Bongo, Pietro – Numerorum mysteria, 1591 – BEIC 58079

Numerology (also known as arithmancy) is the belief in an

occult The occult, in the broadest sense, is a category of esoteric supernatural beliefs and practices which generally fall outside the scope of religion and science, encompassing phenomena involving otherworldly agency, such as magic and mysticism a ...

, divine or mystical relationship between a

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual number ...

and one or more coinciding

event Event may refer to: Gatherings of people * Ceremony, an event of ritual significance, performed on a special occasion * Convention (meeting), a gathering of individuals engaged in some common interest * Event management, the organization of ev ...

s. It is also the study of the numerical value, via an alphanumeric system, of the letters in words and names. When numerology is applied to a person's name, it is a form of

onomancy Onomancy (or nomancy) is divination based on a subject's name. Onomancy was popular in Europe during the Late Middle Ages but is said to have originated with the Pythagoreans. Several methods of analyzing a name are possible, some of which are ...

. It is often associated with the paranormal, alongside

astrology Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Di ...

and similar to

divinatory Divination (from Latin ''divinare'', 'to foresee, to foretell, to predict, to prophesy') is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic, standardized process or ritual. Used in various forms throughout history ...

arts. Despite the long history of numerological ideas, the word "numerology" is not recorded in English before c. 1907. The term numerologist can be used for those who place faith in numerical patterns and draw inferences from them, even if those people do not practice traditional numerology. For example, in his 1997 book ''Numerology: Or What Pythagoras Wrought'' (), mathematician

Underwood Dudley Underwood Dudley (born January 6, 1937) is an American mathematician. His popular works include several books describing crank mathematics by people who think they have squared the circle or done other impossible things. Career Dudley was b ...

uses the term to discuss practitioners of the

Elliott wave principle The Elliott Wave Principle, or Elliott wave theory, is a form of technical analysis that finance traders use to analyze financial market cycles and forecast market trends by identifying extremes in investor psychology and price levels, such as hi ...

stock market A stock market, equity market, or share market is the aggregation of buyers and sellers of stocks (also called shares), which represent ownership claims on businesses; these may include ''securities'' listed on a public stock exchange, ...

analysis.

History

The practice of gematria, assigning numerical values to words and names and imputing those values with religious meaning, dates back to antiquity. An Assyrian inscription from the 8th century BC, commissioned by Sargon II. declares "the king built the wall of Khorsabad 16,283 cubits long to correspond with the numerical value of his name."

Rabbinic literature Rabbinic literature, in its broadest sense, is the entire spectrum of rabbinic writings throughout Jewish history. However, the term often refers specifically to literature from the Talmudic era, as opposed to medieval and modern rabbinic w ...

used gematria to interpret passages in the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
'' First Council of Nicaea, departures from the beliefs of the state church were classified as civil violations within the

Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Roman Republic, Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings aro ...

. Numerology, referred to as isopsephy, remained in use in conservative

Greek Orthodox The term Greek Orthodox Church ( Greek: Ἑλληνορθόδοξη Ἐκκλησία, ''Ellinorthódoxi Ekklisía'', ) has two meanings. The broader meaning designates "the entire body of Orthodox (Chalcedonian) Christianity, sometimes also cal ...

circles. The 6th century philosopher and mystic

Pythagoras Pythagoras of Samos ( grc, Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος, Pythagóras ho Sámios, Pythagoras the Samian, or simply ; in Ionian Greek; ) was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His poli ...

believed that numbers carried sacred codes and were divinely inspired and created. Some alchemical theories were closely related to numerology. For example, Persian-Arab alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (died c. 806−816) framed his experiments in an elaborate numerology based on the names of substances in the

Arabic language Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

. Numerology is prominent in Sir Thomas Browne's 1658 literary Discourse ''

The Garden of Cyrus ''The Garden of Cyrus'', or ''The Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, naturally, artificially, mystically considered'', is a discourse by Sir Thomas Browne. First published in 1658, along with its diptych companion '' Ur ...

''. Throughout its pages, the author attempts to demonstrate that the number five and the related quincunx pattern can be found throughout the arts, in design, and in nature – particularly botany.

Methods

Alphanumeric systems

There are various numerology systems which assign numerical value to the letters of an

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

. Examples include the Abjad numerals in

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

, Hebrew numerals,

Armenian numerals The system of Armenian numerals is a historic numeral system created using the majuscules (uppercase letters) of the Armenian alphabet. There was no notation for zero in the old system, and the numeric values for individual letters were added tog ...

, and

Greek numerals Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, are a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to those ...

. The practice within

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

tradition of assigning mystical meaning to words based on their numerical values, and on connections between words of equal value, is known as '' gematria''.

Latin alphabet systems

There are various systems of numerology that use the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

. Different methods of interpretation exist, including Chaldean, Pythagorean, Hebraic, Helyn Hitchcock's method, Phonetic, Japanese, Arabic and Indian.

