The Philosophy of Numbers

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.

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.