Consonants and the Challenge Method

The division of the name into consonants for the Personality and vowels for the Soul Urge is one of the organising devices of the American system: the vowels are held to voice the inner desire, the consonants to frame the outer show. The Personality Challenge applies the subtraction method to the consonant totals, reading the difference as the tension in the outward self. Like all the challenge numbers it is a modern construction, computed by difference rather than sum, and it rests entirely on the Latin-alphabet spelling of the name, in which the assignment of letters to vowel and consonant is itself not always straightforward, the letter Y in particular is treated now as one, now as the other.

Walter Burkert's study of the Pythagorean tradition finds no ancient precedent for dividing a name into vowels and consonants and reading each half separately; the practice, like the letter-value chart it depends on, belongs entirely to the American numerology assembled after 1900. Underwood Dudley's survey of what such readings are sold for treats the Y-as-vowel-or-consonant ambiguity this article notes as a small but telling sign of a system built by successive writers rather than received whole from any single source.