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Pythagorean numerology and Chaldean numerology are the most widely known today, but numerology has been with man since the beginning.
Here you will learn how numerology has been used from ancient times to the present day, which famous people have used it…
Numerology is flourishing today. Because of its accessibility in the information age, it is used by millions of people all over the world, as well as by many famous people.
Among the deceased, Elvis Presley and John Lennon are the most famous; among the living celebrities, numerology is used by singers Barbra Streisand and Prince, actors Jim Carrey and Eva Longoria, boxing champion Johnny Bredahl, politicians Fidel Castro and Ali Zardari …
In a special article, read more about Famous People and Numerology…
Numerology is however not only a fad of our time. In semi-past history, it was appreciated and used by famous people including the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, the Austrian philosopher and esotericist Rudolf Steiner and the Danish writer and mystic Martinus, who were fascinated by the mysticism and power of numbers in human progress.
The founding fathers of the United States of America used numerology to establish the USA. Some researchers believe that America is so powerful because its system incorporates the Chaldean-Hebrew cabal, of which numerology is an integral part.
Isaac Newton, the great scientist and famous mathematician of the 18th and 19th centuries, was also skilled in numerology.
For Nostradamus in the 16th century, numerology served as the basis for his predictions.
In the 14th century, numerology was used by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio …
By going back in time, we can see that numerology has always been a companion to people on their journey. Indeed, ancient records from many cultures show that numerology was known from the beginning of written history.
And in virtually all cultures today, we see that some form of numerological knowledge has been preserved …
Today, different numerological systems are in use in different parts of the world, having evolved from the numerological schools of ancient cultures:
Let's now take a closer look at the history of numerology …
People have always used numbers to achieve enlightenment and predict the future. Practically all ancient cultures - Indians and Chinese, Chaldeans and Babylonians, Egyptians and Arabs, Greeks and Romans, Hebrews and Essenes - assigned numerical values with hidden meanings to individual letters in their alphabets. The Mayans, the Tibetans, the Phoenicians, the Celts, the Romans… Apparently, this system was known from the beginning of time and was also been used in Atlantis.
The sages of ancient cultures considered numbers to be the basic building blocks of the Universe. Numbers were used to explain natural rhythms and the creation of the world. Many sacred rituals of the Celts were based on numbers. For ancient Hebrew mystics, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet had a sacred meaning and led to God.
When Buddha was born, learned Vedic astrologers have named him Siddhartha with the help of numerology. In ancient India and China, numerology was also used by rulers in warfare and statecraft, and by masters of Ayurveda and Chinese medicine. The Bible also contains the Book of Numbers, which is said to contain hidden healing frequencies.
The Chaldeans or Babylonians had a very mystical, spiritual understanding of numbers combined with astrology, tarot, musical vibrations, colours and the power of the name. It is possible that they took their knowledge of numerology from the ancient Egyptians, who believed that a person's secret name or ren ("your divine identity") was the key to influencing that person or his or her influencing others.
For the ancient Chaldeans, all areas of life were linked to numbers. According to the Chaldean Book of Numbers, numbers represent the energies of creation, which are in constant motion and which reflect the divine cosmic order.
The energies of different numbers correspond to specific planets and fundamental primordial energies from the beginning of creation. Based on this principle, the Chaldeans used numerology as an integrated system for identifying and timing events in nature and for the lives and events of individuals and entire societies.
Chaldean numerology has been passed down for thousands of years only through oral tradition – to ensure that people who might misuse it for evil purposes do not gain access to this knowledge. The Chaldeans passed on their method of numerology to the Hebrews, with whom it became part of the Kabbalah. And this system of numerological calculation was passed on to Jesus by the Essenes.
The Chaldean culture and its achievements in science were also studied by Greek scholars, who equated the study of numbers with the study of God's power.
Pythagoras is considered the father of modern numerology. The great ancient Greek scholar, who lived from around 570 to around 495 BC, studied numerology for many years in Egypt, Babylonia and other parts of the world. When he returned to Greece, he taught the philosophy of numbers for nearly forty years and founded his own school, which has retained its name to this day – Pythagorean numerology. His is the famous saying "Number rules the universe".
