Challenge

Meaning

A challenge is a number read as a difficulty to meet and, with time, to turn into a strength. Numerology finds four of them in the birth date. Each runs with one of the four pinnacles, over the same years: the pinnacle is what a stage of life offers, the challenge what it asks one to work on.

The third is called the main challenge. It belongs to the third pinnacle’s years, but the tradition reads it as present all life long.

A challenge is a difference between two numbers, so it runs from 0 to 8, never 9. The numbers are read through the side of each quality that needs care:

• 0: the challenge of choice. No single difficulty stands out, so one meets a little of each, or chooses one’s own.
• 1: asserting oneself, without dominating and without letting others decide.
• 2: sensitivity; not taking everything personally, not avoiding conflict at any price.
• 3: expression; sharing feelings without scattering them, and trusting one’s voice.
• 4: work and limits; accepting effort and routine without going rigid.
• 5: freedom; living change without running from commitments.
• 6: responsibility; caring without controlling, and letting people be imperfect.
• 7: trust; not withdrawing behind reserve or doubt.
• 8: money and power; neither chasing them nor shying away, and using authority fairly.

None of these is a fault: a challenge is read as a place where growth is asked for.

In practice

Camille Marie Laurent, a made-up person, was born on 15 June 1990. Her month is 6, her day 15 reduces to 6, and her year 1990 reduces to 1.

• First challenge, month and day: 6 − 6 = 0. From birth to 32, a 0, the challenge of choice.
• Second, day and year: 6 − 1 = 5. From 32 to 41.
• Third, the main one, the first two: 5 − 0 = 5. From 41 to 50, and through the whole life.
• Fourth, month and year: 6 − 1 = 5. From 50 on.

Three of her four challenges are 5s, so freedom used well, a theme of 5, is read as central to her life.

Bernard Olivier Martin, also made up, was born on 3 November 1978. His month 11 counts here as 2, and 1978 reduces to 7. His challenges are 3 − 2 = 1, 7 − 3 = 4, 4 − 1 = 3 for the main one, and 7 − 2 = 5.

Origin and history

The challenges come from the same twentieth-century American numerology as the pinnacles they go with. Juno Jordan’s Numerology: The Romance in Your Name (1965) sets the pinnacles out as a way of timing a life, and the challenges are read over the same stages. Who first took one part of the birth date from another is not clear. The four challenges by subtraction, with the third as the main one, are now standard in modern books, Hans Decoz’s among them. The common attribution of numerology to Pythagoras is a later one; no ancient text describes these numbers.

How Ulune calculates it

The month, the day and the year are each reduced to a single digit, a master number counting as its root: 11 as 2, 22 as 4. Each challenge is the difference between two of them, the smaller taken from the larger. The first uses the month and the day; the second, the day and the year; the third, the first two challenges; the fourth, the month and the year.

A zero challenge arises whenever the two numbers are equal. That happens when the month and the day reduce to the same digit, as for Camille. It also happens when the first two challenges are equal, which makes the main challenge 0.

The challenges take the pinnacles’ ages: the first ends at 36 minus the Life Path’s digit, the next two last nine years each, the fourth the rest of life.

The Cycles lens, at /numerology/cycles, shows the challenge of the year chosen, marked when it is the main one, and its life line draws all four. The Calendar marks the birthday on which a new challenge begins.

Correspondences