurdjieff not only studied in Egypt as a tour guide for some time, but a major turning point in his journey to find active wisdom schools in his era stemmed from his encounter with a map of what he called “Pre-Sand Egypt”.

Finally, the third meaningful link between Egypt and the Enneagram is that deep, sincere work with the Enneagram can naturally bring one into harmony with Ancient Egyptian attitudes and sensibilities around consciousness. This requires a lot of unpacking to really convey because it’s not a quick, surface-level connection, but it is perhaps the richest. This point will be the real focus of this essay.

In this article, I won’t reveal everything I think about the links between Egypt and the Enneagram, in part because I am hoping to publish a book on the topic, and in part because very little about the Enneagram’s past can be soundly proven. In fact, I will say frustratingly little about the Pesedjet here. I want to express my views on the links and meaning of the Ennead of Heliopolis with the modern Enneagram elsewhere, but if I was to lay it all out here, I think it would ultimately not mean very much to the reader. Associating certain Egyptian gods with the types would merely be an easily forgotten intellectual exercise. To even appreciate such potential connections, one must first enter a little into the Egyptian perspective, the third connection I’ve outlined above. Plus, I can really go off the rails in expressing my fascination for this topic, as I’ll demonstrate shortly.

Readers looking for a one-to-one correlation between Egyptian elements and Enneagram types may be disappointed The value in the links between Egypt and the Enneagram is more about entering into a sensibility, a way of experiencing inner life and seeing the world, than it is asserting the superior value of the Enneagram based on antiquity or something. Instead, my aim here is simply to open an intellectual space where the reader can orient to the Enneagram’s deep and powerful lineage. As we will see, the Ancient Egyptian perspective can help us both understand our condition of being “asleep” as well as the process of awakening, which, in the Egyptian tradition as well as in the Neoplatonic, esoteric Christian, Sufi, and, to some extent, the Fourth Way, is framed as a mystical ascent of consciousness through divine levels that begins with the development of a spiritual body, a soul, that makes such an ascent possible.

As I will elaborate on below, the Egyptians didn’t just have these images and archetypes, they expressed them constantly in art, ritual, language, calendrical cycles, architecture, and geography endlessly so as to reinforce this shared sensibility. If you’ve ever belonged to an inner work group, you know how much easier it is to do sincere inner work with others versus when making efforts on one's own. You can then imagine the power of an entire civilization that aspired to be like a collective inner work group.

The attitudes expressed by Ancient Egyptian art, ritual, and mythology are not only in alignment with the Fourth Way, but they create a rich and layered symbolic vocabulary that provides powerful orientation even for modern seekers to spiritual engagement and inner work. Within the Gurdjieff Work, the term “wish” is used to express a profound need for awakening with one’s inner life to distinguish merely wanting or recognizing inner work as something useful or something one “should” engage with. Ancient Egypt understood the necessity of vivifying one’s wish as the force of fully needing to participate in spiritual life and training themselves to view the entirety of nature as a living temple, the utterance of the divine logos.

Obviously, the Ancient Egyptians were human, were flawed, and subject to all the chaos and greed of regular human beings, so I don’t want to sound like I believe they were a culture of saints by any means. I don’t think it’s useful to idealize Ancient Egyptians, but I think it's useful to try to understand them.

Two Lenses - The Fourth Way and the Symbolist View

Ancient Egypt is a vast topic in which mythology, spirituality, art, history, philosophy, mysticism, religious studies, architecture, astronomy, astrology, and so much more converge. The two primary distinct but most useful frameworks for understanding Ancient Egypt and its potential value for lovers of the Enneagram are the Symbolist interpretation and the Fourth Way.

The Fourth Way is an approach to inner work first made public by George Gurdjieff. The Fourth Way is called such because it is an a means of working to develop an inner life within the conditions of an ordinary life in contrast two the three traditional paths of inner work: the way of the fakir, who seeks to overcome identification with the body, the way of the monk, who seeks enlightenment through the transformation of the emotions, and the yogi, who seeks union with the divine through understanding. Each of these paths emphasizes one Center over the other two and requires one to drop out of ordinary life to be in solitude, in a monastery, or an ashram, requiring that the practitioner live away from “normal life”. 

By contrast, The Fourth Way is a path that seeks to awaken the body, heart, and mind together within the conditions of daily life. Thus, it requires the attitude described above, the attitude emphasized in Ancient Egypt: that everything is raw material for us to deepen our presence. The Fourth Way is accompanied by a rich and sophisticated system of understanding human personality, spirituality, and the cosmos that have significant roots in Ancient Egypt.

The Fourth Way also draws from the Hesychast tradition, Sufism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Alchemy, and Gnosticism, and many of these traditions have strong Egyptian roots as well. Gurdjieff taught several different systems and employed useful, if initially very complex, concepts in support of his teaching, some of which will be elaborated shortly. I think the Fourth Way is not only exceptionally useful for modern people as a framework of inner development, but that it is a kind of modern “bookend” to the tradition that Egypt represented.

The Symbolist perspective of Ancient Egypt is a term coined by the late John Anthony West, an author and lecturer. The Symbolist interpretation is inspired by scholar Schwaller de Lubicz and attempts to understand the Ancient Egyptians on their own terms by trying to grasp how they experienced their use of symbols and metaphor. West’s book Serpent in the Sky is an attempt to synthesize the work of De Lubicz with hermetic philosophy for a modern audience.

De Lubicz worked in the Temple of Luxor for fifteen years, carefully studying and measuring the temple. He began to see that the proportions, alignments, and math within the architecture What looked to nineteen and twentieth century Europeans as superstition, De Lubicz began to recognize it as a highly sophisticated system of symbolism that both preserved practical wisdom, like geometry and astronomy, while also appealing to the inner life of the people in order to link natural cycles with spiritual principles. What he came to realize was, contrary to the popular view at the time, that the Ancient Egyptian civilization was not one of egocentric pharaohs and primitive beliefs, but a civilization interested in expressing natural and cosmic principles in the actions and activities of everyday life.

De Lubicz dropped the long-held scholarly pretense that Egyptians “couldn’t have...” the wisdom and knowledge so distantly in the past represented in the architecture of their physical temples, pyramids, monuments, and sought to understand Egyptian thinking on its own terms as best he could. The symbolist view runs against the still widely held view of the Ancient Egyptians as simple, death-obsessed, incoherently esoteric people dominated by superstition-empowered egomaniacal god-kings. In fact, many Egyptologists are skittish about or outright deny that Ancient Egypt had any kind of mystical tradition. Mysticism is a spiritual orientation characterized by implementing spiritual practices and other means to alter one’s consciousness in order to achieve higher state consciousness or to seek relationship or union with divinities.

My first trip to Egypt was on a tour led by John Anthony West. The late John Anthony West was an author and rogue Egyptologist who boldly questioned Egyptological orthodoxy. He is most famous for redating the age of the Sphinx based on the geology of the water erosion patterns of the rocks the Sphinx is enclosed within instead of maintaining a neat timeline based on unverified assumptions. West’s work pointed to a far greater antiquity of the wisdom of Egypt and explained many anomalies that plague Egyptology today. This view independently synced with a claim of Gurdjieff’s, that the wisdom of the Fourth Way had roots in deep antiquity, back to “Pre-Sand Egypt”.

I have been privileged to have visited Egypt five times as of writing this. My first time was in 2015. Russ Hudson supported me to accompany him on his yearly trip with John Anthony West. It was only two years later that Russ was going to lead a trip, after John had a health crisis, and asked my help to co-lead. Going from participant to guide in a year speaks to how completely enamored of Egypt I had become. In 2022, I joined Russ once again to co-lead the trip, and in 2024, in collaboration with my friends Lena and Diana at EgyptRetreats.com, I led my own pilgrimage.

Shared Orientation

The purpose of the Enneagram is to help us to liberate our consciousness by making us aware of things we couldn’t have become aware of on our own. The path to liberating consciousness is in learning and mastering becoming unconditionally present, beginning with presence with sensation, feeling, and cognition which flow automatically in us. When one encounters the Enneagram (and sees it for what it is beyond a goofy test), everyone goes through a phase of wanting to type everyone and theorize. It’s extremely fun and interesting.

One’s work with the Enneagram reaches a deeper level when one begins to truly see how everything we do is dominated by the grip of our ego. This opens up the possibility for us to recognize that literally everything we experience, every moment, becomes “raw material” for us to use to be more present. Every reaction, thought, or every pull on our attention can be related to as “data” for self-observation. One’s orientation toward life changes, from passively taking life as a series of experiences to a living recognition of life as a complex labyrinth by which consciousness can become free of identifications and liberated. This attitude reflects a Fourth Way orientation, but it is also very much in line with that held by the Ancient Egyptians.

The Ancient Egyptians expressed their sense of the purpose of human life mythologically, which they represented in all facets of life, both in terms of how they understood themselves as well as in how they related to one another, to nature, to daily life, and to the cosmos. Modern people tend to think of mythology as fantasy “explanations” for events or as entertaining stories because that is how dull modern imagination is. However, for most cultures and especially the Ancient Egyptians, myth functioned to illustrate wisdom, relationships, and truths in the poetic language of the psyche.

As we’re all familiar, ideas conveyed in ordinary break down and become subject to all kinds of biases and distortions. The game of “telephone” demonstrates this, but so does paying attention to our media. Mythology has the capacity to transmit understanding that can be shared between the head and the heart, and because it is the nature of symbols to be generative, for new meaning to be projected and extracted from it, rather than fixed. It operates with archetypes and images that already live within the collective consciousness, so they can be renewed even through the ages. In this way, it counters the usual entropy of ordinary language.

