The Challenger

Type Eight, the Challenger or Protector, is placed in the body triad with Nine and One, and it is the type that expresses the triad's anger outwardly and immediately. Its basic desire is to protect itself and to determine its own course, its basic fear is of being harmed, controlled or violated by others. Its passion is lust, which in this system means not sexual desire but an appetite for intensity and for the full exertion of force; its virtue is innocence. Its wings are Seven and Nine. Under stress the system places Eight at Five, withdrawing and secretive; in growth it moves to Two, turning its force to the protection and care of others rather than to its own defence.

In the Hornevian groups, Riso and Hudson's second classification drawn from Karen Horney's three neurotic trends, Eight falls among the assertive types that move against others, alongside Three and Seven, its exertion of force being the most direct and outward expression of that strategy among the nine. Naranjo's instinctual subtypes cross each type with one of three biological drives, self-preservation, social and one-to-one (sexual). For Eight these give the self-preservation Survivalist, focused on satisfactory material security; the social Group Leader, whose force is turned toward friendship and shared causes; and the one-to-one Commander, whose intensity is expressed through possession and surrender in an intimate bond.

Popular Enneagram literature has often traced the system to a Sarmoung Brotherhood, an esoteric order Gurdjieff described visiting in central Asia in Meetings with Remarkable Men, and beyond that to Pythagoras, to the desert fathers, or to a chain of Sufi masters. No independent evidence for the Sarmoung Brotherhood exists, and Gurdjieff's autobiographical writing is generally read even by sympathetic scholars as teaching narrative rather than reportage. The other genealogies fail on the same test: the nine-pointed figure is not attested before Gurdjieff, and the nine-type personality theory is not attested before Ichazo. The honest position, which several serious Enneagram authors now take, is that the system is a twentieth-century synthesis with identifiable authors, and that its value has to be argued on its usefulness rather than on a pedigree it does not have.

A second scholarly history, James Webb's The Harmonious Circle (1980), an eight-years-in-the-making study of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and their followers, reaches the same conclusion as Moore's later biography: no independent record of a Sarmoung Brotherhood, or of the wider itinerary Gurdjieff describes in central Asia, has been found outside his own account. Webb's book is generally regarded, even by admirers of Gurdjieff's teaching, as the more reliable source on these historical points than Gurdjieff's own telling of them.