The Sun Dial enneagram
If you’re a listener of the Big Hormone Enneagram podcast, you may have heard me mention a Sun Dial schema that I apply to the Enneagram symbol. Per the (rough draft) graphic shown here, it’s fairly straightforward: Point 3 represents the East, 6 is the West, and 9 is midday sky.
The Sun is, then, traveling counterclockwise on the ennea-symbol, from 3 upward to 9 and down to 6, where it then ‘submerges into night’ at enneagrammic points 5 and 4.
The line that connects 3 and 6 therefore represents the horizon line of the planet. 5 and 4 are thus Underworld dwellers or hellions or just profoundly misunderstood.
As might be apparent already, this modality applied to the symbol generates numerous insightful metaphors …some of which I’ve identified; some of which are yet crouched down in the skinny…or waiting in these long lines, number in hand, hoping for their turn.
As you may have heard, the Sun rises in the East — at Point 3. And from our imaginative earthly perspective, it’s thrusting upward, surging higher, rising athletically to the top, motivated to hit its peak number… the way people who are 3s can be. This gets at another quality in Type 3 …of embodying a role as universal flag-bearer of Hope, through their active example infusing us with the feeling of ‘the dawn of a new day,’ filled with fresh possibilities and potential achievements.
3 is also the archetype for Personality in general. And so, we ‘put on the face’ of our personality each morning, after emerging from the darkened limbo of the dream world. It’s interesting to watch yourself become your personality as you wake up. There’s a brief phase, there, where it could go differently. But…. we put the whole thing back together each morning, put on that old uniform, go to work – sometimes just the deadly serious work of being our personality.
The Sun travels up to the neutral of Point 9 – here it’s not East, not West. Takes no sides in the daily debate, even as it cheekily splits the day in half. And then, defying the workday itself, Point 9 imposes a kingly relaxation – a lunch break, right in the middle of productivity.
Sun continues around to Point 6, where it takes us all into the uncertainty and insecurity of unseeing / unknowing: darkness is creeping and night is close, we’re about to lose our sense of direction and the orienting beacon of the Sun. Maybe the nightly stars will form up into zodiac gods to guide our fate and see us through this unnamable darkness.
So, looking at the line between 3 and 6, many or most of us generally have this idea of being ‘workers’…working from sun up to sundown. People identify with what they ‘do for a living’ (do = 3, living = 6). For good or bad, we associate ourselves with how our vocation contributes to the greater society or nearby community, or with our work’s ability to sustain and support us and those near and dear to us. This is the universal line between 3 and 6.
Besides the patternistic rut we’re unintentionally digging in the horizontal road to work each day, we’re trudging a deep groove of Personality in the earthly horizon along this 3-6 line. This is a very flat existence. It’s why, however, when the camera zooms way up and out to show the big blue-green spinning planet, there’s a flutter of inspiration in our bellies at the pregnant idea of a rounder, more all-inclusive perspective for ourselves, personally, and everyone…and how wide this new holistic vision might split us open at the ‘seems,’ if we can get our harried head around it.
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