The Enneagram (Ennea meaning 9 in Greek) was intuited by ancient cultures who noticed that babies and toddlers exhibited different ways of being. These little ones were innately passive, active, silly, emotional, organized, worried, helpful, bossy, or thoughtfully quiet. They were just like children of today. In ancient times the elders wanted to use their understandings of children’s temperaments to train them for the community and to help them grow into their best potential.

The Enneagram was written down by the Ancient Greeks who diagramed the Enneagram system in a circle showing the 9 styles and their relatedness across the circle. In modern times Enneagram authors have used the Evagrius 5th Century diagram, seen in most Enneagram books. However, in 2011 a historian reported from Greece that ancient cultures used 3 triangles within the circle instead of the Evagrius diagram. 

In sacred geometry there is a design called the Enneagon, three right angle triangles within a circle, which I use in my Enneagram mandala. I designed my Mandala to illustrate the differences by color around and across the Circle. There are Three Triads around the circle: Emotional 2,3,4 (Red), Mental 5,6,7 (green) and Gut/Strength 8,9,1 (blue). There are three Triangles across the circle: the Busies 3,6,9 (pink), the Intensives 1,4,7 (orange) and the Sensitives 2,5,8 (yellow). Many combinations contributing to our uniqueness. Read more about the Mandala, Triads, Triangles Wings and Subsets in a later section.