Numerology

Numerology is the practice of using numbers to read a person's character or to foretell what lies ahead. A modern numerologist turns a person's name and date of birth into a series of numbers and interprets these to describe the person's true nature and prospects.

Description

The basic idea

Numerology rests on the Pythagorean idea that all things can ultimately be reduced to numbers. Its way of turning a name into numbers copies the ancient Greek and Hebrew alphabets, in which each letter also stood for a number. A learner who grasps these two ideas can follow everything else: a name or a date is converted into digits, and the digits are read for meaning.

Core numbers

According to the Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained, numerologists hold that all human experience can be reduced to the single digits from one to nine. Contemporary numerologists use their systems to describe a client's personality, patterns of behaviour, compatibility with others and possible future events. Systems differ, but in many the first and most important number comes from the date of birth. The month, day and year are each reduced to a single digit by adding their digits together, and those results are added and reduced again. Numerologists call the result the person's destiny or life-path number. Two numbers, 11 and 22, are treated as "master numbers" and are not reduced further.

Each number is given its own meaning, with a positive and a negative side, though interpretations vary between numerologists. A second number comes from the person's name: each letter is given a number and the numbers are added. Numerologists relate this number to character and personality. Some also add up the numbers of the vowels in the name alone, which they take to show the person's inner self. The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology notes that some systems also use the place of birth, and that lucky or unlucky numbers are sometimes linked to the 22 cards of the major arcana of the tarot.

Numerology and number mysticism

Underwood Dudley, in a history published by the Mathematical Association of America, distinguishes numerology from the older number mysticism: the belief that contemplating numbers can give mystical, non-rational insight into life and the universe. In his account, Pythagoras began number mysticism about 2,500 years ago by giving certain numbers their own characteristics, whereas numerology, which assigns numbers and therefore characteristics to individual people, is a more recent invention.

Scope

What it includes

• Interpreting a person's character from numbers derived from their name and date of birth
• Using those numbers to divine a person's prospects

What it is not

• Dudley defines numerology as the belief that numbers have power over events. His conclusion is that numbers do have power, but over minds rather than events.
• Numerology is not mediumship. Spiritualist bodies describe mediumship as giving evidence that life continues after death, not foretelling events (see Within Spiritualism below).

Traditions and lineage

Numerology draws on the Pythagorean view that all things are reducible to numbers, and on the Greek and Hebrew practice of letters doubling as numbers. The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained says numerological divination and number charms are found in India, Greece, Egypt, China and Europe, and that Cornelius Agrippa's Occult Philosophy (1533) probably supplied the basis for much Western numerology. It adds that numerology became popular among New Age diviners in the 1970s. In Jewish mysticism, the related practice of gematria links numbers with Hebrew letters and looks for hidden meanings in words by converting them into numbers.

Writers differ on who shaped modern numerology. According to a review of Dudley's history, he credits its invention largely to Mrs L. Dow Balliett of Atlantic City, New Jersey, about a hundred years before the book appeared. Library catalogue records list several books on "number vibration" by Mrs L. Dow Balliett published in Atlantic City, including Nature's Symphony, or, Lessons in Number Vibration (1911) and The Day of Wisdom According to Number Vibration (1917). The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology instead says modern numerology was popularised by the palmist and fortune-teller "Cheiro" (Count Louis Hamon), whose "fadic" numbers were found by adding all the digits of a person's birth date to give a number of destiny. The review also notes that Dudley's book covers gematria and biorhythms.

Context

Within Spiritualism

Numerology sometimes appears in Spiritualist settings, but historians treat it as a different kind of practice. The religious historian J. Gordon Melton writes that what sets Spiritualism apart from other psychic groups is its emphasis on survival after death and on mediumship. He places numerology, with astrology, palmistry and the reading of tarot cards and tea leaves, among the arts of divination that belong to the wider occult field.

Spiritualist bodies draw the same line between mediumship and forecasting. The National Spiritualist Association of Churches in the United States says its mediums are not fortune-tellers and that predicting the future matters very little, and the Spiritualists' National Union in Britain says mediumship exists to give evidence that life continues after death, not to foretell events. The line has a history: in 19th-century America, local Spiritualist associations licensed their mediums, ministers and lecturers partly to protect them from local laws against fortune-telling.

In Australian Spiritualism

In 2017 the Blue Mountains Gazette reported that the Church of United Spiritualism of Australia, proclaimed in 1975, offered numerology, astrology and meditation in its services. Matt Tomlinson's ethnography of the Canberra Spiritualist Association records that at the first service of 2018 one of its leaders spoke about the numerological meaning of the years 2017 to 2020, suggesting that 2020, with digits summing to four, was when the association would find a new home.

In his 1981 study of Spiritualists in Sydney, Paul Gillen placed numerology among the subjects commonly grouped as "occult", and described occult seekers who, finding no system that suits them, hover at the edges of Spiritualism, equally drawn to and distant from astrology, numerology and the like.

A Spiritualist perspective

Numerology has found its way into Spiritualist settings from time to time, as the Australian examples above show, though historians place it among the wider occult arts rather than at Spiritualism's heart. A Spiritualist teacher would treat it with respect as a separate system with its own logic, and would keep it distinct from mediumship. Spiritualism's own work is to offer evidence that life continues after death; foretelling events from names and dates is something else, and a sitter should always know which of the two they are being offered.

Used lightly, numbers can give a person a moment of reflection, and some Spiritualists clearly enjoy them. The care lies in how they are used. A reader shouldn't present a number as fate, or use it to make someone afraid. Spiritualism teaches that we are responsible for our own lives, so any reading is best offered as food for thought, honestly described, and never at the expense of someone who is anxious or vulnerable.

Numerology in Australia

One early writer on numerology was the Melbourne dealer and author Isidore Kozminsky (1870–1944). According to a 2017 article in the Journal of the Numismatic Association of Australia, his father, Simon Kozminsky, is thought to have come to Australia from Prussia in 1856; he started in business at Mortlake in country Victoria and, some time after Isidore's birth, moved to Melbourne, where he had bought a business selling curios, precious stones and coins. Isidore worked in the family business and was a Fellow of the Royal Numismatic Society, and his wider interests included astrology, kabbalah and other esoteric subjects. Numerology was among them: he published Numbers – Their Meaning and Magic in 1912. He and his wife moved to England in 1935. A later edition of his book (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1927) appears among the sources listed for numerology in the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology.

Related modalities

• Astrology
• Tarot
• Palmistry
• Runes

Further reading

• Dudley, Underwood. Numerology, or What Pythagoras Wrought. Mathematical Association of America, 1997.
• Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Numerology". Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• "Numerology". Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology. Gale.
• "Numerology". Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained. Gale.
• Rampling, David J. "The numismatic interests of Isidore Kozminsky (1870–1944)". Journal of the Numismatic Association of Australia, 2017.
• Young, Hugh. "Numerology or What Pythagoras Wrought". Review of Dudley's book, NZ Skeptics, 2000. A review by a sceptics' organisation, not a history.