Expression, Soul Urge and Personality

Meaning

Numerology reads a name as well as a date. Each letter has a number, and the full name at birth gives three core numbers, one from each way of sorting its letters.

• The Expression adds every letter. It describes natural abilities and how a person tends to use them: the way they work, speak and get things done. Many books call it the Destiny number.
• The Soul Urge adds the vowels only. It describes what a person wants deep down, the motive behind their choices. It is also called the Heart’s Desire.
• The Personality adds the consonants only. It describes the first impression, what people notice before they know someone well.

The three read as layers of one person. Numerology reads the vowels as the inner side of a name and the consonants as its outer side. The Expression holds both, the whole person at work in the world.

Together with the Life Path, from the birth date, these are the main numbers of a chart. The Life Path is read as the road; the name numbers as the traveller. Two more numbers grow from them: the Maturity number adds the Life Path and the Expression, and the bridges measure the gaps between them.

In practice

Take a made-up person, Camille Marie Laurent. With A = 1 to I = 9, then J = 1 again, her letters give:

Camille has an Expression 3, a Soul Urge 3 and a Personality 9. Numerology would read a gift for words and ideas, used gladly and wanted deeply. People who meet her first may notice a wider, warmer manner, the 9. Ulune shows the three numbers on the numerology wheel, each with its own reading.

Across traditions

• Letters as numbers are old. Greek used its letters as numerals, and the practice of adding a word’s letters is called isopsephy. Hebrew has the same art, gematria. Both use their own alphabets and values, not the A = 1 to I = 9 of modern numerology.
• The Chaldean number reads the same name with Cheiro’s letter values, 1 to 8. It gives one name number, not three. Ulune shows it beside the others, never mixed in.
• Indian numerology today often gives a name number too, the namank. Indian guides often use a letter table where no letter is 9, as in the Chaldean system.

Origin and history

Adding the letters of a name is an old way of divining. In 1533, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa wrote that the Pythagoreans believed the very elements of letters have “divine numbers”. He describes adding the numbers of a name and keeping the remainder after dividing by nine, a cousin of today’s reduction.

Modern name numerology took shape in the early 20th century. L. Dow Balliett, in 1908, already read “the hidden strength or weakness of names” through their vowels. Later manuals fixed the three numbers and their names. The names still vary: Destiny for Expression, Heart’s Desire for Soul Urge. The meaning stays the same.

Ulune follows Hans Decoz, a widely used modern school: each name is reduced on its own, then the names are added.

How Ulune calculates it

• Which name. The full name at birth, as typed for numerology. Without it, Ulune uses the chart’s own name if it is a typed one, and says so. Without either, the three numbers wait and show a dash.
• Letter values. The Pythagorean table: A J S = 1, B K T = 2, C L U = 3, D M V = 4, E N W = 5, F O X = 6, G P Y = 7, H Q Z = 8, I R = 9. Accents are dropped (É is E), and Œ counts as O and E.
• Vowels. A, E, I, O and U, and Y where it sounds like a vowel, by its place in the name. Each Y can be switched by hand. W is always a consonant.
• Reduction. Each name, split at the spaces, is added and reduced on its own. The names are then added and reduced again. 11, 22 and 33 are kept at every step, and a 13, 14, 16 or 19 in the total marks a karmic debt.
• A name used now, such as a married name, gives its own three numbers. Ulune calls them minor numbers; they add to the birth name’s, never replace them.

Correspondences

Each can be 1 to 9, 11, 22 or 33. The same letters also give the hidden passion, the karmic lessons and the planes of expression.