Numerology

What Is Numerology?

Numerology is a method of attempting to find meanings and correspondences between people, places and things by taking their names and translating them into numbers. Numerology could possibly be classified as a form of scrying since it is sometimes used to produce predictions. However I've not included it in that section because it is more widely used to gain insight rather than prediction.

The basis of numerology is very simple: take the names or words which you wish to analyse, look up each letter on a table and add the results together. The most commonly used associations in Western numerology are shown below:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I
J	K	L	M	N	O	P	Q	R
S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z

For example my name - Trevor - works out as:

2 + 9 + 5 + 4 + 6 + 9 = 35
Thus, according to numerological principles, I have some form of sympathetic relationship with other people and ideas that also equate to 35. Some people prefer to reduce the final result still further, continually adding the digits until only a single digit answer is left. So in my case 3 + 5 would become 8.

An obvious criticism of numerology is that the choice about which words or names to use is arbitrary. All English words have synonyms. When it comes to names, how can I tell whether to use "Trevor", "Trevor Mendham", "Trev" or some other variation? Some proponents of numerology argue that this is the whole point. The different variations of names represent subtle variations and correspondences that go to make up a complete individual. Numerology is a lot more than simply providing a single simplistic statement.

Gematria

Numerology in English seems arbritary to some. It arguably makes more sense in a language such as Hebrew where letters, words and numbers are interchangeable.

In Hebrew, since every letter is a number then totalling the values of a word makes much more sense. Some have argued that some words and phrases in Hebrew were deliberately designed to correspond in a numerological fashion.

The numerological analysis of Hebrew texts, in particular the Torah, is known as gematria and has been used in Kabbalistic analysis.