Its Place in the Name Chart

Within the modern name chart the middle-name number contributes to the combined Expression and figures in the challenge numbers derived from the differences between the name parts, where the tension between the private middle name and the public first name is read as an inner friction. Like the rest of the system it rests on the Latin spelling of the name and belongs to the American numerology of around 1900, not to any classical source. Where a person has no middle name, practitioners simply omit the total; where there are several, they are commonly summed together as one middle value.

The whole apparatus assumes a person has exactly one settled middle name spelled in the Latin alphabet, an assumption Walter Burkert's study of the Pythagorean tradition would recognise as belonging to the system's own American origin rather than to anything Pythagoras is recorded to have taught; Underwood Dudley's critical survey of the system, Numerology: Or What Pythagoras Wrought, treats this kind of orthographic dependence as one of the clearest signs of the chart's twentieth-century manufacture. The whole apparatus also assumes a stable birth name, an assumption strained by ordinary life events: a legal name change through marriage, adoption or personal choice would, by the system's own logic, alter a person's numerological profile outright, a consequence practitioners handle inconsistently, some working always from the birth name, others recalculating after any legal change.