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Rick Stump's avatar

I’m five paragraphs in and I remember being a kid when that stuff was everywhere.

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Kris Newcomer's avatar

You are 100% spot on. New Age and Occult stuff is gaining in popularity, especially among younger generations who don’t know any history.

Another interesting thing— seemingly innocuous things like the Enneagram personality system can be traced back to the 1970s. I’ve been doing research on the origins of the Enneagram, as it’s gained popularity among millennial Christians in a “Christian version” of it, but the people promoting the “Christian” version believe that real psychology was added to it at some point. Nope. Initially, the Enneagram symbol came from an Occultist named Gurdijeff who believed the symbol explained all of the universe. Then a Chilean named Oscar Ichazo added vices to it and the first vestiges of “personality” to the numbers and in the early 70s held “retreats” of the stereotypical 1970s kind. The likes of John C Lilly were there, doing lots of psychedelic drugs, sex, and trying to “seek truth.” Claudio Naranjo, who was a psychiatrist— but his research was not on personality, but on… guess what? Psychedelic drugs for 500 Mr. Trebek! Naranjo went on a 40-day “Jesus” experience alone in the desert, took a bunch of psychedelic drugs, channeled spirits through automatic writing, then presto— comes out of the desert with the Enneagram of Personality as we mostly know it today.

Naranjo apparently got himself a little cult following where they thought he was the second coming of Jesus for a time.

There is a reason est and other hippy New Age retreat centers adopted the Enneagram so quickly- it’s one of their inventions.

And yet… Christians today are falling for it as supposedly “good psychology” because I guess it’s the 1970s again and we don’t trust science anymore. 🤷‍♀️

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