The simple reason to distrust numerology is that there are so many numbers that there are bound to be meaningless coincidences between them and the world. Indeed, since the store of numbers is infinite, the fund of coincidence is without limit. Seek, even lightly, and ye shall find.
David Stove is his classic essay “What is wrong with our thoughts” said:
For example, no one actually knows, even, what is wrong with numerology. Philosophers, of course, use numerology as a stock example of thought gone hopelessly wrong, and they are right to do so; still, they cannot tell you what it is that is wrong with it. If you ask a philosopher this, the best he will be able to come up with is a bit of Positivism about unverifiability, or a bit of Popperism about unfalsifiability: answers which the philosopher himself will know to be unsatisfactory on various grounds, but which have in addition this defect, that they put numerology in the same boat as, for example, astrology. But numerology is actually quite as different from astrology as astrology is from astronomy. Philosophers do not know this, because, while they often look at the astrological parts of newspapers for fun, they never read a book of numerology. If they did, they would soon find out that the peculiar awfulness of numerology, while clearly quite different from that of astrology, is utterly elusive in itself.
In this short essay, I do not claim to have discovered all that is wrong with all of numerology, or even that I have proved it false. But unlike Stove’s busy philosophers, I have looked into some of those numerology books, and I believe I can at least provide one definite avenue of error.
I also cannot hope to cover all of numerology here, as there are, or can be, as many branches as there are numbers. However, I can highlight one popular activity, which is really all we need. The flavor of it will be the same in any other numerological practice.
Gematria is the numerological art of assigning numbers to letters, or words, and adding up sums for words, or passages, and then declaring the patterns in these sums one has discovered to be full of meaning. In the book Islam’s Quantum Question (yes) by Nidhal Guessoum, I came across this passage (p 185):
Furthermore, one may as why it would be so impressive if these quantities [speeds of light, sun, and earth’s orbit] shared the numeral 3? al-Naimiy regards this as an important relation because the word Allah contains only three (different) letters (A,L,H)! In fact, the author determines numerical quantities of certain words or expressions in the Qur’an from the values that the ancients sometimes assigned to the alphabet (A = 1, B = 2, J= 3, D = 4, H = 5, etc.) and declares them miraculous; for instance, kullu shay’ (every thing) would have the value 360, which corresponds to the number of degrees of a complete circle, so this means the Qur’an was referring to God encompassing (muhit) everything in a circular way.
It should be noted that Guessoum is himself skeptical of these claims, and goes on to correct al-Naimiy’s math in his calculations of speeds: the commonality of 3 turns out to be an artifact of poor measurements. It would, in any case, be dependent on the unit of measurements. Accepting arguendo al-Naimiy’s exact 300,000 km/s for the speed of light, this is 186,282 miles per second, with not a 3 in sight. Anyway, the metric system with its curious kilometers was the product of the terror of the French Revolution, an event long after the appearance of the Qur’an.
But you can never end with these things, because it can be noticed 3 divides into 186,282 evenly (62,094 times). And that if we sum the digits 186,282, we get 27, which summed again gives 9, which is 3 squared. There is no Trinity in Islam, but there is Allah and the World, hence the simple squaring.
We se that Allah, in gematria, in the standard Eastern Abjad system (as used in the book) directly from the Arabic, would be 1 + 30 + 30 + 5 = 66. But this is not the only sum possible for names of the deity. We also have, using their respective alphabets:
GOD (English) = 7 + 5 + 14 = 26,
DIEU (French) = 4 + 9 + 5 + 21 = 39,
THEOS (Greek) = 8 + 5 + 15 + 18 = 43,
DEUS (Latin) = 4 + 5 + 20 + 18 = 47.
You get the idea. In Latin, there are other ways of counting, and here we used one common way, noting that there is no U but there is a V. Some methods assigned higher values than simple progression, and in medieval times we might have got 4 + 5 + 200 + 90 = 299.
Any language or counting method can be justified in gematria; none is a priori more correct than the next. So let’s use English, because, after all, it is now the lingua franca and the American Empire dominates the world (for good or bad).
