The Pythagorean Label and What It Carries

The system was presented as Pythagorean and is still sold that way, and the label is doing work. Ancient Pythagorean number doctrine concerned the properties of numbers themselves and their role in cosmology and music, not a cipher converting the letters of a personal name in a modern language into a character reading. No ancient source supplies the letter values used here, and they could not have applied to an alphabet that did not yet exist in the form the method assumes. The actual context is American and recent. Balliett worked in the New Thought environment of the turn of the twentieth century, where vibration was the standard explanatory term and where mental and spiritual technique was offered as practical self improvement.

Read against that background the book is entirely of its moment, and its debt is to its own decades rather than to antiquity. The classical name nonetheless mattered to its reception, and lending ancient authority to a new construction is a recognised pattern in modern esoteric publishing rather than a peculiarity of this author. The system passed to students and successors who developed and popularised it further through the twentieth century, and it is by that route, not by any ancient one, that it reached the numerology in print today.