Numbers
84
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Origin 1908 to 1965
Eighty-four is 4 x 21, with twelve divisors. Indian and Tibetan Buddhist tradition counts eighty-four Mahasiddhas, the great adepts of the tantric lineages, from Abhayadatta's Sanskrit collection of the eleventh or twelfth century, surviving in Tibetan; the number is fixed but the roster is not, and rival lists overlap by only about half. The related figure of eighty-four thousand teachings, or dharma doors, is a conventional expression for an uncountable number rather than a count. Hatha yoga texts say Shiva taught eighty-four asanas, but the Hatha Pradipika describes only about fifteen, and no text names eighty-four before the seventeenth century. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 3.
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) Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourcePuranic cosmology holds that the soul passes through eighty four lakh yonis, eight point four million species or wombs, before it can be born human, the rare and privileged birth from which liberation becomes possible. The figure is repeated across several Puranas as the scale of the cycle of rebirth a soul must traverse rather than as a literal biological census. 3Tradition: Hinduism (Puranic cosmology, the eighty four lakh yonis) 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: 8 + 4 = 12, then 1 + 2 = 3. Whatever the system says of 84 it therefore says of 3, 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) 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 Many of the Dharmic Traditions
Eighty-four is seven times twelve and reduces to twelve and then three. In the Indian and Buddhist traditions it is a number of vast completeness, usually encountered multiplied. Tantric Buddhism venerates the eighty-four Mahasiddhas, the great adepts whose unconventional lives are gathered in Tibetan hagiography. Hatha yoga counts eighty-four classical asanas as the seed-postures chosen, in the traditional account, by Shiva from among eight million four hundred thousand. And the rebirth cosmology of Hinduism and Jainism speaks of eighty-four lakh yonis, eight million four hundred thousand species of embodied life through which the soul may pass, so that human birth is the rare culmination of an immense round.
In chemistry, eighty-four is the atomic number of polonium, discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie and named for Poland, Marie's homeland, then partitioned among three empires and not an independent state, the first element ever named for an explicitly political reason.
The whole apparatus of digit-reduction numerology is a twentieth-century invention rather than an inheritance from antiquity. Mrs. L. Dow Balliett published the first systematic version, The Philosophy of Numbers, in 1908, fixing the letter-to-number chart still used today and ruling that eleven and twenty-two must stand as master numbers rather than reduce further; her colleague, the physician Julia Seton, is credited with coining the word numerology itself around 1912.
Eighty-Four Thousand
The number recurs in the round of eighty-four thousand. Buddhist tradition holds that the Buddha taught eighty-four thousand dharmas, doctrines, as antidotes to the eighty-four thousand defilements of sentient beings, the figure standing for an inexhaustible variety of paths suited to every disposition. The emperor Ashoka is said to have built eighty-four thousand stupas to enshrine the relics of the Buddha across his realm, a legendary count expressing totality rather than a census. In all these uses eighty-four and its multiples signify not a precise tally but a completeness so large as to be effectively without limit, a characteristically Indian way of saying all.
Eighty-four factors as 2^2 x 3 x 7 and carries 12 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives 140, more than the number itself, which makes it an abundant number in the classical sense the Pythagoreans used to sort integers into deficient, perfect and abundant classes.
The genuine Pythagorean number philosophy that this modern chart borrows its name from left no writings of its own: Pythagoras and his early followers taught only by mouth, and what survives of their number theory comes instead through Nicomachus of Gerasa, whose Introduction to Arithmetic of the first century CE became the standard authority for a thousand years, and through Iamblichus, who drew on Nicomachus two centuries later; neither wrote anything resembling a name-and-birthdate numerology.
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.
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997View the Source 2. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)
3. Garuda Purana
Anonymous
Hatha Yoga Pradipika
Svatmarama, Panini Office, 1914The asana countQuote, The asana count
The text asserts eighty-four asanas but describes about fifteen.
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. the 84,000 teachings; the mahasiddhasView the Source Encyclopedia of Hinduism
Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.), Routledge, 2008s.v. rebirth (8,400,000 species)View the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.