Numerology: the history of reading numbers
Letter-numbers in Hebrew and Greek, the Pythagorean legend, and the life path number. Where the arithmetic came from.
In brief
Numerology, in the broad sense, is the belief that numbers carry meaning beyond counting, and in its modern form it reads a person through numbers drawn from their birth date and name.1
Its practitioners often trace it to Pythagoras, though he left no writings, and it sits beside older traditions such as Hebrew gematria that read words through the values of their letters.23
The birth-date method used today was in print by 1908 in the books of L. Dow Balliett of Atlantic City.4
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Sources for this page
- Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, vol. 13 no. 2 (Jeremy Genovese, Cleveland State University): A Test of Numerology: Do Birth Numbers Predict Nobel Prize Winners?. Read on · Peer-reviewed journal
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Pythagoras. Read on · University
- Jewish Encyclopedia (Solomon Schechter and Caspar Levias): Gemaṭria. Read on · Encyclopedia
- Internet Archive (Cornell University Library scan): The philosophy of numbers; their tone and colors (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett, 1908). Read on · Archive
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