Joan D'Arcy Cooper teaches that "this ancient Diagram of Man's
Bodies was constructed for the earliest students of Yoga at
the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C. to illustrate the
relationship between the three bodies of man during his
physical life on earth. In the course of time, the oral
teaching abandoned its use of this diagram, when it no longer
suited its purpose, and the diagram found its way into other
systems and was given new interpretation to accord with these
systems. The principal area to which this diagram was carried,
and where it was retained and used for several millennia, was
the area known generally as Turkistan - in particular, certain
centres of religious teaching in the Hindu Kush. These forms
of religious teaching did not stem from the ancient oral
teaching of Yoga, although they adopted the Diagram of Man's
Bodies (which they called the 'Enneagram') and incorporated
various Yoga ideas into their systems. In the late nineteenth
century, a Russian mystic, G. I. Gurdjieff, came across some
of these old hidden centres of religious teaching in his
travels and picked up some of their ideas which he later built
into a system of his own. Among the ideas was the Diagram of
Man's Bodies, with the drawing slightly altered and the
knowledge forgotten that it was originally designed to convey."

Joan's "The Ancient Teaching of Yoga and The Spiritual Evolution
of Man" (1979) offers each of her individual readers a unique
opportunity of exploring the authentic dimensions of this
ancient symbol in depth.