The Ancient Egyptians saw their civilization for attuning earthly life to the patterns, cycles, and divine archetypes of the cosmos. They sought not only to harmonize human life with cosmic principles, they saw human consciousness had a role to play in the universe, a cosmic function. Every artistic, architectural, and mythological image was utilized for this purpose. That is why the artistic style of this civilization stayed relatively consistent for its nearly 3000 year span, an incredibly remarkable feat. Thus, the monuments and temples were built on the Egyptian landscape at key, specific points in space and time in order to reflect the operations of the cosmos so they could be brought into relationship with human consciousness. This connection was expressed through a rich mythological outlook that articulated a complex and precise spiritual geography meant to guide the adept to the subtleties of spiritual life.

For the Egyptians, consciousness was the first principle, and from that orientation, they viewed the phenomena of the world as a great metaphor for inner realities. The content of “ordinary life” was understood to be fragmented reflections of more complete, higher worlds, recurring patterns, energies, and forms, that could only be accessed through a refined consciousness. In other words, they saw material realities and phenomena as themselves symbolic of deeper, truer spiritual forms and archetypes. The spiritual world perceived through symbols was primary and the material world was an echo, and the operations of nature, such as the behaviors of animals or the movements of the sun and stars, were themselves metaphors for the divine energies eternally recurring. Likeness was not accidental, from the Egyptian perspective, but a synchronistic expression of two phenomena participating in the same spiritual property in differing concentrations.

The Egyptians didn’t think of their gods as distinct personalities, but rather the gods were archetypal patterns and powers of nature and consciousness. Their word for gods, neteru, means “principles”.

The sun was the chief spiritual symbol. Its daily and yearly cycles stood for the breath of the cosmos, the ever-present creation and destruction of reality, moving through the cycles of day and night, death and rebirth. The path of the actual physical sun was a symbolic reflection or representation of Ra. Whereas we modern people might derive symbolic meaning from natural events, the Egyptians saw all natural phenomena as living metaphors or symbols for higher, more incomprehensible spiritual realities. The sun was a metaphor of a more sublime divine radiance, for example.

The journey of the sun through the day, the night, the year, and much more constituted the supreme spiritual archetype. Ra undergoes a birth at sunrise, becoming stronger, weakening, being swallowed by the Western horizon to “die”, whereafter it journies through the mysterious night hours. In the depths of night, it faces a terrifying dissolution, following a vivification toward a rebirth, on and on for eternity. Solstices, equinoxes, and each hour of the day and night had very special spiritual significance, marking points in time when material and spiritual realities came into relationship.

Therefore, the Ancient Egyptians sought to craft their civilization as an instrument for cultivating human consciousness so that it could fulfill a vital role in the cosmos, as a link between the material world and the divine worlds. Thus, by aligning the cosmos with earthly life, earthly life could be “divinized”.

There’s a Greek term that writer Algis Uzdavinys uses in his book Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth called “sunthema”, which translates to “token, passport, and symbol”, to describe how the Egyptians used sacred images and symbols. In this, sunthema refers to the Egyptian mode of thought in which all phenomenal things were reflections, images, and symbols of spiritual archetypes or Platonic Forms, and that the philosopher or spiritual adept became able to open their “inner eye” to perceive the divine operation behind the manifest phenomena. Thus, everything becomes a way for the soul to remember and perceive the divine presence within all things, bringing greater unity between the seeker and the gods. Further on, we will explore many examples of this.

Sometimes, for our modern way of thinking, the Egyptian symbolic mode of perception is so vast, multifaceted, and complex it can be overwhelming - “the Pharaoh represents the integration of Horus and Set? But he’s also the Horus in the material world and Osiris in the Inner world? The Pharaoh seeks to be in union with Ra? Ra is the sun, but Osiris is the sun moving through the night hours under the earth? Is this happening in life or after death?” etc. 

The point is that these images and metaphors are meant to attune one's perception to the spiritual dimension of things. If the symbols and metaphors of Egypt become overwhelming, it’s best to suspend the mind's efforts to fit one thing with another as our modern education trains us to do. Instead, if you are trying to understand what Osiris means, for example, let all the layers and perspectives of Osiris “build up” in you and find the meaning from how they collide. Charge up the symbols and let the meaning come to you. The mental framework of how things fit together is less important. This is “seeing gods in everything” which is an essential orientation that lives on today in mystical Christianity and Sufism. This comports with the aim of the Fourth Way, to see everything we experience as raw material for awakening our consciousness.

Part of what makes visiting Egypt today so compelling and meaningful for modern seekers, Enneagram and non Enneagram enthusiasts alike, is seeing the remnants of a culture that was powerfully dedicated to this aim. One encounters the practical and tangible results, rendered in art and architecture, of a people who cultivated upon a deep level of attention to achieve their aims. When faced with precision of their sculpture or the overwhelming sublimity of their pyramids, one can directly understand and feel, on a physical level, that these were by products of a people who had access to a more refined quality of attention, collectively, that is almost impossible to find in even highly practiced individuals today.

Many speculate that the Egyptians had some advanced, secret technology. Maybe. But even with the mathematical precision and symmetry found in the face of a statue made of the hardest stone to render next only to diamond, diorite, one still feels an incredible and unmistakable human warmth emanating through rather than the result of a mechanical process. In other words, whether or not there were lost technological aids, there is a clear and deep sense of the human rendering of these remnants that makes the unmistakable impression of human creation that leads one to the recognition that these were products of a humanity that was drawing on capacities deeper than modern people have access to.

Despite how numb we’ve become to images of the relics of Ancient Egypt, experiencing Egypt in person opens up new understandings and parts of oneself. One can have all kinds of theories about how a pyramid was built, but to actually experience the reality of its mass, one is confronted with two possibilities. One possibility is to come up with some convenient story that writes everything off under a comfortable narrative, and the other is to really take in how what you’re experiencing with your senses overrides and overwhelms everything you’ve been taught to understand history and human nature itself.

Gurdjieff and Egypt

The history of the Enneagram is anything but clear-cut, and what makes it even more difficult to trace is that even the Enneagram’s breach beyond the confines of closely guarded spiritual circles by G.I. Gurdjieff had, arguably, nothing to do with Personality Types. The Enneagram Typology articulated by Oscar Ichazo can rightly be seen as applying the instrument of Gurdjieff’s Enneagram to interpret the human relationship between Essence and Personality, and throughout history there are schemas of roughly nine character types that focus on this dynamic divorced from anything resembling the Enneagram diagram.

In other words, despite the brilliance and originality of Ichazo, there were precedents for Ichazo’s typology that, at least on the surface, had no explicit relationship to the Enneagram symbol. Whether or not there was a more or less complete “proto-Enneagram of Personality” is unclear, but the Kabbalah and the Logismoi of Evagrius, for example, point to the possibility of a lineage of a specific understanding about identification and inner freedom that has resonance with the Enneagram of Personality.

Putting the topic of the history of the actual Enneagram aside, any serious student of the Enneagram ought to be familiar with G.I. Gurdjieff and the philosophy and techniques he taught regardless of whether one uses or appreciates them. Gurdjieff’s work answers the question of “what next?” after one has sincerely found their accurate type and has come to see just how helpless one is before the mechanistic patterns of one’s ego.

Gurdjieff was Greek-Armenian and grew up in Kars, outside Alexandrapol in what is modern-day Turkey. Growing up near the silk road, he witnessed the confluence of many different mystical practices and strange events he couldn’t explain away. This instilled in him a deep hunger to encounter sources of genuine spiritual wisdom, and he and his friends formed a group called the Seekers After Truth to disperse into small groups, explore, and come back together to share their findings. 

During this journey, as Gurdjieff recounts in Meetings with Remarkable Men, while traveling in a region in Afghanistan, Gurdjieff’s companion is bitten by a poisonous snake. The pair are taken in by an Armenian priest. Eventually, the priest shares with Gurdjieff a story about a family heirloom in his possession, an ancient map, and how a Russian nobleman had paid a considerable amount of rubles to make a copy of this map. According to Gurdjieff, the priest showed this map to Gurdjieff which supposedly was a map of “pre-sand Egypt”, the land of Egypt as grasslands, before it had been surrounded by desert. 

The land of Egypt has gone through gradual desertification over thousands of years, with some geologists viewing a climate shift around 7000 BCE, but it is also thought that there was a period of acceleration at about 10,900 BCE to 9,700 BCE at the time of the Younger-Dryas, an approximately thousand year drop in global temperature. The reasons why for this change in climate are debated, but one of the leading theories is that fragments of a comet hit the North American glacial ice caps, leading to intense flooding that brought a halt to the one or more of the Oceanic gyres that regulate global temperatures.

According to Gurdjieff, this map supposedly featured the Sphinx of Giza, surrounded by grass. If there’s truth to this map, it would place the antiquity of the Sphinx at least thousands of years before Egyptologists believe it was carved.

Soon after this encounter, Gurdjieff left for Egypt where he became a tour guide in order to study the Egyptian remains for himself. While guiding, he happened to meet the Russian nobleman, Prince Yuri Lubovedsky (almost certainly a pseudonym), who had made the copy of the priest’s map. They struck up a powerful friendship, and it was thanks to the guidance of Prince Lubovedsky that Gurdjieff was able to eventually make his way to the Sarmoung Monastery, the place where Gurdjieff said he received much of his teachings and the source of the Enneagram.

Explicit and implicit Egyptian influences are to be found in his philosophy, practice, and most overtly in his work, All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, a highly unconventional book in which the higher-being “Beelzebub” tells his grandson about his journeys to earth. Within it, Gurdjieff conveys all kinds of philosophy and allegory, and it is difficult to tell what is Gurdjieff’s own invention, what is philosophy, and what is to be taken for truth.

The Sphinx - John Anthony West and Gurdjieff Converge

The Pyramids and the Sphinx of Giza are the most iconic, mysterious, and intriguing symbols of Ancient Egypt, and it’s in the figure of the Sphinx that Gurdjieff’s story converges with John Anthony West’s work.

In Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, Beelzebub relates the figure of the Sphinx of Giza to a symbol of an ancient brotherhood, the Society Akhaldan, which supposedly prefigured the Sarmouni, that the he witnessed during his first trip to earth:

“It is extremely interesting to notice here that they erected at the chief entrance of that huge enclosure a rather large—large of course in comparison with the size of their presences—stone statue called ‘Sphinx’ which strongly reminded me of the statue I saw on my first descent in person to your planet in the city of Samlios, just opposite the enormous building belonging to the learned society Akhaldan and which was then called the ‘chief cathedral of the society Akhaldan.’

“The statue I saw in the city of Samlios and which greatly interested me, was the emblem of this society, and was called ‘Conscience.’ It represented an allegorical being, each part of whose planetary body was composed of a part of the planetary body of some definite form of being existing there, but of the parts of those beings of other forms who, according to the crystallized notions of the three-brained beings there, had to perfection one or another being-function.

The main mass of the planetary body of the said allegorical being was represented by the trunk of a being there of definite form, called ‘Bull.’ This Bull trunk rested on the four legs of another being existing there, also of a definite form, called ‘Lion,’ and to that part of the Bull trunk called its ‘back’ two large wings were attached similar in appearance to those of a strong bird-being breeding there, called ‘Eagle.’ And on the place where the head should be, there was fixed to the Bull trunk, by means of a piece of ‘amber,’ two breasts representing in themselves what are called ‘Breasts of a virgin.’

When I became interested on the continent Atlantis in this strange allegorical image, and then enquired about its meaning, one of the learned members of the Great Society of men-beings explained it to me as follows: ‘This allegorical figure is the emblem of the society Akhaldan and serves for all its members as a stimulus constantly to recall and awaken in them the corresponding impulses attributed to this allegorical figure.’...

…‘This emblem of ours constantly reminds and indicates to us that it is possible to attain freedom from what I have mentioned only if we compel our common presence always to think, feel, and act in corresponding circumstances according to that which is expressed in this emblem of ours.
‘And this emblem of ours is understood by all of us, members of the society Akhaldan, in the following way: “‘The trunk of this allegorical being, represented by the trunk of a “Bull,” means that the factors crystallized in us and which engender in our presences the impulses maleficent for us, those we have inherited, as well as those we have personally acquired, can be regenerated only by indefatigable labors, namely, by those labors for which among the beings of our planet, the Bull is particularly fitted.

‘That this trunk rests on the legs of a “Lion” means that the said labors should be performed with that cognizance and feeling of courage and faith in one’s “might,” the property of which “might” is possessed among all the beings of the Earth in the highest degree by the possessor of these legs—the mighty Lion.

‘The wings of the strongest and the highest soaring of all birds, the Eagle, attached to the Bull trunk, constantly remind the members of our society, that during the said labors and with the mentioned inner psychic properties of self-respect, it is necessary to meditate continually on questions not related to the direct manifestations required for ordinary being-existence.

‘And as regards the strange image of the head of our allegorical being, in the form of the “Breasts of a virgin,” this expresses that Love should predominate always and in everything during the inner and the outer functionings evoked by one’s consciousness, such a Love as can arise and be present only in the presences of concentrations formed in the lawful parts of every whole responsible being in whom the hopes of our COMMON FATHER are placed.

“And that the head is fixed to the trunk of the Bull with “amber” signifies that this Love should be strictly impartial, that is to say, completely separated from all the other functions proceeding in every whole responsible being.’ 

In order, my boy, that the sense of this latter emblem put into the material called there amber, may become quite comprehensible to you, I must add that amber is one of those seven planetary formations, in the arising of which the Omnipresent Active Element Okidanokh takes part with all its three separate, independent, sacred parts, in equal proportion; and in the process of planetary actualization, these intraplanetary and surplanetary formations serve for what is called the ‘impeding’ of the independent flow of these three localized independent sacred parts.” (pages 359-363)

Obviously, this description of the allegorical Sphinx of Samlios isn’t the same as the Sphinx of Giza, but the point Gurdjieff seems to be making here is that the Sphinx of Giza isn’t just an idol nor is it merely an equinoxial marker with the face of a Pharaoh, as Egyptologists claim. It is meant to convey significance about the awakened human being, and may have had a relationship to or been an emblem for those of higher gnostic wisdom. Sphinxes were by no means limited to Ancient Egyptian culture.

Gurdjieff’s Sphinx depicts the union of the Centers of Intelligence, the body, the heart, and the mind, which are the foundations of the Enneagram of Personality, and their integration is the aim of Enneagram work. Our personality type arises from the relationships, both healthy and distorted, between our Centers, and our consciousness is fixated in the “medium” of each Center: sensation, feeling, and cognition. Our ego is based on the “wrong work” of the Centers, the way we overuse facets of one center to the distortion of the other two. While the Egyptian Sphinx seems to be strictly a lion’s body and a human head, absent the trunk of the bull, wings of the eagle, breasts of a virgin, they both represent awakened consciousness.

Little is directly known about the meaning of the Sphinx from the Egyptians' own statements or commentary, but there are several things we can infer from its construction and symbolism. The Egyptian’s name for the Sphinx was Ra-Horakhty, which means “Horus of the Horizon”. “Ra-Hor” refers to the union of two solar deities, the supreme divine source Ra and Horus, the Ra principle embodied within the material world. Ra and Horus can be thought of as the same entity but expressed on different scales: the transcendent cosmic and as spiritual consciousness imminent within the material world. They are bookends of the same divine energy.

“Ahkty” is a reference to the Akhet. The eastern horizon which the monument faces. The eastern horizon, symbolizing the Akhet, was seen as the birthplace of Ra. It can very loosely be thought of as Ancient Egyptian “heaven”. The Akhet seems to symbolize pure divine creativity, a kind of “big bang” that was not situated in some sort of linear past, but is the representation of the ever-present divine creative energies that descend from the heavens into the material world. 

Ra himself was sometimes depicted as a lion, as was his daughter, the goddess of power and wrath Sekhmet (the related Egyptian word for power was “sekhem”, or, alternatively, the lion protectoress Mehit. Sekhmet and Mehit are related to the likewise-lionheaded Tefnut of the Pesedjet). Sekhmet represented the fiery “Eye of Ra”. She placed herself on Ra’s forehead, which is represented by the uraeus, the cobra on the forehead of the Pharaoh’s crown. While one must be always careful in making correlations between different traditions lest nonsensical leaps are made, the likeness with the uraeus and the third eye of the Indian Vedic tradition is not lost on anyone, especially in the depictions of the uraeus cobra ascending from the cervical spine over the head (in some depictions, the uraeus is a cobra and vulture, symbolizing Wadjet and Nekhbet, alternative expressions of this feminine power who are represented in ascending and descending egg-laying animals).

While mainstream Egyptology sees the face of Sphinx as that of the Pharaoh Khafre, the builder of the middle pyramid of Giza, there is room for doubt whether the face of the Sphinx is original and not, in fact, a re-carving of a damaged, more ancient face. There is a causeway connecting the Sphinx enclosure to the Khafre pyramid, so the relationship is assumed. However, the suggestion that the face is a re-carving meant to salvage an eroded earlier head comes, in part, due to how proportionately puny the Sphinx’s head is relative to the body, especially considering how the Egyptians were famously masters of proportion, even at large scales.

Look up an aerial photo of the Sphinx to get a good sense of just how miniscule the head is relative to the body. Different researchers have suggested that if there was a previous face, that it was most likely that of a lion, but there are arguments that it could have been a hawk or a different human. In any case, combining the human head with the lionide body suggests a human union with the energies of Ra-Horahkti and Sehkmet.

The Sphinx is primarily an equinoctial marker. That means that it faces due east at the exact point of the rising sun on the equinoxes. Earthly monuments marking equinoxes and solstices are found globally. They symbolically link humanity with celestial events and cosmic cycles. The Vernal or Spring Equinox and Autumnal Equinoxes are both important, but the Sphinx seems to particularly emphasize the importance of the Vernal Equinox due to the the Vernal Equinox initiating a highly significant religious time for the Egyptians climaxing with the Summer Solstice.

(this image taken by Santha Hancock on an Equinox)

The Summer Solstice was the “birth of Ra”, the Egyptian New Years Day, in which the sun was at its most potent. This, counterintuitively, coincided with the flooding of the Nile, breaking the season of drought and ensuring the renewal of the land of Egypt and an avoidance of famine. Thus, the period of the Equinox to the Solstice was a very sacred time, much like Christian Lent, that honored the transformational mysteries of Osiris, his death and his rebirth. In a similar fashion to Jesus dying to his human life to be resurrected as the Christ, Osiris must “die” so that Ra-Horakhty can be born. The entire location and landscape of Giza facing the holy city of Heliopolis was dedicated to these cycles, the mysteries of Osiris, Isis, and Ra-Horakhty, and the levels of divine energies as they emanate from the source into matter. 

Scholars debate the origins of the signs of the Zodiac and many insist that they have Sumerian origins that were not adopted by the Egyptians until a few hundred years before Egypt’s collapse. However, there is much evidence that they understood and closely followed the Zodiac. If the Egyptians were aware of the Zodiac, the Sphinx’s combination of the head of a human and body of a lion seems to be referencing the Zodiacal axis of Leo and Aquarius.

While today, due to a processional shift, the Vernal Equinox occurs under the sign of Pisces, the Vernal Equinox once fell under the sign of Leo between 10,700 BCE to 8,500 BCE. Thus, the Sphinx may be referencing the era when the Vernal Equinox fell under the constellation of Leo. This dating roughly accords with the Younger Dryas, of roughly 10,900 BCE to 9,700 BCE, and therefore, if Gurdjieff’s story about the map of pre-sand Egypt is to be believed, could indicate that the Sphinx was built just before the Younger Dryas to mark the era of the Vernal Equinox in Leo so as to create a match between the earth and the heavenly lion on the sacred site of Giza. This idea is not as outlandish as it may first seem because the Sphinx is not the only such reflection of stars on the earth at Giza. The three Pyramids of Giza are also reflections of Orion’s belt, which symbolized Osiris for the Egyptians, which we’ll return to further on.

