Feb 13, 2007
Seven Deadly Sins
This is a psychological posting, so doesn’t really fit into the usual Sciencebase categories, but I had to post about it anyway and give a mention to the amazing quasi-mathematical strips from Jessica Hagy, which you will want to check out, think Venn diagrams, charts, and graphs but amazingly clever and witty, and not a significant figure in sight, and this week touching on the links between the seven deadly sins.
Rather than being simply mystical or wiccan pointed stars enneagrams have been used in analysis providing a diagramatic representation of a personality based on nine types and motivations. Hagy’s enneagram reproduced below, instead focuses on the seven deadly sins and provides definitions of how each possible pair of sins combines to create a particular behaviour. Strictly speaking it should be a heptagram, or septegram, not an ennea-gram (ennea from the Greek for nine, hepta for seven). Deception and fear might have been added to the heptagram to make a true enneagram.
I don’t know if this kind of thing would stand up in psy class, but it’s a nice diagram and offers some rather intriguing insights into the human mind, including the notion of edible undies.
The image comes from this page of Hagy’s. I asked her how she came up with the enneagram, “I was just playing with the idea that everything under the sun is linked to everything else,” she told me, “The ‘7 sins’ card is just a verbal play on the idea.”
If there’s a psychologist in the house, I’m sure Sciencebase readers would be interested in your thoughts on this. What do you make of the seven deadly sins enneagram?
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we must avoid to do those 7 DEADLY SINS…
PRAISE GOD for everything that his done for us…
coz without him we can do nothing…
just give your life to him..
GOD BLESS EVERYONE..!!!
All credit goes to Jessica Hagy, with thanks to her for permission to reproduce the image here.
db
I freakin’ LOVE the diagram! It’s damn clever!
Nothing new under the sun, to be honest. Those original seven deadly sins were not really anything new at the time, were they, they just couched conventional morals in a new way. However, in this day and age, I really cannot see how anyone can justify the continued interference of those who sustain mythological world viewpoints in politics.
db
Sorry about that – you may be typing too fast, but I’m apparently reading too fast. : ) The social injustice reference is interesting though – I posted this news item on my site as well (though I hadn’t thought to put together a neat-o heptagram!), and a commenter made the interesting point that refusing international aid to people who refuse to convert doesn’t seem consistent with social justice. You could argue that an insistence on the immorality of condom use in AIDS-ravaged Africa isn’t either.
But then again, you could make a pretty convincing case for good old-fashioned pride and wrath, too. And isn’t greed a lot like “obscene wealth”?