GOD sums to 26. And did you know that in Hebrew YHWH also sums to 26? That number in Latin is XXVI, which uses only three separate letters, the same as Allah! According to the Wokepedia entry on the number, “In the Tenrikyo religion of Japan, 26 is frequently used, since it marks the lunar calendar date of its founder Nakayama Miki‘s first divine revelation and also her death.”
Even stronger, 26 anno Domini was the year in which Pontius Pilate was appointed prefect of Judea. It is that year which scholars say was the year our Lord himself was baptized by John in the Jordan River. And can be it be mere coincidence that the first job I had out of high school was at the Jordan River Fish Hatchery?
Further, the divisors of 26, besides 1 and itself, are 2 and 13. And do I even have to tell you of all the possibilities of 13?
Well, you can see how easy this is. Inexhaustible is the right word, and for more reasons than you might have thought. Here follows a brief experiment to drive the idea home.
There is no particular reasons, or rather there are many, that the order of the alphabet is the way it is. Different orderings are not only possible, but some existed in practice. How many orderings are possible? That’s easy: 26!, which reads “26 factorial”, and which is 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x … x 26 ~ 4 x 10^26; that is, about 4 times the number 1 with 26 zeros after it. Not infinite, but large.
Incidentally, did we notice the alphabet itself has 26 letters? And that the number of its orderings feature this now miraculous number?
Here is one possible ordering:
K O N S B Z M D I G T L E V W J X Y Q P F R H A C U.
In this ordering, GOD = 10 + 2 + 8 = 20. I will leave it as an exercise to find remarkable features of 20.
Some orderings will have the letters “G”, “O” and “D” in the first three positions, which give the sum 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. And some will have those letters in the last three positions, which give the sum 24 + 25 + 26 = 75. These are thus the Bounds of GOD. What can you do with those numbers?
How many of the 4 x 10^26 will have the sum of 26? Many. One would be 1 + 2 + 23. We could spend time with the math working out the exact solution, which a good numerologist would. But I’m not a good numerologist, and so an approximation will do.
Here’s a histogram of a million of those 4 x 10^26 reorderings of the sum of GOD:
About 1.7% of those reorderings, or 17,405 of the million, had a sum of GOD equalling 26. You see the breakdown. The most popular sums are around 40. Can you do anything with 40? In fact, 40 is often taken Biblically as being “a large number”, and was not meant to be precise, as when it rained for “40 days and nights”. It is only the modern era which takes these things literally. In ancient days, math and numbers did not have the same meaning nor importance as they do now. Or that 40 might have even been accurate for that event, and wasn’t a stand-in for “large.”
It’s obvious that the exercise could be carried out for any language. And there was nothing special about the liner ordering. We could have had A = 1, B = 2, C = 4, D = 8 and so on. Or any other assignment of letters to numbers. Many are used, and many new ways can be created. How many?
Well, infinite. Which is what I claimed at the beginning, and which proves there will be an infinite number of coincidences that can be made between the numbers, and that’s before counting the numbers with events in the world. And this was only one small word. Think about what we could do with books of them, and with other numerological procedures. No end is in sight, or can be.
None of this is proof that numbers aren’t, from time to time, important, nor can I say that the particular numerological claim you favor or have discovered is wrong. But notice that in all the coincidences, we merely insinuated connections, and never came out and claimed definite causal connections. Not all numerologists are so shy and do make definite claims. I cannot say such claims can never be proved out, but to be convincing they must be proved, not merely asserted. That they exist as coincidences is never sufficient as proof.
Video
*By a coincidence I only noticed as I recorded the video, Stove in his essay used the number 3 to show how easy it is to generate thought gone wrong.
All my work is free and user-supported. Here’s how to help:
- Subscribe at Substack (paid or free!)
- Cash App: $WilliamMBriggs
- Zelle: use email: matt@wmbriggs.com
- Buy me a coffee
- Paypal
- Other credit card subscription or single donations
- Hire me
- Subscribe at YouTube
- PASS POSTS ON TO OTHERS
Discover more from William M. Briggs
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
