L. Dow Balliett

She was born Sarah Joanna Dennis on 1 March 1847. Like several of her generation's American occult authors, she wrote and published under her married name, appearing on her own title pages as Mrs. L. Dow Balliett, the form under which she is still catalogued in library records today. Comparatively little of her early or personal life survives in accessible sources; she is known almost entirely through her published work and her role in the numerology movement of the early twentieth century United States.

She died on 11 December 1929 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and was buried in nearby Pleasantville. By the time of her death she had produced several books and built a small but durable following, and the system she set out had already begun to pass, through her own students, into the form that numerology still largely takes in English language practice. She wrote at a moment when American numerology was still assembling itself out of scattered nineteenth century number mysticism, Theosophical numerical symbolism and popular self improvement literature, and her books did more than most to give the field a settled vocabulary and a repeatable method rather than a loose set of correspondences. She lectured as well as wrote, building a following large enough to sustain her work as a full time occupation for the last decades of her life, at a time when few women supported themselves through public esoteric teaching in the United States.

Balliett's central book, The Philosophy of Numbers: Their Tone and Colors (1908), combined a Pythagorean letter to number correspondence with material she read as biblical precedent, deriving a name number and a birth number for each person and pairing each number with a musical tone and a color. She wrote it, by her own account in the preface, in response to requests from readers across the world who wanted a clearer statement of a numerology that already circulated in less organized form.

Her most durable technical contribution was the convention of treating eleven and twenty two as master numbers, left unreduced rather than collapsed to two and four as ordinary Pythagorean reduction would do. That distinction became a standard feature of the numerology practiced after her, carried forward directly by her student Juno Jordan and, through Jordan's own students, into most of the Pythagorean numerology taught in English today. The system remains popular rather than scholarly: it has no standing as an empirical account of personality or fate, and the atlas describes it as the tradition its practitioners hold it to be. The book was aimed at general readers rather than specialists, and its plain instructional tone, walking a reader step by step through deriving their own numbers, was part of why it reached as wide an audience as it did.