The Magic Constant

Thirty-four is twice seventeen and reduces to seven. It carries little traditional religious symbolism, and honesty requires saying so: the older systems, which loaded meaning onto the small numbers and the primes, largely passed it by. Its one memorable property is mathematical. Thirty-four is the magic constant of the four-by-four magic square, the number to which every row, column and diagonal sums, and the most famous such square is the one Albrecht Durer engraved in his Melencolia I of 1514, which totals thirty-four in each direction and encodes the date of the work in its bottom row. The four-by-four square carried astrological associations with Jupiter in the Renaissance tradition of planetary squares, which is the nearest thirty-four comes to a symbolic role.

Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers gives thirty-four no compound meaning of its own, treating it instead as sharing the reading already given to twenty-five, and the pairing is arithmetically consistent: both numbers reduce, by the ordinary digit-sum method, to seven, thirty-four by three plus four and twenty-five by two plus five, which is precisely the logic Cheiro's scheme uses to carry a lower number's reading forward onto every higher number sharing its root.