Pythagorean system

Meaning

The Pythagorean system turns letters into numbers by counting through the alphabet in nines. A is 1, B is 2, and so on to I, which is 9. J starts again at 1 and R closes the second round at 9. S starts the third round, which ends with Z at 8. Every letter thus has a value from 1 to 9. A name’s number is the sum of its letters, reduced to one digit or a master number.

Most modern numerology books use this table for the Latin alphabet, and Ulune uses it for every number drawn from a name. The Expression number adds all the letters, the soul urge the vowels and the personality number the consonants. The finer numbers read the same values in other ways. The karmic lessons are the values no letter gives; the planes of expression sort the letters into four groups.

The values follow the order of the alphabet, not the sound of the letters. That is its simplicity, and its main difference from Cheiro’s Chaldean values, which group letters by sound and never give 9.

In practice

Take a made-up name, Camille Marie Laurent. Each name is added on its own. Camille is 3 + 1 + 4 + 9 + 3 + 3 + 5 = 28. Marie is 4 + 1 + 9 + 9 + 5 = 28. Laurent is 3 + 1 + 3 + 9 + 5 + 5 + 2 = 28. Each 28 reduces to 10, then to 1. The three names give 1 + 1 + 1 = 3: the expression is 3.

Accents change nothing. Zoé Hélène Lacœur counts as ZOE HELENE LACOEUR, with the œ written out as O and E. Its three names reduce to 1, 4 and 3, and its expression is 8.

The Y is worth 7 wherever it stands. Whether it is a vowel only decides which number it joins. In Yolanda Mary Kyle, the first Y, before a vowel, is a consonant. The Y at the end of Mary, after a consonant, and the Y of Kyle, between two consonants, are vowels.

Across traditions

Several alphabets once served as numerals. Greek isopsephy compared words whose letters add up to the same sum. Hebrew gematria does the same with 22 letters, from aleph, 1, to tav, 400, and Arabic has the abjad order. These values run into the tens and the hundreds.

The Pythagorean table is a modern device of another kind: the Latin alphabet never counted this way, and every value stays between 1 and 9. The Chaldean table that Ulune shows beside it is close to the Hebrew values, zeros dropped.

Origin and history

Pythagoras of Samos lived in the 6th century BCE and left no writing. Aristotle reports that the “so-called Pythagoreans” took the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things. Around 100, Nicomachus of Gerasa wrote a classic introduction to arithmetic, and a book, now lost, on the divine meaning of the first ten numbers. The Theology of Arithmetic, attributed to Iamblichus, keeps much of it. Walter Burkert has shown how much of Pythagoras’s image grew long after his death.

No ancient source gives a table of letter values from 1 to 9. It appears in the United States at the start of the 20th century. L. Dow Balliett published How to Attain Success Through the Strength of Vibration in 1905, subtitled “a system of numbers as taught by Pythagoras”. She is often credited with the method for the English alphabet. Florence Campbell (1931) and Juno Jordan (1965) built the modern method around the same values.

The name honours the old idea that number orders the world. The table itself is modern, and its link to Pythagoras is a later attribution.

How Ulune calculates it

• The letter values are those of the table below, from A = 1 to Z = 8.
• Accents are taken off: é, è and ê count as E, ç as C. Ligatures are written out: œ as OE, æ as AE, ß as SS. Ø counts as O and Þ as TH. Hyphens, apostrophes and other signs are left out, never counted as zero.
• The name is split at its spaces. Each name is added and reduced on its own, then the names are added and reduced again. Both steps keep 11, 22 and 33. A hyphenated name, such as Jean-Pierre, counts as one name.
• A, E, I, O and U are vowels. Y is 7 in every case. It counts as a vowel or a consonant by its place, following Hans Decoz’s rule, and each Y can be switched by hand. W is always a consonant.
• The core numbers use the full name at birth. A name used now, when its letters differ, gives its own expression, soul urge and personality, shown as minor numbers.

Correspondences