Myth Monday [16]:

 

“The nine Enneagram vices are the deep root of each type.”

 

In much traditional teaching, the nine “passions” or vices are treated as the sacred core of each type, the deep spiritual root from which everything else grows. That sounds profound, but there are a few big problems with taking them as the foundation. 

 

First, it is basically unprovable; you can tell a story that everything in type 4 comes from “envy” or everything in type 9 from “sloth,” but there is no way to test that against anything except more story.

 

Second, seven of the nine come straight from the Christian “seven deadly sins”, which already biases the whole list. 

Because seven were not enough to cover nine types, two more had to be added, so we get Fear for type 6 and Deceit or Vanity for type 3, depending on the source.

This is not a neutral discovery of nine universal roots; it is a religious framework stretched to fit a nine‑point diagram.

 

Third, and this is the most practical problem, most of the words simply do not mean what teachers need them to mean, so they require pages of extra explanation.

“Lust” for type 8 does not usually refer to strong sexual desire in daily life, but to something like “I know what I want and I want it now”, which we already have a much clearer word for: impatience, intensity, or excess.

“Sloth” for type 9 gets redefined as “falling asleep to yourself”, not laziness; “Envy” for type 4 becomes a complex sense of lack rather than simple jealousy, and so on. If a core term has to be endlessly explained away from its ordinary meaning, it is not doing good descriptive work.

 

In that light, the “passions” are at best poetic metaphors, not solid foundations. Either the vices need to be renamed so that the actual word matches what we are trying to describe, or they are better abandoned in favour of language that points more directly to what types are doing in real life.