Numbers
59
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Fifty-nine is the seventeenth prime. Its use is calendrical: two lunar months, one of twenty-nine days and one of thirty, come to fifty-nine, and the true double synodic month is 59.06 days, so the alternation is accurate to within an hour and a half. Babylonian, Hebrew and Islamic calendars all work on that basis. Fifty-nine is also one less than sixty and so the largest single digit in Babylonian sexagesimal arithmetic. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 5.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin Period 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. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore 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. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) 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) Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 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 Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemThe modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 5 + 9 = 14, then 1 + 4 = 5. Whatever the system says of 59 it therefore says of 5, 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. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceSourced to the subject's own accountIn number theory fifty-nine is the seventeenth prime and, with sixty-one, forms a twin prime pair, two primes differing by two. It carries no religious or scriptural significance recorded in any tradition this atlas has surveyed; the interest in it, where any is recorded, is mathematical rather than symbolic. 3 Learn More
The Beads of the Rosary
Fifty-nine is prime and reduces to fourteen and then five. Its one concrete traditional use is Catholic: the standard five-decade rosary carries fifty-nine beads, fifty-three small beads for the Hail Marys and six larger ones for the Our Fathers, strung on the loop and pendant that guide the prayer. The number also has a lunar echo, since two synodic months run to about fifty-nine days, so a pair of months alternating twenty-nine and thirty days totals fifty-nine, the basis of the paired-month reckoning in lunar calendars.
Fifty-nine falls outside Cheiro's original 1926 compound-number scheme, which runs only from ten to fifty-two, so this atlas reports no reading attributed to his book; Balliett's 1908 chart reduces it instead to five, by way of fourteen, change, freedom and the senses in the standard modern keyword list, a reading with no bearing on the rosary's fifty-nine beads or on the number's incidental fit to a pair of lunar months, both already described above. In chemistry, fifty-nine is the atomic number of praseodymium, a rare earth element whose name comes from the Greek for leek-green, describing the colour of its salts, and which is used today to tint certain welding-goggle glass and ceramic glazes a protective green.
What the Systems Assign
Beyond the rosary and the two-month lunar span, fifty-nine carries no developed symbolism; it is one of the primes the older traditions passed over. Modern numerology reduces it to five and reads it through that root as a number of change, freedom and the senses. The honest core of fifty-nine is the count of beads on the rosary, a devotional total arrived at by the structure of the prayer rather than by any symbolic intent, together with its incidental fit to two lunar months.
The digit nine within fifty-nine carries the same favourable near-homophone in Chinese numerology already noted elsewhere in this family of articles, jiu sounding identical to jiu, long-lasting or eternal, historically an imperial number reserved in Chinese tradition for the emperor; the association is unrelated to the rosary's structure or to the lunar arithmetic that gives fifty-nine its place in this article, a third, independent tradition converging on the same integer by its own separate logic. Mathematically, fifty-nine forms a twin prime pair with sixty-one, the two primes differing by exactly two, the same kind of pairing already noted for forty-one and forty-three elsewhere in this family of articles, one of the many twin prime pairs number theorists have catalogued without ever proving whether infinitely many such pairs exist.
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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