The Last Threshold

Because the fourth pinnacle runs from the Third Pinnacle Ending to the close of life, this ending is the final calculable turning-point in the pinnacle scheme, the point after which a single governing number is said to hold for all the remaining years. The nine-year cadence that fixes it, each later pinnacle nine years long, is the same rhythm of completion that runs through modern numerology. Like the rest of the pinnacle apparatus it belongs to the twentieth-century American system and rests on the reduced birth date, and the age it yields is read as an approximate threshold into the last and longest of the four life-stages.

Walter Burkert's study of the Pythagorean tradition finds no descent from Pythagoras for the nine-year cadence that fixes this threshold, and Underwood Dudley's critical survey of the system, Numerology: Or What Pythagoras Wrought, treats the whole pinnacle scheme as a clear case of the American chart's twentieth-century construction; the scholarly verdict on its claimed ancient pedigree is that it has been largely abandoned as a comparative category. The sense that a pinnacle's arrival at a precise age captures something meaningful is also the kind of effect the psychologist Bertram Forer demonstrated in 1948, when identical, deliberately vague personality sketches handed to thirty-nine students were rated, on average, better than four out of five for personal accuracy, a result skeptics cite as the likely reason this last calculable threshold feels tailored to whoever receives the reading.