During the era in which the Egyptologists think the Sphinx was built, the Spring Equinox would have been in Taurus and the Autumnal Equinox would have been in Scorpio, so there would not have been a match between heaven and earth. At that time, however, there was a great deal of association between the Pharaoh and bulls, most notably in the Apis Bull, meaning that bull imagery was playing an important role in that era.

Most Egyptologists believe that the Ancient Egyptians were not aware of the procession of the equinoxes nor the zodiac, but Jane B. Sellers excellent book The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt makes an extremely compelling case that the Egyptians not only carefully tracked Procession and its effects, but that those stellar changes were enshrined in Egyptian mythology from its earliest days. In one such example, around the dawn of the Age of Aries, the ancient capital of Egypt moved from the northern Memphis to the southern Thebes of Upper Egypt and the previously insignificant-deity Amun came to prominence as the king of the gods. Amun, in this era, was often represented with a ram’s head, the animal of Aries. There are many such examples of the ways in which the Egyptians honored changes in processional ages.

It was previously believed that human civilization began about 7000-500 BCE, but discoveries such as that of Gobekli Tepe in modern Turkey display the tracking of constellations, megalith building, and possibly shared religious traditions immediately following the Younger Dryas. These are all significant achievements of civilization, and thus it is unlikely they all sprang up at the same time in the same place. Instead, many scholars speculate that there was some sort of civilization with these practices prior to the Younger Dryas that renewed after the climate warmed again.

The creation of earthly markers and monuments to reflect specific constellations and eras is a practice seen throughout the ancient world that continues today. At the Hoover Dam, for example, the "Winged Figures of the Republic" sculptures by Oskar J.W. Hansen features a celestial alignment that reflects the stars’ position on September 30, 1935, when the dam was completed to signal to future civilizations to determine when it was built.

The Ancient Egyptians traced their own history to a mythical ancestor civilization that was lost in a great disaster attributed to human beings neglecting their responsibility to maintain harmony between the human and divine realms, much like the Biblical Noah story. Perhaps this could mythologically preserve the story of beginning their society once again after the events of the Younger Dryas. There are different versions of the story, but roughly, after this great disaster, a band of sages known as the Shemsu-Hor, the Followers of Horus, come to Egypt to teach the people there the foundational skills and values for renewing their civilization in alignment with divine order so that a similar, future disaster could be averted.

We all know the story of Atlantis from Plato’s dialogues, the Timaeus and Critias, in which Critias claims his uncle Solon learned of this myth from an Egyptian priest of Sais. Scholars have written this off as Atlantis' story being a pure fabrication that Plato was using just as a way to give his arguments more weight by falsely attributing them to great antiquity. 

There is no trace of the word “Atlantis” in any known Ancient Egyptian writings, however, independent researcher Manu Seyfzadeh argues that “Atlantis” comes from a corruption of a Greek translation of an Ancient Egyptian term for “The Pristine Places”, an epithet that referred to the “Island of the Ka”, the mythical “original temple” that was destroyed by a devastating flood, of which Egyptian Civilization is a renewal of. In other words, The Pristine Places is likely a reference to an ancestor civilization of which Egypt viewed itself as a legacy of:

“An inscription on the exterior of the enclosure of the Edfu Temple corroborates what Plato claims here through his proxy Critias. Horus’ rule is said to have begun seven thousand years before the original texts transcribed by the Ptolemaic scribes onto the temple walls were composed. Forensic, linguistic evidence from the redacted copies that these Edfu Temple inscription represent points to a terminus ante quem that coincides with the last use of authentic Middle Egyptian—in contrast to a later made-to-look-old style called Traditional Egyptian—until approximately 1500 BC, or the beginning of the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt.

….msjt nt wḏ3 swt, “born of the flood, pristine sites,” or “pristine sites born of the flood.” This comes from a passage that reads in English from Dieter Kurth’s German: Re praises the great primeval mound: “The High Hill on which the KA of the god is mighty, born of the flood with pristine sites,” and so comes to be Mesen, and the Place-with-pristine-Sites comes to be. “Behedet is there until all eternity, which is the capital of the sites where the primeval gods dwell,”... Applying Manetho’s diagraph substitution and Beekes’ old etymological interpretation, I propose the following:

1. Transliteration: wḏ3 swt msj nt

2. Diagraphic conversion of “ḏ”: w-tl-a swt msj nt

3. Contraction and Pre-Greek “ant” substitution: wtlant msj nt

4. Weak consonant replacement with Greek copulative a-: Atlant msj nt

Translation: Pristine Sites born of the Flood”
Perhaps this is all just inflation for the sake of mythically sanctifying the significance of the Egyptians to themselves. The Ancient Egyptians famously maintained “king’s lists” of Pharaohs going back to the beginning of Dynastic Egypt, starting with King Narmer/Menes who supposedly united Upper and Lower Egypt into one kingdom around 3150 BCE. However, prior to Narmer, they list reigns of mythical demi-gods and gods as kings that stretch back around 30,000 years. At the very least, this may simply be a mythic claim to a powerful legacy that legitimized the specialness of Ancient Egyptian civilization to themselves, or, perhaps, it was an acknowledgment of roots in a far more ancient past than the modern world recognizes.

This is where John Anthony West comes back into the picture. In addition to West’s work to articulate the Symbolist perspective and interpret Schwaller De Lubicz for wider audiences, his main claim to fame is bringing geologist Robert Schoch to date the Sphinx based on the geology of the erosion patterns of the Sphinx enclosure. The Sphinx was not constructed. Instead, it was carved directly out of the bedrock, with the limestone around it quarried out to construct the nearby Valley Temple. This means that the enclosure of the Sphinx is the same age as the Sphinx itself. 

If you look at photos of the Sphinx enclosure, you’ll see these very sensual, bulbous erosional patterns. By studying the geology alone and not the guesses of when the Sphinx “must” have been built to fit the currently-held chronology, Schoch determined that the erosional patterns are the result of hundreds of years of torrential rains and not, for example, the result of the Nile flooding or slow erosion from groundwater seeping up into the limestone nor is it characteristic of grainy wind erosion of the type that can be seen on the Sphinx’s neck. The last time the Giza plateau was subject to these kinds of rains was likely during the Younger Dryas, indicating that the Sphinx may be 12500 years old or more. This would correspond with a timeline that would correlate with Gurdjieff’s map of pre-sand Egypt.

Adding to all this, for much of the Sphinx’s history, including during the dynastic era, the Sphinx was buried in sand up to its neck that would have protected the enclosure from erosion. There is a stele between the paws of the Sphinx commemorating Pharaoh Thutmosis III uncovering the Sphinx from sand around 1450 BCE, indicating that the uncovered Sphinx was a rare and special event. Drawings from Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and photos from the early twentieth century show how deeply the Sphinx was covered for most of its history.

Further still, the Sphinx shows extensive repairs made to it that are acknowledged by Egyptologists, to originate from the Old Kingdom, the era that the Sphinx was supposedly constructed. These repairs are in relatively great condition compared to the weathering of the Sphinx enclosure. Why would this be, other than the Sphinx already being very old during the Old Kingdom Era? Why would the erosion deeply impact one portion of the enclosure while sparing the other?

The Sphinx is connected by a massive causeway to the middle pyramid of the Giza Plateau, attributed to the Pharaoh Khafre, son of Khufu and grandson of Sneferu. Thus, Egyptologists assume that the Sphinx’s face must be that of Khafre’s. There have been independent studies done to compare the proportions of the face of the Sphinx to some of the incredible statues of Khafre, and they don’t match. However, if the Sphinx does represent Khafre, it could be a re-rendering after the original head collapsed. The point here being that far less is settled about the Sphinx than is commonly believed.

Is all this important to the history of the Enneagram? I think it depends on each person to determine if they think it’s important or not, but for Gurdjieff, at minimum, the age of the Sphinx was part of a broader meaning he was trying to convey. Whether historical or allegorical, Gurdjieff was pointing to a deeply ancient source for the wisdom traditions preserved by esoteric schools that have survived incredible disasters and upheavals.

Maintaining the transmission of the Work through turmoil and disasters was itself an important theme of Gurdjieff’s life and work, so perhaps he was simply echoing this theme allegorically in his writings. Gurdjieff and his students were forced to relocate several times due to the outbreaks of various wars and revolutions. There were times when he and his groups had to secretly flee cities in the middle of the night to avoid outbreaks of conflict. Likely informed by the devastation he witnessed his entire life, Gurdjieff foresaw social and ecological collapse long before it was a commonly acknowledged topic. Much of his mission was dedicated to “preparing the future” by fostering schools and practitioners who could uphold and transmit the science of awakening during times of collapse.

The Ennead of Edfu 

The story of the destruction of the “The Pristine Places” and its renewal via the civilization of Ancient Egypt is found carved onto the walls of the Temple of Edfu dedicated to Horus, one of the best preserved in Egypt. The Edfu Temple to Horus is a rather late Egyptian temple, built around 237 BCE to 57 BCE that, in typical Egyptian fashion, was built over an older temple. As the Egyptian civilization and religion went into decline, there’s indication that the sacred mysteries only known to adepts and priests gradually began to be presented more openly on temple walls in order to preserve them. It’s a bit of a stretch, but these walls do potentially connect “pre-sand Egypt” to both the predominant Egyptian themes of inner transformation and the Ennead of Heliopolis.

The Temple of Edfu contains some of Egypt’s oldest myths. It includes the Building Texts which describes Egyptian temples as models of the cosmos and that all temples are reconstructions of a mythical primordial temple on the “Island of the Ka”, the pristine place, that was established in Zep Tepi, the “First Time”. It was the timeless era before time in which the gods ruled and that all subsequent time is a fragmented reflection of. The Building Texts instruct on the measurements and requirements of temples, including the importance of aligning them with particular stars.

