Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos

Author:John Allen Paulos
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780809058402
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Published: 2011-04-01T05:00:00+00:00

NUMEROLOGY

Less worrisome than inaccurate tests is numerology, the last pseudoscience I want to discuss, and my favorite. It is a very old practice common to a number of ancient and medieval societies and involves the assignment of numerical values to letters and the consequent reading of significance into the numerical equality between various words and phrases.

The numerical values of the letters in the Hebrew word for “love” (ahavah) add up to 13, the same total as the letters in the word for “one” (ehad). Since “one” is short for “one God,” the equality of the two words was deemed significant by many, as was the fact that their sum is 26, the numerical equivalent of “Yahweh,” the divine name of God.

The number 26 was important for other reasons: in verse 26 of the first chapter of Genesis, God says: “Let us make man in our image”; Adam and Moses were separated by 26 generations; and the difference between the numerical equivalent of Adam (45) and that of Eve (19) is 26.

The rabbis and cabalists who engaged in numerology (gematria) used a variety of other systems as well, sometimes disregarding powers of 10—taking 10 to be 1, 20 to be 2, and so on. Thus, since the first letter of “Yahweh” was assigned a value of 10, it could, when the occasion demanded, be assigned a value of 1, making “Yahweh” equal in value to 17, the same as the numerical equivalent of the word for “good” (tov). At other times they considered the squares of the numerical values of the letters, in which case “Yahweh” would equal 186, the same as the word for “place” (Maqom), another way of referring to God.

The Greeks, too, engaged in numerological practice (isopsephia), both in antiquity, with the number mysticism of Pythagoras and his school, and especially later, with the introduction of Christianity. In this system the Greek word for “God” (Theos) had a numerical value of 284, as did the words for “holy” and “good.” The numerical value of the letters alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, was 801, the same as the word for “dove” (peristera), and was supposed to be a mystical corroboration of the Christian belief in a Trinity The Greek Gnostics noted that the Greek word for “Nile River” had a numerical value of 365, indicating the annual nature of its floods.

Christian mystics devoted much energy to deciphering the number 666, said by John the Apostle to designate the name of the Beast of the Apocalypse, the Antichrist. The method used to assign numbers to letters was not specified, however, and so it’s not entirely clear to whom the number refers. “Caesar Nero,” the name of the first Roman Emperor to persecute the Christians, had a value of 666 in the Hebrew system, as did the word for “Latins” in the Greek system. The number has often been used in the service of ideology: a Catholic writer of the sixteenth century wrote a book whose gist was that Martin Luther was the Antichrist, since in the Latin system his name had a value of 666.

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