Slick Dissident | The Occult Enneagram, Esoteric Psychology, Archetype, & Mythology
Slick Dissident, the symbolic syncretism master sleuth, returns to InnerVerse for a deep dive into the esoteric enneagram. We'll be exploring the light and shadow archetypes of the nine divines, and exploring the digital significance of such knowledge being used by occultists over the long spans of human existence.
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In this episode
Core themes
The occult is psychology wearing a mask
Chance Garton opens by arguing that whatever is real in what people call the occult, the hidden, is simply psychology, the psyche of the individual, the collective, and the universe itself. He points out that you cannot separate the most famous psychologists of the modern age from myth and the hidden arts. Freud wrote Moses and Monotheism, Jung wrote endlessly about alchemy and the image making faculty of consciousness. From there he frames mythographers, priest classes, kings and tyrants as masters of universal psychology who either play to a people's strengths or prey upon their weaknesses.
Gurdjieff, the Sufis, and the beehive
Gabriel, who goes by Slick Dissident, walks through the Enneagram's contested history. It reaches the modern world through Gurdjieff, who credited a Sufi sect whose name translates roughly as the keepers of the bees. Gabriel finds that thrilling because the Beehive Cluster sits in Cancer, which he ties to the Chariot card and its gilded gold. A rival lineage claims independent South American discovery. The personality matrix, he notes, was layered onto the older figure fairly recently, which is why the system now lives mostly in self help circles rather than initiate ones.
How the nine numbers actually divide
The heart of the episode is the map. The big Y splits the circle into three trines. Eights, nines and ones are instinct, body and the present moment. Twos, threes and fours are feeling and the past. Fives, sixes and sevens are thinking and the future, and the four to five crossing is the pivot of the whole figure. A second grouping sorts the numbers into compliant, aggressive and withdrawn. Gabriel adds that the seven deadly sins form the base, with deceit and fear added for three and six, and that dividing almost any number by seven yields 142857 repeating.
Star Wars as a tarot deck in motion
Gabriel's project overlays the Thoth Crowley tarot and Star Wars onto the nine stations. Luke Skywalker is the Fool and the perfectionist one, alongside Athena and her shadow brother Ares, and Zeus when he must fight Typhon. Chewbacca is the Magi and the giver, always repairing, always saying yes, a willing slave whose pride roars. Princess Leia and Dionysus hold the achiever three with its shadow of deceit. Han Solo, married to the Empress as the Millennium Falcon, is the emperor and the individual four, driven by envy. Obi Wan Kenobi sits at five, the observer.
Feeding the demon of a number
Both men keep returning to how this knowledge could be used against people. Chance Garton describes collectivism as the shadow of oneness and traces it through the one percent slogan, MAGA loyalty that survived Warp Speed, and January 6th, arguing that righteous indignation is the easiest lever for moving crowds. He predicts pride parades oscillating into wrath parades. Gabriel goes further, suggesting that childhood images like Chewbacca choking Lando Calrissian can be summoned decades later around events like George Floyd. Their closing warning, echoing The Prisoner, is blunt. You are not a number.
Quotes
“I believe personally that when we talk about the quote unquote occult, the hidden, if we are describing something real, we are talking about psychology, the psychology, the psyche of humanity, the collective, the individual, the world and the universe itself”
“It's like architecture or like a loose substructure of the shape of the collective mind. And it's been given a particular shape such that I think later in our lives, they can hit these notes in these similar echoes to the shape of these archetypes. And it will ring true to us because it was seeded into our youth.”
“So he attributed the Enneagram to a Sufi sect. And the name of those Sufis is something like Sardegos or Sarrogues. It translates to the keepers of the bees. And that is quite fascinating to me because the beehive cluster is in the cancer constellation.”
“Up to 50% of the world population identifies as the six. And that single fact alone is really monumental, and it also bespeaks of social engineering quite pronouncedly because the sixes are very conveniently loyalists, and their shadow aspect is to be fearful.”
“And so a person who is expressing wrathful or angry behavior is very simply looking for perfection. They're demanding something better. And it's just as simple as that. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking of anger as being hateful. And that just is not true.”
“So my point is that this collectivism is really easily instilled and exploited in people when you're playing on their wrath side. When you get them all riled up, like, there's very few emotional switches that work for the movement of mass action in a certain direction, like righteous indignation.”
“And so maybe that's also kind of related to the deceit aspect of it that the two mother when pregnant and the child is within her is carrying, the two is carrying the three but it's hidden, you know, and deceit and hiding go together.”
“As fascinating, as educational as it is to learn these systems, I do have good reason to believe that what happens when we all attach to these archetypes and they standardize the symbols of our childhood psychological scaffolding, the nefariousness is that these things can be triggered and called up and summoned later on in your life.”
Gabriel, known on air as Slick Dissident, co-hosts InnerVerse's Vibe Rant show and is a longtime recurring guest on the podcast. He teaches occult symbolism and tarot on his YouTube channel, ranging across the Major Arcana, the esoteric Enneagram, mythology and archetype, mystic linguistics, and the symbolism hidden in popular film. He is best known for Tarot-tories, his own system mapping the 22 Major Arcana and zodiac archetypes onto the geography of the United States.
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