Planes of expression

Meaning

The planes of expression sort the letters of the birth name into four groups. Numerology reads each group as one side of a person: the body, the mind, the feelings and the intuition. The values of the letters in each group are added and reduced, which gives four small numbers beside the Expression number number.

• Physical plane: D, E, M and W. The body, the senses and practical action.
• Mental plane: A, G, H, J, L, N and P. Thinking, logic and ideas.
• Emotional plane: B, I, O, R, S, T, X and Z. Feeling, imagination and creativity.
• Intuitive plane: C, F, K, Q, U, V and Y. Insight, inspiration and a sense of what cannot be measured.

Two things are read on each plane. The first is how many letters fall on it. A name with many letters in one group is read as leaning on that channel. The second is the number the plane gives, read with the usual meaning of the numbers 1 to 9 and of the master numbers.

The Expression number says what the whole name holds. The planes say through which door it tends to come out: by doing, by thinking, by feeling or by sensing. A plane with no letter is not a lack. The tradition reads it as a quieter channel, used less by habit, which can still be practised on purpose.

The planes describe tendencies of expression. Numerology does not read them as limits on what a person can do.

In practice

Take a made-up person, Alice Margot Fontaine. Her name has 19 letters. Ulune sorts them like this:

• Physical: E, M, E. 5 + 4 + 5 = 14 → 5. Three letters.
• Mental: A, L, A, G, N, A, N. 1 + 3 + 1 + 7 + 5 + 1 + 5 = 23 → 5. Seven letters.
• Emotional: I, R, O, T, O, T, I. 9 + 9 + 6 + 2 + 6 + 2 + 9 = 43 → 7. Seven letters.
• Intuitive: C, F. 3 + 6 = 9. Two letters.

The mind and the feelings carry most of her name, seven letters each. Numerology would read her as someone who tends to think things through and to feel them deeply, in equal measure. Her intuitive plane is the quietest, with two letters, yet its number is a 9, read as a wide, generous kind of insight.

Her emotional plane gives 7. Her Soul Urge is 16/7, a 7 too. Numerology reads such an echo as a theme the name repeats: here, an inner life that values depth and reflection.

Her physical total passes through 14 on its way to 5. In a core number, a 14 would be a karmic debt. Ulune does not mark debts in the planes, so the plane simply shows 5.

Across traditions

• Jung’s four functions. In Psychologische Typen (1921), C. G. Jung describes four ways of meeting the world: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. They resemble the mental, emotional, physical and intuitive planes closely. Numerology books do not say that one comes from the other.
• The four elements. In Relating (1977), the astrologer Liz Greene pairs Jung’s types with the four elements. Thinking goes with air, feeling with water, sensation with earth and intuition with fire. Read through her pairing, the four planes find four elements. This is a resemblance, not a rule of numerology.

Origin and history

The planes of expression belong to twentieth-century Western numerology. Florence Campbell’s manual Your Days Are Numbered (1931) already speaks of planes of expression. The same book counts how many letters of the name fall on each number, the count from which karmic lessons come.

Hans Decoz, whose rules Ulune follows, gives the four groups of letters Ulune uses. The letter values are the Pythagorean ones, A = 1 to I = 9, then again from J. The name honours Pythagoras, but the link between him and these values is a later attribution.

How Ulune calculates it

• Ulune reads the full name at birth, all its names together. Accents are dropped and ligatures spread out (é counts as E, œ as O and E).
• Each letter belongs to one plane only, as in the table below.
• Y always belongs to the intuitive plane, whether the name reads it as a vowel or a consonant. Switching a Y by hand changes the Soul Urge and the Personality number, never the planes.
• For each plane, Ulune adds the values of all its letters in the whole name, in one total, not name by name.
• The total is reduced by adding its digits until one is left. 11, 22 and 33 are kept and written with their root (11/2).
• A 13, 14, 16 or 19 met on the way is not marked as a karmic debt in a plane.
• A plane with no letter gets no number, never a 0.

Correspondences