Eleven, the First Master Number

Eleven is the first of the master numbers of modern numerology, the numbers, eleven, twenty-two and thirty-three, that are not reduced to a single digit but read in their doubled form as carrying a heightened, more demanding vibration. As the number just past ten, past the completion of the decimal cycle, eleven is read as excess and transcendence, a doorway to a higher octave; it is the two of its digit-sum raised to a spiritual intensity, so where two is partnership eleven is intuition, illumination, vision and the inspired teacher, together with the instability and nervous strain that such heightened sensitivity is said to bring. It should be stated plainly that master numbers are not ancient. They are a distinctive feature of the twentieth-century American numerology that grew from L. Dow Balliett's system, elaborated especially from the 1920s and 1930s onward, and they appear in no earlier source. The doctrine that certain repeated digits carry special force is roughly a century old, part of the same digit-reduction system that the tradition misleadingly calls Pythagorean.