Modern numerology reduces a hundred and one to two and reads it as a number of partnership and balance, the two reached through the doubled unity around a zero. This reductive reading is the whole of its symbolic account. A hundred and one is best described as a number without tradition, remembered for the idiom of the introductory course and for Orwell's room.
The whole apparatus of digit-reduction numerology is a twentieth-century invention rather than an inheritance from antiquity. Mrs. L. Dow Balliett published the first systematic version, The Philosophy of Numbers, in 1908, fixing the letter-to-number chart still used today and ruling that eleven and twenty-two must stand as master numbers rather than reduce further; her colleague, the physician Julia Seton, is credited with coining the word numerology itself around 1912.
A separate and older-claimed system, generally called Chaldean numerology, assigns letters to digits irregularly rather than in Balliett's repeating one-to-nine sequence, and deliberately omits nine from the chart as too sacred to attach to an ordinary letter; its popular billing as a genuinely ancient Babylonian system rests on assertion rather than on any textual evidence that has been traced back that far.