Numerology… with a twist
We’ve been juggling numbers for a very long time, offering interpretations of data and names without giving much thought to why one number or another has a certain meaning or is linked to a quality, a function, or a part of our body. (I’ll leave aside the fact that some insist on talking about digits—which are merely the written form of numbers, varying across different cultural contexts—or about colors associated with numbers, but which aren’t representative in and of themselves because they aren’t used in the few important operations.)
Meaning can only be tied to the moment and the way in which numbers came into being. In fact, have you ever wondered when they first appeared? Have you ever considered that there was a time when they didn’t exist? Before the moment of creation, there was no countable element; it was as if the universe had been endlessly repeating “empty set, empty set, empty set” (and not “zero,” which already presupposes the existence of creation), so numbers appeared at the very moment of creation! For example, you can imagine how the universe began to count its components as it was being created, as created matter began to “precipitate” from uncreated matter.
Pythagorean numerology is too recent in its own right to preserve the memory of the creation of numbers and to justify their significance. Like with cars, it’s already common practice and standardized, but it doesn’t help you understand much about their origins.
As an aside, did you know that cars didn’t originally have the controls where we know them today? For example, in the famous Ford Model T, the right pedal was the brake, the middle one was reverse (when you pressed it, it was as if you were releasing the clutch after shifting into reverse), and the left pedal—when pressed halfway—was the clutch, then the second half was the equivalent of lifting the clutch pedal today in first gear; lifting it halfway shifted out of first gear; and lifting it all the way to the end of its travel, combined with operating the gearshift lever, was equivalent to lifting the clutch pedal into second gear. And that was it—just two! For acceleration—separate controls for air and fuel, separate for the advance—you had two levers on the steering wheel, two “whiskers,” as they were called. And the point valve was… a point valve! Not like today’s complex valve system.
So I went further back, to older forms of numerology; the oldest I discovered were those described by R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz—Egyptian numerology, as he understood it from the ruins of the temple at Luxor, which is at least as old as the temple itself, and yogic, or tantric, numerology, brought to the West by Yogi Bhaijan, which, based on the references it makes, may date back to the time the Vedas were written.
These are two descriptions of the meaning of numbers that partially overlap, and comparing them can provide a wealth of information about how numbers came to be and may also justify the so-called numerological operations we use to extract meaning from those numbers. And which, subsequently, can also be used by practitioners of Pythagorean numerology, who will understand much better what they are doing.
If you will, understanding the origin of these meanings is also the best way to memorize them; you no longer need to learn them “by heart,” but rather you must understand the logic behind the emergence of numbers.
As for the operations you perform on and with these numbers, it’s important to keep in mind that we treat them as ordinal numbers, not cardinal numbers; so when we work with the year 1900, we’re referring to the one thousand nine hundredth year, not one thousand nine hundred years. This is important because, although ordinal and cardinal numbers may appear identical, they do not allow for the same mathematical operations to be performed on them.
A Little More
Numerology operates on the set of positive integers, on a lattice, which is an abstract structure—an ordered set with the property that every finite subset has an upper bound and a lower bound.
If L is a complete lattice and f : L → L is an order-preserving function (we can also call it an increasing function), then the set of fixed points of f also forms a complete lattice.
The partial order is a special binary relation that is reflexive, antisymmetric, and transitive:
• a ≤ a (reflexive)
• if a ≤ b and b ≤ a, then a = b (antisymmetric)
• if a ≤ b and b ≤ c, then a ≤ c (transitive).
A partial order formalizes the intuitive concept of order, sequence, or arrangement of the elements of a set.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.