Numbers
15
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Fifteen is a number of magnetism, abundance, and material fascination, holding both the charm of harmony and the pull of temptation. Made of one and five, it joins the initiative of the one with the freedom of the five and reduces to the root vibration six, the essence of harmony, love, and responsibility. In tarot it is The Devil, card fifteen, the image of bondage to the material and the appetites, the shadow side of six's love turned to possession and attachment. Its keywords are attraction, abundance, sensuality, and the temptation of the material. As a compound number fifteen expresses the warmth and beauty of six intensified by desire and personal drive, magnetic and generous at its best but prone to indulgence and entanglement at its worst, a reminder that love and appetite share the same root.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1908 to 1965 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Origin Period500 BCE to 300 CE 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Origin PeriodThe arithmological reading of the first numbers, one as source, two as division, four as justice, seven as virgin, ten as completion, reaches us through Platonic and Neopythagorean writers of the centuries after Plato. Burkert's finding is that it cannot be traced to Pythagoras himself, whose activity was religious rather than mathematical: the doctrines were credited backwards to him. 2 Origin PeriodThe system that gives a number a personality, and a person a number, was assembled in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century out of New Thought material. Balliett's The Philosophy of Numbers appeared in 1908; the chart positions, pinnacles and cycles were added by her successors over the next fifty years. 1 Place of OriginThe Greek world, and above all the Greek cities of southern Italy where the Pythagorean societies were established; the arithmological literature itself is later and largely eastern Mediterranean. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Place of OriginThe United States, and specifically the New Thought circuit of the north-eastern seaboard; Balliett worked from Atlantic City. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Attributed Author / CompilerAttributed by the tradition to Pythagoras. Burkert's study is the standard demonstration that the number-doctrines carrying his name are the work of later hands, and that almost nothing in them can be shown to go back to the sixth century BCE. The attribution is recorded because it is what the tradition says, not because it holds. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Attributed Author / CompilerMrs. L. Dow Balliett, who published the first version of the modern system in 1908 and to whom Dudley devotes a chapter. What later authors added, the pinnacles, the challenges, the cycles, the personal year, is theirs, and this atlas's own numerology-position entries cite four different authors between 1908 and 1965 for what is presented as one system. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Origin of the NamePythagorean numerology is a twentieth-century label. The system it names has no demonstrable descent from Pythagoras, from the Pythagorean societies, or from the ancient arithmological literature; the letter-value chart it rests on was drawn up in the United States after 1900. The name borrows a pedigree, the oldest move in the subject. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemThe modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 1 + 5 = 6. Whatever the system says of 15 it therefore says of 6, which its own description already states directly ("reduces to the root vibration six"), because it holds no separate doctrine for the higher numbers. The stated exceptions are 11, 22 and 33, which it leaves unreduced and calls master numbers. 1 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseNumerology has been sold since Balliett as a basis for decisions: which name to take, which date to marry on, which house number to buy. Dudley's survey of what numerologists sell is the standard critical account and its finding is blunt, numbers have power over minds, not over events. These entries record what the tradition says, not advice. 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceWritten the ordinary way in Hebrew numerals, fifteen would be yod plus heh, the first two letters of the divine name. Rabbinic convention refuses to write that combination for a mundane count and instead writes fifteen as tet plus vav, nine plus six, so that the number itself is quietly reshaped to keep the sacred letters from appearing where they do not belong. 3Tradition: Rabbinic Judaism (gematria convention avoiding the divine name) Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Learn More
The Full Moon and the Withheld Name
Fifteen is three fives, and in lunar reckoning it is the day of the full moon: the fifteenth tithi of the bright fortnight is Purnima in the Indian calendar, and the great festivals of the full moon fall on it. In Judaism fifteen carries a peculiarity of its own. Written in the ordinary way, as ten plus five, the Hebrew letters would spell the first two letters of the divine name, so fifteen is instead written as nine plus six, tet-vav, to avoid even the fragment of the Name, which is why the festival of the full moon of spring is called Tu BiShvat and the fifteenth of Av is Tu BeAv. The number also orders the Temple: the Mishnah describes fifteen steps rising from the court of the women, on which the Levites sang the fifteen Psalms of Ascents, Psalms 120 to 134.
Balliett's 1908 chart reduces fifteen to six, harmony and responsibility in the standard modern keyword list, a reading Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers, Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation all carried forward largely unaltered; none of the four American writers developed a distinct compound reading for fifteen the way Cheiro did for numbers such as twenty-seven or forty-three, so its place in the modern chart is comparatively thin beside the density of its lunar and scribal associations already described.
Fifteen as a Sum and a Square
Fifteen is the magic constant of the smallest genuine magic square, the three-by-three grid the Chinese tradition calls the Luo Shu, in which every row, column and diagonal totals fifteen; the figure is tied to the myth of a pattern seen on the back of a turtle emerging from the river Luo, and it underlies a good deal of later Chinese cosmological arithmetic. In the tarot the fifteenth trump is the Devil, a card of bondage to the material paired, by its number, with the Lovers reversed. Fifteen is also triangular in a loose sense only, but it is exactly the sum of the numbers one through five, which is why the Pythagorean tradition treated it as a natural rounding-off of the pentad. Most of its weight, though, comes from the full moon and from the Hebrew scribal caution about the Name.
The fifteenth day of the lunar month, already noted above as the full moon of Purnima, is also the date of two of the best-attended festivals in the Chinese calendar: the Lantern Festival, Yuanxiao, closes the fifteen days of Lunar New Year on the fifteenth of the first month, and the Mid-Autumn Festival falls on the fifteenth of the eighth month, both timed to the full moon on exactly the logic that gives fifteen its place in the Hindu calendar, an independent instance of the same lunar arithmetic doing similar cultural work in an unrelated tradition.
Correspondences & Relations
Numerology Meanings
Born on the fifteenth, the root is six and the compound joins the one to the five, which the tradition reads as care exercised with unusual personal magnetism. Fifteen is treated in the older compound literature as a number of attraction and persuasion, so the gift here is not only responsibility but the ability to draw others into sharing it.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
The modern numerological system assigns this number a meaning, which is why the atlas records it as a subject in its own right, though this does not endorse what the discipline says about it. This link shows only that the discipline works with this particular number; the readings of the number itself belong to whichever tradition holds them.
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