What the Systems Assign

Beyond the age of Moses and the fourscore of Psalm 90, eighty carries little independent symbolism; its weight is scriptural and biographical rather than mythic. Modern numerology reduces it to eight and reads it through that root as a number of worldly power and completion, fittingly for the age at which Moses took up his commission. The number's honest content is the pair of Mosaic associations, the age at the Exodus and the fourscore that marks the vigorous limit of life.

Where the Chaldean chart and the Balliett-descended chart assign different values to the same letters, a name totalling one figure in one system need not total the same figure in the other, since the two rest on unrelated letter-value tables rather than on a shared inheritance from any single ancient source.

The whole apparatus of digit-reduction numerology is a twentieth-century invention rather than an inheritance from antiquity. Mrs. L. Dow Balliett published the first systematic version, The Philosophy of Numbers, in 1908, fixing the letter-to-number chart still used today and ruling that eleven and twenty-two must stand as master numbers rather than reduce further; her colleague, the physician Julia Seton, is credited with coining the word numerology itself around 1912.