From Letters to Numbers, and Numbers to Tone and Colour

The machinery is simple and that is the point of it. Each letter of the alphabet is assigned a number, a name is converted letter by letter and the total reduced by adding its digits until a single figure remains, and the same is done with a birth date. The two results are read as different things about a person: what was given at birth and what the name expresses. Balliett then carries the numbers further, matching each to a musical tone and to a colour, so that a reading can be spoken of in terms of vibration across all three. The tone and colour layer has largely dropped out of later practice while the arithmetic has not.

Modern popular numerology retains the letter values, the reduction and the distinction between a birth number and a name number in a form that is recognisably this system, and drops the synaesthetic apparatus that Balliett considered central. That selective survival is itself informative. What travelled was the part that produces an answer quickly and can be printed in a newspaper column or a paperback appendix. What was left behind was the part that required the reader to accept a whole theory of vibration linking sound, sight and character, which is the part Balliett would have said the system was for. A method detached from the doctrine that justified it is a common outcome when an esoteric technique reaches a mass readership, and this is a clear instance of it.