Twenty-Two, the Master Builder

Twenty-two is the second master number of modern numerology, read as the most powerful of the three and given the title of the master builder, the number that can bring great visions into material form. Where its digit-sum four is the number of order and construction, twenty-two is that building-power raised to a higher octave, the capacity to realise large and lasting works in the world, joined to the heavy pressure and potential for burnout that such a charge is said to carry.

Twenty-two has a further resonance that numerologists note: it is the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet and of the trumps of the tarot and the paths of the Tree of Life, which lends it an air of completeness borrowed from those older systems. But the master-number doctrine itself is modern. It is not attested before the twentieth-century American numerology that developed from Balliett's work and was systematised by Juno Jordan and others from the 1920s onward; the coincidence with the Hebrew alphabet is real but the reading of twenty-two as a master number is about a hundred years old, not ancient.