What the Systems Assign

Modern numerology reduces thirty-five to eight and reads it as a number of material capability and worldly balance, the eight arrived at through a three of expression and a five of change, a reading internal to the twentieth-century American system. Older traditions did not develop thirty-five, and the responsible summary is that its one durable association is the midpoint of the seventy-year life, the pivot at which, in the moralists' reckoning, a person turns from ascent to descent. Beyond that it is a composite number without its own body of lore.

A separate and older letter-value system, generally called Chaldean numerology, assigns digits to letters irregularly rather than in Balliett's simple repeating sequence, deliberately omits nine from the chart as too sacred to attach to an ordinary letter, and is favoured by some Indian and Vedic-influenced numerologists over the Balliett-Cheiro-Jordan chart described throughout this family of articles; a name totalling thirty-five in the Chaldean system need not match the total the Pythagorean-labelled American chart would give the same name, since the two rest on entirely different letter values. In chemistry, unconnected to any reading above, thirty-five is the atomic number of bromine, one of only two elements that exist as a liquid at ordinary room temperature.