The Sarmoung Claim, and How to Weigh It

Popular Enneagram literature has often traced the system to a Sarmoung Brotherhood, an esoteric order Gurdjieff described visiting in central Asia in Meetings with Remarkable Men, and beyond that to Pythagoras, to the desert fathers, or to a chain of Sufi masters. No independent evidence for the Sarmoung Brotherhood exists, and Gurdjieff's autobiographical writing is generally read even by sympathetic scholars as teaching narrative rather than reportage. The other genealogies fail on the same test: the nine-pointed figure is not attested before Gurdjieff, and the nine-type personality theory is not attested before Ichazo. The honest position, which several serious Enneagram authors now take, is that the system is a twentieth-century synthesis with identifiable authors, and that its value has to be argued on its usefulness rather than on a pedigree it does not have.

A second scholarly history, James Webb's The Harmonious Circle (1980), an eight-years-in-the-making study of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and their followers, reaches the same conclusion as Moore's later biography: no independent record of a Sarmoung Brotherhood, or of the wider itinerary Gurdjieff describes in central Asia, has been found outside his own account. Webb's book is generally regarded, even by admirers of Gurdjieff's teaching, as the more reliable source on these historical points than Gurdjieff's own telling of them.