On the same outer wall that contains the Building Texts are a very complex telling of the conflict of Horus against his uncle Set, who murdered Horus’s father Osiris, a story that goes back to at least 3000 years prior to the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts. The battle of Horus and Set is one the principle mythological motifs of Ancient Egypt throughout its long history, representing the conflict of material and spiritual forces seeking to find the right relationship with one another within human consciousness.

The hawk-headed Horus is one of the central deities of Ancient Egypt. He has many qualities and his attributes evolved and gained complexity over Ancient Egypt’s long historical span. The animals associated with the gods revealed something about the nature of that god. The hawk, associated with Horus, is known for both its incredible eyesight, symbolizing that true consciousness sees all. In flight, the hawk makes steady, slow circles in the high “solar realms” of Ra, observing all below it with incredible clarity. Identifying prey, it rapidly descends to the earth to then ascend back to the solar realms in a spiral-shaped path of flight. The hawk, then, is a bridge between the solar domain of Ra and the material world, presenting an archetype for human consciousness’s own path of ascent back to the source, the solar-stellar realm of Ra. The hawks' descent and return are even mimicked the dual stairwells of some temples, wherein one stairway is constructed as a straight descent down, while the other is constructed as a spiraling ascent connecting the ground floor to rooftop chapels.

Horus, therefore, represents the divine consciousness of Ra embodied in the material world and embodies the process of the human soul’s return to its divine source. In the Pyramid Texts, the Pharaoh is shamanistically transported by way of a Horus-hawk to the Zenith of the sky so he can peer into the Akhet.

Horus can be thought of as equivalent to Christ Consciousness, and the relationship between Horus and his father Osiris was deeply influential to and combined in the Chirstian understanding of Jesus Christ. The Pharaoh was considered the personification of “the living Horus”, divine kingship granted through the realization of the Horus principle. Horus, unlike Christ, had a warrior aspect as the avenger of his fathers murder by Set.

In the mythology, Osiris is the king of the gods in the time before time, named Zep Tepi. In this telling, he stands for the human soul. Osiris is tricked by his brother Set into entering a golden coffin. Set traps Osiris in the coffin and then chops Osiris’s body into fourteen pieces (representing half a lunar cycle, death, and renewal). Set scatters the body parts of Osiris throughout the landscape of Egypt. The god Set came to represent all evil and opposition (or disorder, “isfet”, the entropic counterforce against Maat’s cosmic order), but his central symbolism was that of matter without spirit, the entropic effects of animal carnality absent a relationship with consciousness. 

For students of the Enneagram, Set can best be thought of as the Instinctual Drives, or more specifically, the impact that identification with the instinctual drives, the body, and the material world overall has on our consciousness. Trapping Osiris in a coffin is a representation of the physical body and how our soul becomes identified with the body and its instinctual drives, which is what leads to the development of a personality, after birth. The dismemberment of Osiris represents how, via identification with the body and instinctual drives, our soul’s energies are dispersed and fragmented. We become divided inside, and we lose our connection with essence.

What Set’s face is supposed to represent has long confused Egyptologists, with the odd  and unnatural rectangular shapes of his “ears”. The Set-animal is often thought of as depicting an anteater. Maybe this is so, but to me, his face looks like an anthropomorphized Egyptian plow. The plow actually gets at the central significance of what Set represents. As a plow, Set is a “non living thing”, absent of divine energy. Osiris is associated with spiritual and sexual fertility, including the fertile black soil deposited by the Nile’s flood. The plow is what tills the soil, like Set cuts up Osiris, to prepare for planting and growth. Thus, Set represents the destructive force that ultimately initiates the process of Osirian resurrection and Horus’s birth and ascent.

There will be details to add and extract say about this battle as we become immersed in more of the Egyptian perspective, but readers might recognize echoes of the story of Horus in the film The Lion King or Hamlet. These two combatants, Horus and Set, represented all dualities human consciousness becomes trapped by, spiritual and material, masculine and feminine, self and other, good and evil, like and dislike, etc. These two forces become “locked up” in eachother until they are reconciled by a third force that holds the two together.

This is a pattern that should be immediately recognizable to students of the Enneagram as a representation of the Law of Three, and it is a motif that continued on in Christian art in depictions of St. George and the Dragon. Readers of my book or students of the Fourth Way will recognize this quote that perfectly captures the sensibility represented on these ancient temple walls:

“At a certain moment we come to see two aspects, two natures, in ourselves - a higher nature related to one world and a lower nature related to another, a different world. What are we? We are neither one nor the other - neither God nor animal. We participate in life with both a divine nature and an animal nature. Man is double, he is not one. And as such, he is only a promise of a man until he can live with both natures present in himself and not withdraw into one or the other. If he withdraws into the higher part, he is distant from his manifestations and can no longer evaluate them, he no longer knows or experiences his animal nature. If he slides into the other nature, he forgets everything that is not animal, and there is nothing to resist it; he is animal... not man. The animal always refuses the angel. The angel turns away from the animal” (de Salzmann, 2011, p. 21). 

In one of many such representations of a “reconciled dualism”, the law of three, the Pharaoh, as the living Horus, represents the reconciled Horus and Set, signifying that he has integrated solar consciousness with the powers of the material world. One of the epithets for the Pharaoh and Horus both was “Lord of the Two Lands”, the worlds of spirit, represented by Lower Egypt, and matter, represented by Upper Egypt, ruled by Set. While Osiris represents the principle of what must die for rebirth, Horus represents the energies of consciousness that counter and overcome the entropic effects of Set.

The battle ends with Isis intervening as the Holy Reconciling Force. By her magic, she aids Horus’s triumph over Set, inheriting the legitimacy of rulership of Egypt from his father Osiris. As it is depicted on the Edfu walls in a scene entitled “the First Dismemberment of Set” there is a triad of Horus the Behdetite (the aspect of Horus associated with kingship that the temple of Edfu is dedicated to), standing atop Set in the form of a small hippopotamus (a very deadly animal for the Egyptians) and piercing him with a spear. Isis stands behind them, supporting his wielding of the spear, bringing Horus and Set into their proper relationship: the forces of consciousness, represented by Horus, and the forces of matter, represented by Set, are brought into their right alignment by Isis, representing presence or Self-Remembering. Set is now under the powers of Horus.

Standing before Horus’s triumph is a depiction of nine gods, a divine Ennead, as if to suggest that when spirit and matter are reconciled, the nine energies are available. While neither Enneads nor Triads were rare in Ancient Egypt, that these specific two are presented together and so clearly in relationship seems significant.

The oldest formal Ancient Egyptian pantheon was the Pesedjet of Innu or the Ennead of Heliopolis. This arrangement is of a family of nine divinities that articulate a scale of divine energies from the supreme godhead and source of creation, represented by Atum-Ra, towards the lower worlds in which the human soul participates, represented by Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, and Set. After awakening in the primordial void, Atum-Ra generates twins Shu and Tefnut (Mehit), who themselves birth Nuit and Geb, who then create Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, and Set. In some arrangements of the Ennead, Set is replaced with Thoth, the wisdom god. Osiris and Isis are the parents of Horus.

Following Atum-Ra, the divine source, each set of gods represents a station in the unfoldment of divine energies emanating in a spectrum of the pure, undifferentiated godhead towards greater levels of constriction and density, culminating in matter. The Ennead then represents the articulation of spiritual “worlds”. As energy closer to the source is more free, but less defined, whereas energies closer to materiality are more defined, fixed, and limited. As we will examine further on, the “lower” gods of the Ennead are closer to the human experience and represent archetypes human consciousness participates in. Thus, the Egyptians viewed reality as existing in levels. While physical bodies are bound to one level, human consciousness has the potential to transverse worlds.

These gods may also roughly correlate with the types on the Enneagram, beginning with Atum-Ra at point Nine, and the descending pairs may correlate with the types as they descend around the circumference of the symbol. Shu may correlate with Eight while Tefnut may correlate with One. Geb may correlate with Seven while Nuit may correlate with Two. With the remaining gods, it’s not so clear, and the reasons for that will be in an upcoming book. I don’t agree with the correlations I’ve seen others make.

There are other important pantheons such as that of Ogdoad of Hermopolis, but this one bears an obvious resonance with the Enneagram. It is also the most ancient pantheon and also the most relevant to understanding human transformation, most clearly in the relationships between Osiris, Isis, Set, and Horus. As I alluded to in the introduction, there’s a lot more to the story of correlation than simple one to one correspondences. We’ll return to the significance of the Ennead with the section on “making an Inner Enneagram”

This Edfu Ennead doesn’t quite match up to the traditional deities of the Heliopolitan Ennead, Atum-Ra, Shu, Tefnut, Nuit, Geb, Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, and Set, but there is some overlap. Instead, on the top register, it features Isis, Nephthys, Khumn, Khumn-Haroeris, and Tefnut-Mehit, and on the lower register is Wepwawet, Anhur (Onuris, a form of Shu), Haroeris (Horus the Elder), and Osiris-Onnophris the Triumphant (the Resurrected Osiris) according to The Triumph of Horus translated by H.W. Fairman.

Nuit, Geb, and Set are missing from this Ennead, but Set here is likely replaced by Wepwawet (sometimes Set was switched out for Thoth, Anubis, or Wepwawet in the Ennead of Heliopolis). Wepwawet is closely associated with Anubis, who is the son of Osiris and Nephthys. As the gods were not static qualities, their attributes and qualities often blended and synthesized with one another.

