Ten is the base of the counting most of humanity uses, an accident of having ten fingers, and much of its symbolism follows from being the number at which the count returns to one and begins again, completeness followed by a fresh cycle. The Pythagoreans held it the holiest number and represented it as the tetraktys, the triangular figure of ten points arranged in rows of one, two, three and four, whose row-sum is ten; they swore oaths by it. Ten is the sum of the first four numbers and so was felt to contain them. In the Hebrew Bible the round number of a complete set is often ten: the Ten Commandments, the ten plagues, the ten generations from Adam to Noah, the minyan of ten required for communal prayer. The decimal completeness of ten is the reason it so often marks a whole.
In Cheiro's own 1926 scheme of compound numbers, ten is titled the Wheel of Fortune and read as a number of honour, self-confidence and the rise and fall of fortune, the wheel that turns; it is one of the numbers his book carried forward largely unchanged by the later systematisers, Florence Campbell in 1931 and Juno Jordan in 1965, both of whom kept Balliett's 1908 chart and Cheiro's reading of ten intact even as they added new figures elsewhere. As a compound number ten itself reduces further, to the single digit one, so the wheel-of-fortune reading sits alongside, rather than replacing, the tetraktys and the round biblical tens already described above.