Modern numerology reduces a hundred and nine to one and reads it as a number of initiative and leadership. This reductive reading is the whole of its symbolic account. A hundred and nine is best described as a prime without lore, sourceable only through the standard reduction of modern numerology.
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.
Florence Campbell, a student of Balliett's, restated and extended the chart in Your Days Are Numbered in 1931, and Juno Jordan, founder of the California Institute of Numerical Research, standardised the modern four-part chart of life path, expression, soul urge and personality numbers in 1965; both writers worked from name and birth date rather than from any older number philosophy.