Khumn, a ram-headed creator god associated with the source of the Nile, came to prominence in the New Kingdom and later and was often associated with Amun, supreme god of the New Kingdom. Khumn-Haroeris was a syncretic blend of Horus the Elder and Khumn, possibly blending the primordial sky-god form of Horus with the creative powers of Khumn. Khumn-Haroeris may have been a deity important to a local city or region. This Ennead comes some 2500-3000 years after the Ennead of Heliopolis, making for incredible consistency, all things considered.

Whatever is the case with this Ennead of Edfu, it seems quite significant to me that along the same stretch of temple wall are myths of Egypt’s primordial history, its consecration to to Zep Tepi and its reestablishment through the kingdom of Ancient Egypt, its chief mythological motifs exemplifying the aim of their civilization, and finally, culminating in an Ennead. Could this Ennead be a variant of the Ennead of Heliopolis? If so, could this placement suggest that the Ennead of Heliopolis, and thus the earliest known proto-Enneagram we have, have their roots back to the civilization of “pre-sand Egypt”? 

Mythology and the Transformation of the Soul

The following sections will seem to have little to do with the Enneagram itself, because they have nothing to do with the typology. They speak to what the Enneagram is truly meant for. True inner work is moving beyond psychological work into the efforts to build a soul. The Enneagram shows us our particular pattern of inner fragmentation, the way our “inner Osiris” has been fragmented and the specific ways we need to apply the unifying magic of Isis. Our inner life lacks cohesion and we can typically only sustain awareness and concentration for very brief moments in time before we are distracted again. In other words, Egypt helps us with knowing what to do with the information the Enneagram provides.

The Egyptians conceptualized the work of human life as aligning with Maat, cosmic order, which included, for example, ensuring that all earthly activities were mirrors of divine archetypes. A marriage wasn’t just a legal contract, for example. It was a human reflection of the cosmic union of Osiris and Isis, a pattern established in eternity. 

To fulfill Maat, human beings must actualize their spiritual potential, which involves participating in divine patterns and undertaking a spiritual ascent. Toward this end, the Ancient Egyptians believed it was necessary to “build a soul” that was equipped to navigate the complex spiritual realms and awaken to its nature as an emanation or particle of the divine source. This sentiment aligns with many spiritual traditions, but most relevant for Enneagram enthusiasts, it is a sentiment expressed in Gurdjieff’s cosmology where we are not born with a soul, we must develop one via Self-Remembering.

The Egyptians understood the transformation of the soul as a human sunthemic enactment of the divine transformation represented by their god Osiris, the god of death and rebirth and Lord of the Duat. To develop one’s inner world was to “participate” in the cycle of Osiris on a spiritual level, while the Osirian cycle is itself a “closer to human” reflection of the divine source or supreme godhead was Ra (or Ra-Horahkti. “Atum” means something like “complete”, so Atum-Ra is the aspect of Ra in his complete form, possibly as the totality of creation or the energy prior to creation). Thus, to navigate the landscape of the inner world was to participate in or to become a reflection of the eternal archetype of Osiris.

According to the Egyptians, the soul is something we are born with only in potential form. Building a soul means to awaken and bring cohesion to the spiritual dimension of our consciousness and life force, our Ka. Ka is often translated as life force and as one’s “double”. It is symbolized by two connected arms in an embrace or praising position with the elbows bent at 90 degrees almost like a posture of greeting, waving, or embracing. This may have symbolized the power of “attraction”, attributed to the Ka, in the sense that the Ka is what pulled certain influences into our lives. 

To die, for the Egyptians, was to “go to one’s Ka”. The Pharaoh’s pivotal rejuvenation ceremony, the Heb Sed festival, featured crucial death and rebirth rites that took place within the pyramid for the sake of revitalizing the Ka of the land and people of Egypt, not unlike the Christian sense of Christ’s death redeeming humanity. I think the best way to think of Ka is as essence, or the “stuff” of essence that Gurdjieff referred to as Handbledzoin, the “blood of the second body”. I’m not completely certain Ka and essence are equivalent ideas, but I think it is a useful place to start from.

The contrast of essence and personality is a major theme in the Gurdjieff Work and though it is often under-emphasized in the Enneagram, it’s actually the heart of Enneagram work. Essence is our being. When we are present, it is essence that can be present or not. We experience essence as the substance of ourselves, and the more being we have cultivated, the more our attention and consciousness can be whole and endure in the face of distractions, dispersals, and the nonsense of our personalities.

Gurdjieff described essence as something we were born with, but unless we make special efforts to collect and strengthen it, it can disperse and even die in us, even as our bodies live. Essence has the potential to be developed and grown into authentic and established consciousness, a “soul”. It is the potential of a soul or the substance for a soul. Much like the Egyptian view, essence is not complete, but is something that must be matured through inner work.

For the Egyptians, the principle task of one’s life was building a “spiritual body”, which they symbolically correlated with building their own tomb. The spiritual body is a concentration of presence that can navigate what is translated as “Underworld” or “Duat” as the Egyptians referred to it, which is a complex, mysterious realm of transformation full of difficulties.

Egyptologists conceive of the Duat as where the soul goes when we die. This is true, but many of the numerous books of the Duat (the so-called book of the dead, “Coming Forth by Day” and “What is in the Duat” included) state that the knowledge within is “for those on the earth” i.e. the living. As we will see examples of, Egyptologists don’t often take Egyptians for their own word because to do so would mean to reevaluate some assumptions that our modern understanding of Ancient Egypt is based on. So the Duat is the realm we go to when we die, but it is also accessible to one who has an inner life, who has an “inner body”. Thus, while there is an element where the soul does transverse the Duat after death to cleanse itself, the Duat exists here and now. 

The Duat, then, is not exactly an underworld. It is the world of the soul, the soul’s perspective in life and after death. It is the inner world. In other words, the Duat isn’t a separate realm, it’s a mode of consciousness. The Duat is life from the perspective of the soul. What for us is the navigation of the daily trials of being human, the soul experiences as avoidances, traps of identification, illusions, pain, and temptations of false peace that act as barriers for the souls freedom. These were represented in so-called funerary texts as various entities, demons, regions, gates, and monsters barring the soul from progressing. The Duat contains obstacles, positive and negative, that the soul can get entangled within instead of being able to freely make its way to its source, its noetic home “star”. 

The Duat can be thought of as akin to the Christian purificatory realm of Purgatory, albeit far more nuanced and elaborate. It is a realm of purification for the spirit to return to its source, stripping away elements of the lower, earthly realms. In a sense, our Enneagram Type is our Duat, the labyrinth that our essence is caught within and must free itself from.

This perspective powerfully underscores the Sufi sentiment of “living in two worlds at once”, the outer world of daily life and the inner world of soul moving toward liberation. To navigate the Duat requires that we not be so identified with our physical bodies, personalities, instinctual drives, our “likes and dislikes”, and that we know ourselves as essence. 

The Egyptians placed great emphasis on being “spiritually equipped”, which meant both having spiritual capacities from powerful Ka-energy to build a spiritual inner body and having the wisdom to identify, and thus “see through”, specific gods, demons, realms, and spiritual beings that inhabited the Duat. We see echoes of this very perspective in many other traditions that likely had a strong Egyptian influence, such as in ancient Jewish Merkabah and Hekhalot mysticism.

The Ka, organized into a Sahu body, “fixes” the Ba. If Ka is essence, and Sahu body is the soul (organized, conscious essence), then Ba is the spirit. In other traditions, it’s what Gurdjieff called the “I”, what the Greeks called the Intellect, and what the gnostics called the Nous, our highest part. It may be roughly equated to the Higher Intellectual Center. In these traditions, we all have this higher part, but due to a lack of development of an intermediate spiritual body, it cannot be connected to or in relation to our lower part, and thus, it cannot begin its journey of ascent and return to its source.

The Egyptians symbolized the Ba as a human head on a migratory bird’s body. Ba translates into “emanation” or “manifestation”, so Ba is our individual aspect of the spiritual source, our individual ‘emanation’ of Ra. The Ba, like a bird, navigates through the spiritual realms, acquiring gnosis. The Ba is the inner vessel that can truly move through the Duat to its spiritual home or it can get lost and distracted in the Duat, “perching” on some branch instead of completing its migration home. It is the dimension of the soul that is links the incorporal, material body with the divine source.

The Ba that awakens to its celestial nature and becomes eternal is called an Akh, symbolized by an Iblis, the bird of the god of wisdom, Thoth. This means the soul has acquired true wisdom. The Akh joins Ra as a star, a companion on Ra’s solar boat, the sun-as-a-sailboat sailing across the heavens. Akh souls were often symbolized by five pointed stars painted on the ceiling of tombs and temples to signify their participation in the creation and world-maintenance of Ra.

The Akh-soul represents one who has achieved such gnosis/wisdom that it has “seen into the Akhet”, the horizon where the sun is born, signifying the Egyptian source of divine creativity. In the mystical ascent by Pharaoh by way of a Horus-hawk to the zenith of the sky in order to appear into the Akhet depicted in the Pyramid Texts is the perception that transforms the Ba to the Akh, allowing the Pharaoh’s soul to take its place among the timeless and eternal stars. 

Thus, to summarize, the energies of the Ka provide a place to gather the energies for a “soul” the Sahu body, to “attract” and “fix” the Ba. The Ba that can escape the trap of identification and purify itself can come to know itself as an emanation of the divine source, Ra, and thus, achieves true wisdom and be transformed into an Akh. The Akh soul has perceived the full revelation of divine creativity and has come to directly know its true nature.

The hieroglyph for the Akhet was a symbol of a sun disk rising between two mountains. These mountains were also represented by two lions (known as the Aker lions) whose names are “yesterday” and “tomorrow”, which I take to mean that the “birth of the sun” is perceived between past and future. In other words, the divine creative source is found deep within the present. 

Recall the Sphinx, Ra-Horakhty, is likewise a lion like the Aker lions, but it is the lion that is peering into the horizon, into the present moment. In other words, the Sphinx symbolizes the quality of consciousness, aligned with celestial coordinates, that has the capacity to perceive the unfolding of the divine source through the present.

