The Enneagram is routinely presented as ancient wisdom, often as Sufi, sometimes as desert-father. The documented history does not support that, and the history is not obscure.
The figure enters the modern West through G. I. Gurdjieff, who taught it in Russia and then in Europe from around 1915. Gurdjieff described the nine-pointed figure as a symbol of cosmic process, built from the law of three and the law of seven, with the circle divided by the repeating decimal of one-seventh, and used it for that. He attributed it to an esoteric brotherhood in Central Asia. He did not attach personality types to it, and no personality system appears in the Gurdjieff literature. The fullest published account is Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous.
The personality typology was mapped onto the figure by Oscar Ichazo in Chile in the 1960s, drawing on the classical vices and virtues and on his own synthesis. Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean psychiatrist, learned it from Ichazo around 1970, correlated the types with psychiatric categories and his own clinical observation, and taught it in Berkeley in small groups under a confidentiality agreement that was not kept. From those groups it passed to Jesuit teachers at Loyola and into Catholic retreat work, and from there into the general public through the books of Riso and Hudson, Helen Palmer and others from the late 1980s.
That is a lineage of about sixty years for the typology and a little over a century for the figure in the West. Ichazo himself objected in print to the attribution of his system to Sufi or other ancient sources.
Academic psychology has given it limited attention; the studies that exist give mixed support for the reliability of type assignment, and the model is not part of mainstream personality research, which works with trait dimensions rather than types.