This quotation, from the Roman historian Suetonius in 121 AD, was another early example of numerology, the original Greek or Latin words purportedly found either as graffiti or in popular verse. His work would go onto influence the Greek philosopher Plato, which in turn coloured the development of Roman society.Ĭount the numerical values of the letters in Nero’s name, and in ‘murdered his own mother’ you will find their sum is the same. Immortalised for his mathematical insight that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is always the sum of the squares of the other two sides (a fact which actually pre-dated Pythagoras and was widely known in Babylonia a thousand years before he was born), his basic idea was that numbers underlie and describe all creation. But he also revered numbers so much that he consecrated a mystical school in their name, teaching about the reincarnation of the soul and instructing his pupils how numbers could reveal the beauty, harmony and order of the world. Son of a stone-cutter from the island of Samos, we know him as a mathematician, vegetarian and keeper of the Egyptian mysteries. Living in Ancient Greece around 550 BC, he has been described as one of the most influential humans that ever lived, for the very essence of his thinking about numbers is baked into our modern world. Though there are undoubtedly connections from the numerology of today, way back to Ancient India (in the Vedas) and China (in the I Ching) it is widely accepted that the semi-legendary figure of Pythagoras is the true father of numerology.
Of course, our ancient friends would not have called this numerology, but it is, to all intents and purposes simply an early version of a practice that exists to this day, the application of meaning to numbers. One early example of this is preserved in a fragment from Babylonia, around 700 BC, where the king, Sargon II, ordered that the length of the wall around his capital city of Khorsabad be made equivalent to the numerological value of his own name. Of course, there is no direct evidence for such a tale, yet we see suggestions of something similar dotted throughout history. While someone in that tribe would be responsible for counting the number of sheep or goats, someone else in the tribe would interpret what those numbers meant, not with regard to material problems such as whether there were enough resources to feed the animals, but in a mystical, spiritual way, what does it mean to have 66 goats or 33 sheep, for example. My favourite anecdote about the origins of numerology goes like this imagine an ancient tribe of people at the dawn of civilisation, maybe in Africa or the Middle East. By Richard Abbot (specialist in numerology and wellbeing based in Northamptonshire but visits Cheltenham regularly)
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