The Celestial and Terrestrial Landscapes - The Mirror of Heaven

Egypt is so complex and everything overlaps so greatly it’s very difficult to avoid endless digressions to unpack the significance of any single element. In keeping with the Egyptian sensibility of sunthema and endless metaphor, the Duat was represented as under the Western horizon as the place where the sun and stars “die”, are revitalized, and are reborn when they rise again at dawn. 

In The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, Jane Sellers explores the connections between ancient Egyptian mythology and astronomy, arguing that Egyptian mythology and religious texts, particularly those of the Pyramid Texts, are symbolic and mythic representations of celestial cycles and astronomical events rather than solely expressions of religious fantasy. Further, she argues that the Egyptians were aware of the precession of the equinoxes, a phenomenon that takes about 25,920 years to complete, and that myths of gods being defeated or dying correspond to shifts in the stars and changes in the dominant constellations. The story of Osiris being killed and dismembered, for example, likely mirrors the temporary disappearance of Orion from the Egyptian skies due to precession.

The Egyptians represented Osiris in the constellation we know today as Orion because of the distinct ways that the constellation seemed to move through the sky during yearly cycles. They referred to Orion as Sah. This constellation would “die”, i.e. sink below the horizon for 70 days, and be reborn in a way that coincided with the Summer Solstice. This endless stellar death and rebirth naturally expressed the energy of Osiris to the Egyptians.

The Summer Solstice was special in that it was both the longest day of the year, and thus, the sun was at its strongest, but it also corresponded, somewhat counterintuitively, to the Nile’s yearly flood which broke the drought season and renewed the entire land. Without this flood, which did fail to happen some years, Egypt would be brought to famine.

Thus, via the flood, whose waters represented the tears of Osiris’s wife Isis at her husband's death, the landscape of Egypt itself enacted the eternally recurring image of Osiris’s resurrection whilst the sun, as both Horus and Ra, was “born” at peak strength. Therefore, we can see multiple ways and levels in which Osiris is “reflected” in natural and human cycles: the personal transformation of the soul, the sun through the night hours, the yearly solar cycle, and the rejuvenating flood of the Nile. As already stated, a major aspect of the Egyptian way of experiencing the world was to sensitize themselves to these interpenetrating reflections, and thus, to become aware of the divine in all moments, which is the aim of a great many prayers and practices within modern mystical traditions.

The Egyptians saw the inner world of the Duat reflected in a specific triangle-shaped section in the stars that stretch from the constellation Leo to Taurus and extended beneath them to Sirius and Orion. For the Egyptians, the star Sirius (known as Sopdet) represented Isis and Orion (as stated above, called Sah by the Egyptians) represented Osiris. If you observe these stars, the three stars of Orion’s belt are in a line with or seem to “point” toward Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. This “line” of stars extends the other direction, too, from Sirius, through Orion’s belt, to the prominent stars of Taurus into the pleiades. This will be relevant later. At certain periods of Egyptian history, Taurus represented both Osiris and his brother Set, and other periods, Taurus was a part of Sah-Osiris while the constellation Lepus (the hare) was Set. 

This patch of stars is where the sun travels along the ecliptic between the Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice for approximately 90 days. The Equinox is the balance between day and night whereas the Solstice is the longest day of the year, when the sun is the strongest. If you were to sit in one position and watch the part of the sky occupied by Orion, Sirius, and Taurus day in and out, you’d see the sun pass through these constellations toward Leo. As the nights pass, Orion would gradually move from its highest point in the sky toward the horizon over a period of 70 days, where it would disappear beneath the horizon. It is for this reason that the mummification process took 70 days, to reflect Osiris’s descent, in just one example of how many rituals were enactments of stellar events. 

Three weeks later, Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, would rise before the sun, as if “announcing” the birth of the sun on that morning. This is called the Heliacal rising of Sirius. Thus, Sirius as Isis was giving birth to her son, Horus, represented by the actual sunrise. By some miracle, it was also the precise day that the Nile river flooded, rejuvenating the land of Egypt and expressing a powerful relationship between heavenly and earthly events in the Egyptian point of view. Adding to the synchronistic elements of the flood, the floodwaters would appear red, attributed to the flourishing of microscopic "Burgundy Blood" algae in the slow-moving, warm waters, or possibly red-colored silt churned into the water during the flooding season. This was seen as the bleeding of Isis in birthing Horus. Later, the Nile flood would deposit black, fertile soil from which the Egyptians’ name for their own land came, Khemet, meaning “the black lands”.

Thus, if you looked at the horizon on the morning of the Solstice, you’d see a “line” of stars in the sky from the Pleiades to the Hyades (star clusters in Taurus) to the belt of Orion to Sirius “pointing” to the sunrise where the sun rises on its most powerful day that heralded the Nile floods. The parallels between these astronomical phenomena and the Christian story of the birth of Jesus wherein the three kings follow the star of Bethlehem to the birth of the savior should be obvious.

This amazing confluence of events - the flood, the solstice, and the heliacal rising of Sirius symbolized death and an underworld journey for Osiris (below the horizon) followed by his resurrection (Orion rising after an annual period of invisibility) that impregnates Isis-as-Sirius to give birth to their sun Ra-Horakhty, in the Akhet. It was as if the spiritual energies of the constellation of Osiris poured into Sirius-Isis, which then poured into the sun.

As stated prior, this coincidence between the flood and solstice was profound for the Egyptians because their survival depended on it. Intimate links between cosmic and earthly patterns were tightly maintained because it was believed that if the heavens and earth became out of sync, the flooding would not come and Egypt would be subject to famine. In other words, human consciousness was viewed as the intermediary between spiritual realms and the material worlds that wove them together, as human beings are creatures that partake in both natures, in both “Horus” and “Set” that could “unify the two lands”.

Thus, the transformation of the human soul wasn’t just a personal journey. To “build a soul”, from the Egyptian perspective, was to create pivotal links between the material world and the vitalizing spiritual realms. Building a soul meant to take one's place within the grand cosmic breath, the exhalation of divine emanation from the creative source, bringing forth the created world, and the inhalation of ascent back to the cosmic source once again.

The expansive landscape of the Giza plateau stands of as a mirror of these celestial events on the earth, with the pyramids as the three stars of Orion’s belt, pointing toward the horizon, standing for the Akhet, into which the Sphinx, as a representation of awakened consciousness, observes eternally. Therefore, this sacred landscape and home to the world's most iconic monuments is an enormous totemic representation and revelation of the mysterious relationships between the physical world, the Osirian Duat, and the Akhet in the path of human development and ascent through spiritual worlds.

The Heka of Isis - Assembling the Spiritual Body

The personal inner striving of assembling this spiritual body that can navigate the Duat is represented by the efforts of the Goddess Isis, wife of Osiris. Earlier, we covered the significance of the story of Horus and Set, but Isis’s role was left out. Her part in the mythology represents the actual inner work of building the soul.

Isis is the goddess of magic, Heka, which for our purposes can be understood as the energies of presence. The Egyptians had no name for their religion, but the closest term is Heka, which is translated to “magic”. Heka is the divine energy, encompassing all that springs from the godhead Ra down into the material world. To be spiritually adept was to wield Heka, which has an obvious link to the word Ka. Gathering, growing, and working with Ka was the practice of Heka.

When Set rips Osiris apart, Isis goes on a long journey that involves humbling herself, navigating trials, and faithfully seeking out each part of her husband's body. Using Heka, she assembles his body parts and makes him whole, bringing him back to life, just as by learning to be present, we can bring together the fragmented parts of our consciousness. It is the feminine, the actively receptive mode of consciousness that we engage in when, for example, meditating, that is the force that brings about the soul’s renewal.

The first part of Osiris’s body that Isis uses to hold all the other pieces is his spine, which the Egyptians represented as the Djed Column. Like all Egyptian symbolism, the Djed had many layers of meaning, but in terms of this process of inner unification, the first real step in cultivating a genuine inner life is impartiality. 

Impartiality is the same as the Stoic concept of apatheia, where the word “apathy” comes from. Our modern sense of apathy is an indifference whereas apatheia or impartiality is an inner freedom wherein one’s inner life is not impacted by the ups and downs of the outside, is not caught or identified with grasping for one’s likes and avoiding one’s dislikes. It's an indication that there is something free inside that stands apart from the personality. 

When we are identified with the personality, there is no inner space from the likes and dislikes of our personality. Impartiality or freedom from likes and dislikes is a major part of inner work. It doesn’t mean one no longer has preferences, which would simply be rearranging what one likes and what one doesn’t like. It means that we experience our likes and dislikes but aren’t ruled by them. We can be impartially present no matter what is happening. In the context of the Enneagram, the Enneagram of Virtues represents impartiality, which is when the heart is allowed to simply be itself, free of identification with the instinctual drives. Impartiality, depicted in the Enneagram as the Virtues, is a major focal point of inner work that is often neglected. It represents a kind of death of the egos aims, a surrendering of grasping, and is the precondition for authentic awakening. See Chapter 10 of my book for more.

Oscar Ichazo formulated the Virtues in contrast to the Enneagram of Passions. Virtues and corresponding vices or passions were a major thread in Greek philosophy that continued into the Christian tradition. The Passions, from the Greek word “Pathos”, meaning suffering, describe the core emotional suffering of each Enneagram. They represent the spiritual confusion between essence and personality, wherein we become identified with our personality instead of essence. When we’re identified with personality, the heart sources our sense of identity from the instinctual drives, namely how we think we’re doing in terms of our lifestyle, our sexual attractiveness, and our social value. By trying to find identity through the instinctual drives, we are unconsciously trying to evoke our essential quality by getting our instinctual needs met in a way that boosts the ego, but essence is not experienced by any functional or instinctual means. For more on this topic, see my book.

