Numerology

Numerology is the belief that numbers have qualities as well as quantities, and that the numbers drawn from a person's date of birth and name describe their character and the shape of their life. In its popular modern form it gives everyone a "life path" number, an "expression" number and several others, each read from a short catalogue of meanings for the numbers 1 to 9 and the so-called master numbers 11, 22 and 33.

Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans

The tradition claims descent from Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570–c. 495 BCE), though he left no writings and almost everything said about him comes from later authors. His followers, the Pythagoreans, taught that number is the principle of all things. They noticed that musical harmony follows simple ratios (2:1 for the octave, 3:2 for the fifth, 4:3 for the fourth) and concluded that the cosmos itself is ordered by number. They revered the tetractys, the triangle of ten points arranged 1 + 2 + 3 + 4, and gave each of the first ten numbers a moral and cosmic character: the monad as origin, the dyad as division, the triad as completeness, and so on. Later writers such as Nicomachus of Gerasa (c. 100 CE) and the Theology of Arithmetic attributed to Iamblichus collected these meanings, and Renaissance magi such as Cornelius Agrippa placed them in tables of correspondences. Ancient Pythagoreans did not, however, calculate personal numbers from birth dates; that is a modern development. For the longer history see Numerology: a complete guide and Number symbolism.

The modern "life path" system

The system most people now know took shape in the United States in the early twentieth century. Mrs L. Dow Balliett of Atlantic City published a series of books on the "vibrations" of numbers, among them The Philosophy of Numbers (1908), presenting her method as a revival of Pythagorean wisdom. Her student Juno Jordan systematised the method over a long career, summarised in Numerology: The Romance in Your Name (1965), and Florence Campbell's Your Days Are Numbered (1931) popularised it further. In Britain the palmist Cheiro promoted a different alphabet he called "Chaldean". The word "numerology" itself became common only in the 1910s and 1920s.

How the numbers are calculated

The life path number comes from the full date of birth. In the most common method the month, the day and the year are each reduced to a single digit by adding their digits, and the three results are added and reduced again. For 14 July 1985: the month gives 7; the day gives 1 + 4 = 5; the year gives 1 + 9 + 8 + 5 = 23, then 2 + 3 = 5; and 7 + 5 + 5 = 17, which reduces to 1 + 7 = 8. The expression number is found by giving each letter of the birth name a value from 1 to 9 in alphabetical order (A = 1, B = 2 … I = 9, J = 1 again) and reducing the total.

Master numbers

Balliett and Jordan treated 11 and 22 as "master numbers" that are not reduced, regarding them as intensified forms of 2 and 4. Many later writers added 33, a heightened 6, although not every numerologist accepts it, and practitioners differ on when exactly a total should be left unreduced.

A note on evidence

Numerology is best read as a symbolic and cultural tradition. Scientific studies have not found that birth dates or name values predict personality or life events, and the descriptions on these pages present what numerologists say, not established fact.