Depending on the company, sometimes working for a big company may feel like being in a cult, with workers having to cater to their bosses’ egos and perform work that isn’t all that meaningful or that they don’t even understand. Severance draws a lot from this idea, and Lumon Industries is the ultimate corporate leviathan in that sense. In Season 2’s eighth episode, “Sweet Vitriol,” we learn just how deeply Lumon has affected the town of Salt’s Neck, with people still living by their rules even after losing everything and everyone, like Harmony Cobel’s (Patricia Arquette) aunt Sissy (Jane Alexander). As Harmony’s friend Hampton (James Le Gros) notes, Sissy “still lives by the Nine,” meaning she still religiously follows the rules she learned when working at the local Lumon ether mill. But what exactly are “the Nine”?

Lumon’s Nine Core Values Are Part of the Company’s Canon and Culture

Every company has its own set of rules to follow as part of what is usually called “company culture,” and Lumon is no different. In fact, Lumon uses this concept to try and indoctrinate its employees in an almost religious fashion, praising the figure of its founder, Kier Eagan (Marc Geller), as if he were a god. Kier spent most of his life as the CEO of Lumon, and created his own philosophy about subjects like work and service, and those are recorded in his own words in the Lumon Compliance Handbook and the Macrodata Refinement’s Orientation Booklet, including the Four Tempers of the Soul and Lumon’s Nine Core Principles.

Every Lumon employee (whom Kier calls his “children”) is supposed to memorize and live by these concepts, especially the Nine Core Principles. They are: vision, verve, wit, cheer, humility, benevolence, nimbleness, probity, and wiles. All workers should strive to live by all nine principles equally (as Dichen Lachman‘s Ms. Casey would say), and not prioritize one of them while neglecting the rest. In fact, they should be considered as a collective rather than individually, as, together, they are supposed to elevate a worker’s performance as well as their very spirits as Kier’s “children.” This is why social skills are also emphasized among Lumon’s Core Principles, considering that every employee is not only an individual self but also part of a family.

The Nine Core Principles are an essential part of Lumon company culture because they set up what Kier calls “corporate affection” in the Compliance Handbook. According to Kier, “Romantic love may burn with a more luminous flame, but it is gone far more quickly than corporate affection, which persists even through generations.” It all sounds very poetic, but the message is clear: at Lumon, work comes before family and other relationships, and employees are encouraged to think of their jobs as a calling. “The challenge for all in my employ is to infuse their daily occupation with my love at the moment as the task is actively being performed,” Kier says, and that’s what the Nine are all about.

Lumon’s Nine Core Principles Are Inspired by Actual Religious Teachings

As we can see, the language used in the Compliance Handbook is extremely formal, almost Bible-like. This is all by design, as Lumon aims to indoctrinate its employees not only to achieve whatever the company’s endgame is but to cling to it even if it abandons them, as happened in Salt’s Neck. Even after the company left the town to its own luck, giving nothing more than a typical corporate excuse to justify it, there are still people in the town who “live by the Nine,” like Sissy, and she is definitely not the only one. Harmony Cobel, for example, studied at the Myrtle Eagan School for Girls, where she learned the Nine by heart until becoming fanatical, so there are certainly other people like her in Salt’s Neck.

Most people cling to religion for the feeling that they are engaging in something bigger, larger than themselves, and that’s also what’s behind concepts like the Four Tempers and the Nine Core Principles. The religious undertones in Kier’s language are supposed to give Lumon’s employees the feeling that they are fulfilling a higher purpose through their work, no matter how menial it is. Even non-employees can get something out of these teachings, because Lumon masks the idea of corporate dominance by talking about purpose and service in its Nine Core Principles, and everyone wants to have a useful purpose. In a capitalist society, big companies are like deities who save people from unemployment by giving them a purpose and allowing them to make a living, so why not listen to their teachings? In this context, Kier is not a businessman or entrepreneur, but a prophet, and his teachings should be taken as such.

Severance uses many religious allegories through Lumon. Teachings like the Nine Core Principles are meant to mirror core principles of Christianity, for example. The Seven Deadly Sins all have their opposites, the Seven Virtues: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience, and humility. There are also the nine Fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So, including the Nine Core Principles in the Compliance Handbook makes it Lumon’s own version of the Bible, and Kier Lumon’s own Jesus. There are other allegories, too, like Lumon Branch 501 sort of mirroring the Nine Circles of Hell, with the Severed Floor and the Testing Floor, for example — Kier knows how many other floors there are and what they are for.

The Nine Core Principles Have Been Mentioned Before in ‘Severance’

If people talking about “the Nine” sounded somewhat familiar to Severance viewers after watching “Sweet Vitriol,” it’s because it wasn’t the first time the Nine Core Principles have been mentioned in the series. In the series’ second-ever episode, “Half Loop,” Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) is doing a dynamic with Macrodata Refinement in which they all have to say a fun fact about themselves, and Irving B. (John Turturro) says that his favorite of the Core Principles is cheer. In the following episode, “In Perpetuity,” Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) includes Irving mentioning the Core Principles in his MDR Bingo Card as they visit the Perpetuity Wing. In the Season 1 finale, Helena Eagan (Britt Lower) also mentions that her father, Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry), made her recite the Nine every night before bed, although she was “less than perfect about it.”

The creepiest reference, however, can be seen in Harmony Cobel’s shrine to Kier in her home in Kier, PE, where a framed needlepoint lists the Core Principles as if they were a prayer, with the final sentence reading “I was me till you gave me you,” further adding to how people who grew up indoctrinated by Lumon came to see Kier and his company as deities and salvation. In “Sweet Vitriol,” Sissy criticizes Cobel’s mother, Charlotte, for not believing in Kier’s teachings, saying that “If only she had been a believer, perhaps she would have found solace in the Nine” upon dying. It’s a heavy remark, but one that shows how deeply-rooted Lumon’s ideology has become after all these years.

New episodes of Severance Season 2 premiere Fridays on Apple TV+.