Numerology

What it is

The reduction of names and dates to single digits, and the reading of those digits as character and destiny.

The core calculations:

• Life Path — from the birth date, digits summed and reduced to one figure
• Expression or Destiny — from the full birth name, letters converted to numbers and reduced
• Soul Urge — from the vowels only
• Personality — from the consonants only

Numbers reduce by repeated addition until a single digit remains, except for the master numbers 11, 22 and sometimes 33, which are left unreduced.

Two incompatible conversion systems are in general use.

Pythagorean (also called Western) assigns letters sequentially: A=1, B=2, through I=9, then J=1 again, and so on through the alphabet.

Chaldean assigns values from 1 to 8 only — nine being held too sacred to attach to a letter — and does so non-sequentially, on the basis of claimed sound values. A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, E=5, F=8, G=3, H=5, I=1, and onward on no pattern a user could derive.

Where it came from

Neither name is honest about its origin.

"Pythagorean" numerology has no demonstrable connection to Pythagoras, who left no writings and about whom almost nothing is securely known. The association rests on the Pythagorean doctrine that reality is fundamentally numerical, which is a very different claim from the proposition that adding up the letters of your name reveals your temperament.

"Chaldean" numerology invokes Babylon and has no traceable Babylonian source. The name was attached for the antiquity it implies. Its popularisation is associated with Cheiro — William John Warner, self-styled Count Louis Hamon (1866–1936) — a celebrity palmist and society fortune-teller.

The actual origin of modern Western numerology is American and datable. L. Dow Balliett — Sarah Joanna Dennis Balliett (1847–1929) — of Atlantic City published The Philosophy of Numbers in 1908 and several further books, building a system from vaguely Pythagorean ideas combined with New Thought and colour and music correspondences. Her student Julia Seton popularised the word "numerology" from around 1911, and Florence Campbell's Your Days Are Numbered (1931) systematised what is now standard practice.

So the tradition presented as an ancient science is a little over a century old and was assembled in New Jersey.

How it is practised

The full birth name and birth date are converted, reduced and read against a table of meanings — 1 for leadership and independence, 2 for cooperation, 4 for stability and hard work, 7 for introspection and analysis, and so on. Master numbers indicate heightened potential and heightened difficulty.

What we can and cannot say

We can say there is no evidence of any correlation between these numbers and anything, and no mechanism has been proposed that is worth stating.

We can say the two systems disagree, which is the internal problem. Run the same name through Pythagorean and Chaldean conversion and you will generally get different numbers, hence different readings. Practitioners defend their preferred system on grounds of antiquity or of sound-values, and there is no procedure for settling it — the same structural fault that appears in astrology's house systems and in the I Ching's casting methods.

And we can say something that is fatal in a way the other systems are not: numerology is bound to a script.

The values depend on the Latin alphabet and on a particular spelling. This has consequences that do not survive being stated:

• A name transliterated as Mohammed, Muhammad, Mohamed or Muhammed produces different numbers, and none of them is what the name is.
• Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai and Devanagari names have no values at all until someone chooses a Romanisation, which is a modern administrative act.
• Anglicised names given at immigration — a very large number of them — produce numbers reflecting a clerk's ear.
• A person who marries and changes surname changes their destiny number. So does anyone who emigrates and simplifies their spelling.

Gematria does not have this problem, because Hebrew letters carried numerical values as a matter of established convention within the language itself — the values are not assigned by a modern practitioner, they are how numbers were written. Numerology has borrowed the form without the foundation.

We cannot say people get nothing from it. A framework that assigns you a small number of traits and invites you to consider whether they fit does what the sun-sign column does, through the same mechanisms, and people find it useful for the same reasons.

Further reading

• L. Dow Balliett, The Philosophy of Numbers (1908) — the source of the modern system, and worth seeing how recent it is.
• Underwood Dudley, Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought (1997) — a mathematician's survey, funny and thorough.