Numbers
24
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Twenty-four is the smallest number with eight divisors: 2 x 2 x 2 x 3. That divisibility is why it orders the day. The twenty-four-hour division comes from Egyptian practice, where decan stars marked the hours of the night and a matching count was assigned to daylight. Revelation 4:4 seats twenty-four elders around the throne, a figure Christian commentators have long read as the twelve tribes joined to the twelve apostles. Jainism counts twenty-four tirthankaras for the present cycle, the last being Mahavira. The Greek alphabet has twenty-four letters, which is why the Alexandrian editors divided the Iliad and the Odyssey into twenty-four books apiece. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 6.
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) Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe Book of Revelation twice pictures twenty four elders enthroned around God's throne, robed in white and wearing crowns, taking part in the heavenly worship John describes. Commentators generally read the number as the two priestly and Levitical courses of ancient Israel, twelve plus twelve, standing for the whole worshipping people rather than a special elite within it. 3Tradition: Christianity (New Testament, the Book of Revelation) Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe Chinese agricultural calendar divides the solar year into twenty four terms, each marking a fifteen day shift in the sun's position and named for the season's work or weather, Awakening of Insects, Grain in Ear, Frost's Descent among them. The terms fix the ritual and agricultural calendar together, telling a farmer when to sow and a household when to observe the accompanying customs. 4Tradition: Chinese calendrical astrology Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemThe modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 2 + 5 = 7. Whatever the system says of 25 it therefore says of 7, which its own description already states directly ("In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 7"), 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 Learn More
The Elders and the Hours
Twenty-four is twice twelve, and it inherits twelve's association with the ordered cosmos while doubling it. Revelation seats twenty-four elders around the throne of God, a number usually read as the twelve tribes of Israel joined to the twelve apostles, the old covenant and the new. The day is divided into twenty-four hours, a scheme inherited from Egypt, where twelve hours of night and twelve of day were counted by the rising of decan stars. The Greek alphabet has twenty-four letters, and by that count the Iliad and the Odyssey were each divided by later editors into twenty-four books, a lettering that became the standard division. The doubled twelve thus organises time, text and the heavenly court alike.
Balliett's 1908 chart reduces twenty-four to six, home, responsibility and harmony in the standard modern keyword list; Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers develops no separate compound reading for twenty-four distinct from that of its lower relatives, so Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both simply carried the six-root reading forward, making twenty-four one of the numbers in the American chart the four successive writers treated with the least individual elaboration.
Twenty-Four Across Jain and Chinese Tradition
Jainism counts twenty-four Tirthankaras, the ford-makers who teach the path in each descending age, of whom the historical Mahavira was the twenty-fourth and Parshvanatha the twenty-third; the full set structures Jain sacred history and iconography. Chinese tradition divides the solar year into twenty-four jieqi, the solar terms that govern agriculture and were inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible heritage, and Confucian moral teaching gathers the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars, stories of exemplary devotion to parents. The recurrence of twenty-four as an organising count across such different systems owes something to its divisibility, it splits cleanly into halves, thirds, quarters, sixths and eighths, which is the same practical virtue that made it the number of hours in the day.
The digit four that twenty-four contains carries the same near-homophone weight in Chinese numerology as it does in fourteen, si sounding close to the word for to die, though the digit two is read far more positively, considered auspicious because good things are traditionally held to come in pairs, hao shi cheng shuang; the two associations pull in opposite directions within the same number, which is precisely why Chinese numerology is generally read digit by digit rather than by the whole number's reduced sum.
Correspondences & Relations
Numerology Meanings
Born on the twenty-fourth, the root is six and the compound joins two and four, which the tradition reads as care supported by structure. Twenty-four is treated favourably in the compound tables, particularly in matters of home and of assistance received. The gift is responsibility carried without the depletion the six often suffers.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The solar year is divided into twenty-four terms, the framework Chinese calendrical astrology works from.
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.
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997on the pedigree claimed for modern numerologyView the Source 2. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1962the chapters on Pythagoras and on Pythagorean number theoryView the Source 3. The New Testament, Revelation
Traditionally attributed to John of Patmos
4. Chinese Mathematical Astrology: Reaching Out to the Stars
The Holy Bible
Anonymous (multiple authors), Robert Barker, 1611Revelation 4:4View the Source A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought
Wolfram Eberhard, Routledge, 1986the twenty-four solar termsView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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