What the Systems Assign

Beyond the Egyptian ideal and the deaths of Joseph and Joshua, a hundred and ten carries little independent symbolism. Modern numerology reduces it to two and reads it through that root as a number of partnership and balance. The number's honest and genuinely interesting content is the Egyptian one, the perfect lifespan of a hundred and ten years, quietly carried into the biblical accounts of two men whose lives were bound up with Egypt.

The genuine Pythagorean number philosophy that this modern chart borrows its name from left no writings of its own: Pythagoras and his early followers taught only by mouth, and what survives of their number theory comes instead through Nicomachus of Gerasa, whose Introduction to Arithmetic of the first century CE became the standard authority for a thousand years, and through Iamblichus, who drew on Nicomachus two centuries later; neither wrote anything resembling a name-and-birthdate numerology.

Nicomachus's own arithmetic sorted whole numbers into deficient, perfect and abundant by comparing them with the sum of their own divisors, a genuinely ancient classification that has nothing to do with the letter charts later numerologists built; the modern system that assigns meaning to digit sums is a distinct, twentieth-century construction that happens to borrow the Pythagorean name.