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A Composite Without Lore

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A Composite Without Lore

A hundred and fifteen is five times twenty-three and reduces to seven. It carries no traditional religious symbolism; the older systems passed it over. What can honestly be said of it is structural only, and structure is not lore.

A hundred and fifteen factors as 5 x 23 and carries 4 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives only 29, short of the number itself, which places it among the deficient numbers in the same classical scheme.

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.

None of this genealogy is hidden by the numerologists themselves: Balliett, Campbell and Jordan each wrote openly as originators and systematisers rather than as transmitters of a secret ancient science, and the chain from Balliett's 1908 book through Campbell's 1931 manual to Jordan's 1965 standardisation is well documented in the numerology literature's own bibliographies.

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