Numerology Positions
Personal Year
Timing Number
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Origin 1908 to 1965
A forecasting figure rather than a trait, giving the character of the year a person is currently in. It runs in a cycle of nine and then begins again, the first year of a cycle read as a beginning and the ninth as a completion and a clearing, which is why practitioners commonly advise starting things in a one year and finishing them in a nine. Because the calculation takes the current year as an input the figure changes annually, and schools differ over whether it turns at the birthday or at the first of January, a disagreement that puts two readings in circulation for the same person for several months of every year. Practitioners are generally candid that this is modern technique. The personal-year cycle belongs with the Pinnacles to the twentieth-century American system, not to anything older.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1908 to 1965 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Origin PeriodThe numerological chart and its positions were built in the United States between 1908 and the 1960s. Balliett's The Philosophy of Numbers of 1908 supplied the letter-value chart and the first positions; the pinnacles, challenges, cycles and personal-year figures were added by later authors. No position here is attested before the twentieth century. 1 Attributed Author / CompilerMrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors. The atlas's own sources for these thirty-two positions name four different authors, Balliett in 1908, Cheiro in 1926, Florence Campbell in 1931 and Juno Jordan in 1965, for a scheme presented to readers as one system with one pedigree. The layering is the honest fact about them. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Attributions
CalculationReduce birth month and day, add the reduced current year 1 Identity
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The Personal Year Number
The Personal Year is the numerological figure that changes annually, giving each calendar year of a person's life its own number and theme. It is calculated by reducing the birth month and birth day and adding the reduced current year, so that it cycles through a nine-year sequence, from a One year of beginnings to a Nine year of endings, before returning to One. It is the most immediate and short-term of the numerological indicators, used to characterise the tone of the year ahead and to time decisions, and it is often subdivided further into Personal Months and even Personal Days.
The nine-year cycle mirrors, on the scale of a single life, the sense of completion the digit nine carries throughout the system. The Personal Year belongs to the Pythagorean numerology assembled in the United States in the early twentieth century by Balliett, Jordan and their successors; it is a modern forecasting method, called Pythagorean by convention rather than by any documented descent from antiquity.
When the Personal Year Turns Over
The Personal Year adds a person's reduced birth month and birth day to the reduced current calendar year, giving a figure that advances by one each year and returns to the start after nine. Practitioners use it as the main timing instrument in the chart, and clients ask about it more than anything else.
The system has never agreed on when it changes. One camp turns it over at the start of the calendar year, on the reasoning that the calendar year is one of the inputs and the figure should change when that input does. The other turns it over on the birthday, on the reasoning that a personal cycle should be personal and should begin where the person did. A third position, taught in some lineages, treats the transition as gradual across the months either side.
The disagreement is not academic. For anyone born after the first of January, which is nearly everyone, the two conventions place them in different personal years for part of every year, and the guidance attached to a one year and a nine year points in opposite directions: one is described as a time to begin things and the other as a time to finish and release them. A client following the wrong convention is being advised to do the reverse of what their practitioner intended.
No argument in the literature settles it, because there is nothing it could be settled against. Which convention a practitioner uses depends on which books they learned from, and the honest thing is to say which one is in use.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
The chart positions a numerological reading is built from, as distinct from the numbers themselves.
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