Seven Deadly Sins

This post touches on the links between the seven deadly sins, offering a psychological perspective. But, do check out the amazing quasi-mathematical strips from Jessica Hagy, think Venn diagrams, charts, and graphs, but amazingly clever and witty.

Seven deadly sins connected by Jessica Hagy, with permission

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 here, 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, where lust and gluttony intersect.

The image (with permission) 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.”