Pythagoras and his disciples believed that order emerged from chaos through numbers and that everything in the universe could be expressed mathematically in numbers. However, numbers do not only express mathematical quantities, but each of them has its own hidden vibration or power.
They believed that the letters of the alphabet corresponded to specific numbers and that the numerological interpretation of a name could describe a person's personality. In order to personally realise the numerological effects, Pythagoras is said to have changed his own name.
As the Pythagorean school was esoteric and knowledge was spread only by word of mouth, we do not have many hard facts about their teachings. When his school in Croton was suppressed, his system of numerological calculation was probably lost. Later, one of his pupils is said to have attributed numbers to individual letters in alphabetical order, rather than by sound vibrations as in the original Chaldean system.
Pythagoras' teachings were taken up by Plato, the Hebrew Kabbalists and early Christian scholars.
In 325 A.D., following the First Council of Nicaea, departures from the beliefs of the state Church were classified as civil violations within the Roman Empire. Numerology had not found favor with the Christian authority of the day and was assigned to the field of unapproved beliefs along with astrology and other forms of divination and "magic."
The rise of Christianity and the rigid theological teachings of St. Aurelius Augustine dealt a severe blow to occultism. However, some bishops and popes still flirted with the occult, so that numerology and similar sciences were in a kind of polylegality.
Thus the sixth-century Abbot Dorotheus of Gaza commented on and analysed the "Number of Jesus". Numerology was still used by some medieval clerics and physicians, such as the sixth-century Byzantine physician Aetius Amidenus, who used numerology to treat various illnesses.
Kabbalists in France and Hispania, however, have made a major contribution to the popularisation and development of numerology since the 12th century.
Numerology had a new revival in the Renaissance of the 16th and 17th centuries, when several hermetic philosophers in western Europe took up astrology, alchemy and numerology. For example, the German physician and philosopher Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) wrote that all things in the universe have numbers and that all numbers of the tangible and intangible embody a value, combined with a special significance or magical transcendental meaning. And the English mathematician and astrologer John Dee (1527-1608) believed that numbers were the foundation of everything and the key to knowledge, and that God's creation was an act of counting.
In the 19th century, liberal systems unleashed interest in astrology and numerology among the masses. The occult sciences became popular, while science, in its positivism, moved away from them.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, numerology already became very influential. Modern Pythagorean numerology was established by the American numerologist L. Dow Balliett (1847-1929), who updated Pythagoras' work by combining his principles with the first days of creation in the Bible, and by the California Institute for Numerical Research, founded by Balliet's student Dr. Juno Jordan. Her mother and Ballietta's colleague Julia Seton Sears, however, gave numerology its present name.
At the same time, views were developing which, unlike the Pythagorean school - which attributes numbers to individual letters in alphabetical order - sought to find phonetic-letter approximations to the ancient Semitic or Chaldean numerology. This led to the development of modern "Chaldean" or "Hebrew-Chaldean" numerology, which in the 19th century developed an adapted Chaldean gematria, based on the old Canaanite gematria (the encoding of the numerical values of the letters-vowels).
This Chaldean numerological system was further refined and popularised at the beginning of the 20th century by the Irish astrologer and numerologist Count Louis Hamon (1886-1936), better known as Cheiro. In his works, Cheiro presented the ancient knowledge of Chaldean numerology and its intertwining with astrology and the Tarot, while also drawing from the Vedic tradition, as he had studied numerology with the Brahmins of India.
Walter Gibson, also from England, restored the old Chaldean numerology in a slightly different way – he assigned some numbers to different letters, some planets to different numbers, and different matching of numbers. In 1927, he presented his view of numerology in his book The Science of Numerology or What Numbers Mean to You.
Since the Chaldean and Pythagorean systems of numerology are the most well-known and used today, let's now take a closer look at them…
Chaldean or "mystical" numerology is still used worldwide today, although not as widely as the more recent Pythagorean or "modern" numerology. The latter is easier to calculate, while Chaldean is supposed to give more accurate results. Other features of Chaldean numerology include:
Today, Pythagorean numerology is very popular in the Western world. Its features are:
In both Chaldean and Pythagorean numerology, the meaning of numbers and their interpretation are similar.
Most numerologists today combine different elements from Chaldean and Pythagorean numerology, which have been proven in numerological practice. This is also our approach.
