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Sacred Correspondences
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A Composite Without Lore

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A Composite Without Lore

A hundred and four is eight times thirteen and reduces to five. It carries no traditional religious symbolism; the older systems left it undeveloped. Its structure as a multiple of thirteen is the most that can honestly be said, and that is arithmetic rather than lore.

A hundred and four factors as 2^3 x 13 and carries 8 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives 106, more than the number itself, which makes it an abundant number in the classical sense the Pythagoreans used to sort integers into deficient, perfect and abundant classes.

The digit four inside it is the one Chinese numerology treats with real weight: si, four, is a near-homophone of si, death, in Mandarin and in several other varieties of Chinese, which makes four the single most avoided digit in addresses, floor numbers and phone numbers across much of East Asia, a fear with its own name, tetraphobia, and no connection to any Western number symbolism.

A separate and older-claimed system, generally called Chaldean numerology, assigns letters to digits irregularly rather than in Balliett's repeating one-to-nine sequence, and deliberately omits nine from the chart as too sacred to attach to an ordinary letter; its popular billing as a genuinely ancient Babylonian system rests on assertion rather than on any textual evidence that has been traced back that far.

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