Numerology — the code of your date and name

Numerology is the teaching that behind every number there is a quality and a meaning. Add up the digits of your date of birth — and you get a key to your character and purpose.

Where numerology came from

The father of numerology is considered to be Pythagoras — the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher (6th century BC). He is credited with the famous idea: “All is number”. In his school in Croton numbers were seen not merely as a tool for counting but as the foundation of the universe, each with its own character.

“Numbers rule the world.”— an idea attributed to Pythagoras

The roots go deeper still — to Babylon and Egypt, where numbers were given a sacred meaning. A separate ancient branch is Chaldean numerology, which came from Mesopotamia. In the early 20th century numerology was revived in the West (L. Dow Balliett and others), taking on the modern form that is used today.

Key milestones

Which numbers are calculated

How the main number is calculated

Take June 15, 1975. Day: 15 → 1 + 5 = 6. Month: 6, it’s already a single digit. Year: 1 + 9 + 7 + 5 = 22 — and here’s the first subtlety: we don’t reduce 22 any further, because it’s a master number. Add them up: 6 + 6 + 22 = 34, reduce: 3 + 4 = 7. The Life Path number is seven.

The whole rule: reduce the day, month and year separately, keeping 11, 22 and 33 along the way; add the three results; reduce the sum — again keeping master numbers.

There’s a second method too — write the date out in one line and add all the digits in a row. Usually the answer is the same, but not always: we ran both methods over 35 thousand dates, and they disagree in 12.8% of cases — roughly one date in eight. The reason is always the same: master numbers. We use the first method, as Cheiro did. If another calculator gave you a different number, it most likely adds everything in a row, and nobody is wrong here. A detailed breakdown with examples is in the article “The Life Path number” (in Russian).

What numerology can and can’t do

It can do a little, but something useful: describe what comes more easily to a person and what they keep running into time after time. The Life Path number never changes — not with marriage, not with a move. Name numbers, on the contrary, are recalculated when a surname changes, and that’s the only place where numerology responds to events.

What it doesn’t do: it doesn’t assign a profession, doesn’t predict events and doesn’t promise money. A Four doesn’t have to be an accountant, nor a Three an actress — there are plenty of Threes among engineers, and that contradicts nothing. And one number doesn’t explain a person entirely: you also have the time and place of birth, from which much more is calculated.

The three schools we calculate

The word “numerology” covers different traditions, and they argue with each other. We don’t pick one “correct” school — we show three and label which is which.

Cheiro — the Irishman William John Warner, the best-known numerologist of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries; his “Book of Numbers” came out in 1926. From him we take planetary numbers, lucky days, colors and the table of friendly numbers — the same table is used to check phone and car numbers. Goodwin — the modern Western school: pinnacles, challenges, Personal Years. Kabbalah of numbers — a separate tradition with its own reading.

Where the schools disagree, we say so directly rather than averaging. To average is to get a number that isn’t in any book.