The logismoi, as mentioned in the introduction, were the basis of the Seven Deadly Sins and influenced Ichazo in his understanding of the modern Enneagram of Personality. They formed the basis of the Passions. The logismoi were teachings on behalf of the desert fathers, the earliest Christian monastics, and compiled by Evagrius Pontius. These were developed by monks who sought to connect with the divine in solitude, but nonetheless struggled immensely to keep their attention consistently on God. They observed the patterns of their own attention that habitually distracted them and from these observations they formulated the logismoi, which means “tempting thoughts”. Evagrius described just eight instead of nine, but they form an early formulation of the same kinds of psychological conditions we observe with the Enneagram. 

They consisted of Gluttony (Gastrimargia) – An obsession with indulgence and physical gratification.

Lust (Porneia) – Uncontrolled sexual desire, impurity, and fantasy.

Avarice (Philargyria) – Greed, personal grasping and retention, fear of poverty.

Sadness (Lypē) – A despairing sorrow that detaches the soul from joy in God.

Anger (Orgē) – Wrath, resentment, and uncontrolled rage.

Acedia (Acedia) – Spiritual sloth or listlessness, leading to apathy.

Vainglory (Kenodoxia) – The desire for recognition and praise.

Pride (Hyperēphania) – Arrogance, self-exaltation, and seeing oneself as superior.

What’s missing is a flavor of fear, doubt, or faithlessness that could be attributed to Type Six, but these were lost for a time until Pope Gregory I changed and adapted them into the Seven Deadly Sins we are familiar with today.

More research is needed, but it may be that these monks were drawing from the earlier tradition that was already present in Egypt. Perhaps the teachings of the logismoi were passed from the longstanding Egyptian tradition to the new Christian movement. Harold R. Willoughby notes in his book Pagan Regeneration, 1929,  “…when Christian emperors were ruling in the Mediterranean world, Egyptian mystics were more than likely to turn anchorite and to seek in the solitude of the desert the experience of oneness with the divine; or perhaps they would lose themselves as members of a Christian monastic community” (pg 196). If there is a link between the Ennead of Heliopolis and modern Enneagram, then perhaps the logismoi came from a tradition that sought to understand what blocked one’s consciousness from being in relation to the Neteru, much like the Kabbalah developed the teachings of Qlippoth, the “husks” that block the divine light of the Sephiroth. 

Returning to Isis, she recovers all of Osiris’s body except for his phallus, which was destroyed. Isis fashions a magical phallus, which symbolizes that spiritual potency in the hands of the feminine actively receptive mode of consciousness. This act of magic resurrects Osiris in the Duat and simultaneously results in the Ancient Egyptian “immaculate conception” in which she becomes pregnant with their son Horus who goes on to avenge Osiris. 

Osiris’s resurrection at Isis’s hands Osiris stands as the archetype for the development of the soul very similar to how Christ represents the same archetype for Christians. The Pharaoh, though represented in the popular imagination as a harsh, powerful king, was more like a Pope. He was the chief high priest of Egypt and signified an incarnation of Horus in the physical world. The Pharaoh was seen as roughly equivalent to the living Christ and the chief human model for awakening one’s spiritual life. The typical explanation is that when the Pharaoh dies, he becomes “an Osiris”. He participates in the divine archetype of Osiris. However, it may be that the Pharaoh, who is living Horus, is also Osiris within the Duat. Thus, the Pharaoh is dually presiding over the material world and land of Egypt as Horus, the divine incarnate and the inner world as Osiris simultaneously. 

The assembled spiritual body was called a Sahu body. It is reflected in the Egyptian name for Orion, Sah, the constellation of Osiris. Sah was also the Ancient Egyptian name for the mummy, a body that had undergone ritual transformation to reflect the spiritual Sahu body in the image of Osiris, in contrast to their word for a corpse, Khat. One can see the resonance between the Christian representation of the crucified Christ as a representation for the enlightened person who has sacrificed their worldly identity for a spiritual resurrection with the depiction of Osiris in his mummified form.

Thus, the Sahu Body is “in the image” of Osiris, so the inner work of restoring the soul or building the spiritual body is performed “in the image” of Isis. Our physical body houses our consciousness in life, but if our body dies, our consciousness has no way of staying coherent. When we “zone out”, for example, which most of us do nearly all the time, our attention disperses. If we had no physical body to house our consciousness, there’d be nothing to hold the energies of our consciousness together, no self-remembering. We’d just disperse. Thus, when losing our physical body in death, the “energy of our consciousness” simply becomes disorganized vapor, from the Egyptian and Gurdjieffian perspectives, so it needs to be worked with, developed, and organized into a “spiritual body” that has coherence and solidity in the absence of a physical body. 

The idea of a spiritual body or cultivation of a spiritual vehicle is a fairly universal motif, exemplified in the Man of Light in Sufism, the Merkaba in Jewish Mysticism, the Vajra body in Tantric Buddhism, and even Christianity has its own version, the Resurrection body:
2 Corinthians 35-55: “But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” …God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body… There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor. So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. 

If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”[f]; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.

I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “

This Christian schema, which parallels the Egyptian one, is also reinforced within esoteric Christian mysticism, such as the philosophy of Hierotheos; “Know, then, that the body is the house of the soul, and the soul is the garment of the Mind (The Nous or Intellect); for it is right that the Soul should beautify its house and the Mind its (dwelling) place; for thus (only) can it enter into the heavens where Christ has already entered for our sake…" The Book of the Holy Hierotheos 2:13. Little is known about Hierotheos, but he seems to have been influenced by Proclus the Neoplatonists and Evagrius.

The Soul and Spiritual Ecology

The view that the human consciousness has a vital role in maintaining cosmic order is echoed in nearly all esoteric western spiritual traditions. It is specifically central to Gurdjieff’s teachings, found in his concept of Reciprocal maintenance. This idea is that everything participates in “feeding” and maintaining everything else in a kind of spiritual ecology. 

As represented in numerous Western esoteric traditions like Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, and Sufism, represented in Gurdjieff’s cosmology as a scale of cosmic concentrations of increasing density of energies emanating from the absolute source into “dead” matter, the “outer darkness” of the Torah. According to the view of Reciprocal maintenance, all organisms and materials have a role to fulfill in participating in the flow of energies from the sources toward the developing edge of the cosmos, matter, which Gurdjieff metaphorically represented as the moon due to it being a “lifeless” planetary body. Humans, in this schema, function like “photosynthesizers” of cosmic energies. The energy generated by taking on inner work, the task to develop a soul, generates the energy that the universe needs.

Without human consciousness’ ascent, the cosmos is deprived of a pivotal nutrient. In Gurdjieff’s mythology, as in others with similar schemas, this lack contributes to a loss of balance amongst the spiritual forces that govern our world. The debt is then recompensed by means of psychic pressures that contribute to the suffering and death of human beings. In other words, it's as if the failure of human consciousness to play its part in the greater world results in bad “psychic weather” that negatively impacts the emotions and behaviors of human beings, resulting in disastrous consequences like hatred, violence, and war. 

In many occult traditions, there are often acknowledgments of harmful spirits, domineering archaeons, demons, and other negative entities that in one way or another parasitically “feed” on human suffering which accord with this view. Whether it’s countering the isfet to uphold Maat and become an Akh, defying the gnostic archons, escaping the wheel of samsara, or realizing nirvana, these allegories and myths point to an urgency of transformation that is beyond a personal project.

This state of planetary tension is what Gurdjieff referred to as Solioonensius in Beelzebub’s Tales, and it’s safe to say that our present era is characterized by Solioonensius. It’s when, according to J.G. Bennett, “people – all people – become intensely dissatisfied with the situation in which they find themselves and they react to this state of dissatisfaction differently.

Here is what is the right and wrong of it: those who are wise and understand this, know that this force of dissatisfaction that is developed can be converted into a dissatisfaction with oneself and a wish to change and to work on oneself, and it is the greatest and most powerful force that one can have. It is the realization that only those who have attained to an inner freedom through work can pass safely through this kind of crisis.”

Chapter Ten of my book addresses a similar sentiment, in that dissatisfaction is inevitable, and we can use it for our work. The instinctual needs that drive our ego, expressions of Set, never go away so long as we have a body. The ego attempts to satiate itself, a project that is forever incomplete as its needs constantly renew. Loss and incompleteness is an ever-present fixture of being a creature in time. Dissatisfaction provides not only the motivation to strive for something new, but the interplay of dissatisfaction and desire is what animates the eros that keeps the creative world moving. Dissatisfaction and lack, then, can become potent tools if they are paired with an authentic wish for The Work and a potent orientation.

Once again, like the other ideas articulated in this article, whether or not Solioonensius is “real” or not is irrelevant. It’s a useful mythological orienting tool that provides a felt sense of connection between the individual’s inner situation and a greater sense of occurrences within the “macrocosmos”. 

One of the central and enduring functions religion serves is using stories, mythic images, and spiritual poetry to touch the heart and orient the soul. Ancient Egypt provides a rich, layered, and profound symbolic lexicon that already shares many points of connection with the modern Enneagram and the body of wisdom the Enneagram comes from. By no means am I suggesting making a religion out of the Enneagram or Ancient Egypt. I am saying that the civilization of Ancient Egypt, it’s rich mythological wisdom, it’s potent creativity, and the unrivaled monuments it left behind can serve as potent, kaleidoscopic symbolic immersion that both feeds the heart’s striving to awaken and transforms basic-sense impressions that we usually take for granted into portals that draw the “inner eye” toward consciousness of a deeper reality. 

Most people get “high” learning and unraveling the Enneagram and how our Enneagram Type shows up ourselves and how the Enneagram is expressed in other people. After a time, however, it’s easy to plateau or not really know what comes next. Ancient Egyptian understanding of the sense and purpose of human life, then, provides a powerful and never-exhausting illustration of what it means to go deeper with the Work the Enneagram calls us into.