History of numerology

Number symbolism is very old and appears in many cultures. In the Western tradition most accounts begin with Pythagoras.

The Pythagoreans

Pythagoras lived from about 570 to 495 BC. He and his followers held that everything could be expressed in numbers and that whole numbers and their ratios have special properties. They studied mathematics, music and religion together. Several well-known ideas still carry his name: the Pythagorean theorem, Pythagorean triples, the tuning of musical intervals, the Tetractys and the table of letter values used on this site's numerology page.

Other cultures

Many other peoples built their own systems of number meaning: the Babylonians, the Hebrews, early Christians, the Maya, the Druids and the Hindus among them. Some used letters in place of numbers, some used only single digits, and some combined calculation with interpretation. Hebrew gematria gives every letter a number, and Kabbalistic number mysticism grew out of it. In Chinese culture the number four is thought unlucky because it sounds like the word for death.

The Greeks

The Greek philosophers were among the first to treat mathematics as a way of understanding the world, and the Pythagoreans in particular linked numbers to the divine. They used number to sort days into lucky and unlucky, as divination.

The Renaissance

Interest in number symbolism returned in Europe in the Renaissance, along with astrology and the study of the Greek and Hebrew texts that had carried it.

The modern system

Most accounts date the modern Western system, with the letter table and the reduction of names and birth dates to a single digit, to the early twentieth century. Today numerology is usually met alongside astrology and horoscopes, and many people treat it as a way of reflecting on themselves rather than as a forecast.

Tarot, astrology and numerology are traditions of symbolism. This page says what the tradition associates with its subject. It does not predict anything and it is not advice.