Pythagorean method

In the so-called 'Pythagorean' method (which uses a kind of place-value for number-letter attributions, as does the ancient Hebrew and Greek systems), the letters of the modern

are assigned numerical values 1 through 9.

Chaldean method

A lesser known method, more popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, is the so-called 'Chaldean' method; in this context, "Chaldean" is an old-fashioned name for the

Aramaic language The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated in ...

s. In the Chaldean method number 9 is not used in the calculations, at least in practice. It is left out because it is thought to be divine and sacred, and therefore unassignable. This method is radically different from the Pythagorean (as well as both the ancient Greek and Hebrew systems) as letters are assigned values based on equating Latin letters with letters of the

Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet ( he, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewi ...

in accordance with sound equivalents (then number associations being derived via its gematria) rather than applying the ancient system of place-value used by the Hebrew and Greek gematria (although 'place-value' is almost universally interpreted in the ancient world according to units, tens and hundreds, which nonetheless have the same digital root as place value); in consequence of this there are several slightly different versions, there being disagreements over some of the letter-sound equivalents (it doesn't help matters that the Hebrew alphabet has only twenty-two letters whilst the modern

English alphabet The alphabet for Modern English is a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. The word ''alphabet'' is a compound of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, ''alpha'' and '' beta''. ...

has twenty-six).

Agrippan method

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa applied the concept of arithmancy to the

classical Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

in the 16th century in '' Three Books of Occult Philosophy''. He mapped the letters as follows (in accordance with the Latin alphabet's place-value at that time): Note that the letters U, J, and W were not commonly considered part of the

at the time.

English Qaballa

English Qaballa (EQ) refers to a system of Hermetic Qabalah that interprets the letters of the

via an assigned set of values developed by James Lees in 1976. Like most of the systems developed since the death of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), it was created with the intent of gaining a better understanding of the mysteries elaborated in his inspired works, especially those in '' Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law''. According to Jake Stratton-Kent, "the English Qaballa is a qabalah and not a system of numerology. A qabalah is specifically related to three factors: one, a language; two, a 'holy' text or texts; three, mathematical laws at work in these two."

Chinese numerology

Some Chinese assign a different set of meanings to the numbers and certain number combinations are considered luckier than others. In general,

even Even may refer to: General * Even (given name), a Norwegian male personal name * Even (surname) * Even (people), an ethnic group from Siberia and Russian Far East **Even language, a language spoken by the Evens * Odd and Even, a solitaire game wh ...

numbers are considered lucky, since it is believed that good luck comes in pairs.

Traditional Chinese Medicine Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an alternative medical practice drawn from traditional medicine in China. It has been described as "fraught with pseudoscience", with the majority of its treatments having no logical mechanism of acti ...

(TCM), and its associated fields such as acupuncture, base their system on mystical numerical associations, such as the "12 vessels circulating blood and air corresponding to the 12 rivers flowing toward the Central Kingdom; and 365 parts of the body, one for each day of the year" being the basis of locating acupuncture points.

Other uses

In science

Scientific theories are sometimes labeled "numerology" if their primary inspiration appears to be a set of patterns rather than scientific observations. This colloquial use of the term is quite common within the scientific community and it is mostly used to dismiss a theory as questionable science. The best known example of "numerology" in science involves the coincidental resemblance of certain large numbers that intrigued mathematical physicist

Paul Dirac Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the Univer ...

, mathematician Hermann Weyl and astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington. These numerical coincidences refer to such quantities as the ratio of the age of the universe to the atomic unit of time, the number of electrons in the universe, and the difference in strengths between gravity and the electric force for the electron and proton. (See also

Fine-tuned universe The characterization of the universe as finely tuned suggests that the occurrence of life in the universe is very sensitive to the values of certain fundamental physical constants and that the observed values are, for some reason, improbable. ...

). The discovery of atomic triads, an early attempt to sort the elements into some logical order by their physical properties, was once considered a form of numerology, and yet ultimately led to the construction of the

periodic table The periodic table, also known as the periodic table of the (chemical) elements, is a rows and columns arrangement of the chemical elements. It is widely used in chemistry, physics, and other sciences, and is generally seen as an icon of ch ...

. Here the atomic weight of the lightest element and the heaviest are summed, and averaged, and the average is found to be very close to that of the intermediate weight element. This did not work with every triplet in the same group, but worked often enough to allow later workers to create generalizations. Wolfgang Pauli was also fascinated by the appearance of certain numbers, including 137, in physics. British mathematician I. J. Good wrote:

In wireless communication

Wireless communication uses "numerology" to refer to "waveform parametrization, e.g., cyclic prefix, subcarrier spacing."

References

Citations

Works cited

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

External links

*
Number symbolism
on the

Encyclopædia Britannica The (Latin for "British Encyclopædia") is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It is published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; the company has existed since the 18th century, although it has changed ownership various t ...

{{Authority control Divination Esoteric Christianity Language and mysticism