Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Counting by Twenties

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Counting by Twenties

Twenty is the score, and in several cultures it was a counting base in its own right. The Maya reckoned in twenties, their calendar naming twenty days, and traces of a vigesimal habit survive in languages that never fully adopted it, French still says quatre-vingts, four twenties, for eighty, and English preserves the score in older usage, most famously the threescore and ten of Psalm 90. The base of twenty most likely reflects counting on fingers and toes together. In the Hebrew Bible twenty is the age of military and census liability, and Jacob serves Laban twenty years for his wives and flocks, a period the narrative marks with some care in Genesis 31. As a number twenty reduces to two, and modern numerology reads it through that pairing.

Balliett's 1908 chart reduces twenty to two, partnership and diplomacy in the standard modern keyword list, the same root this article already notes; Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers, Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation all kept that reading rather than developing a distinct compound meaning for twenty the way Cheiro did for numbers such as twenty-seven or forty-three, so the American chart adds comparatively little to the number beyond the arithmetic this article already reports.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.