Numbers
100
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Origin 1908 to 1965
One hundred is ten squared. Its force is as a round number in base ten rather than as a symbol in itself: a hundred means completeness or a great many, which is why the hundredfold return in the parable of the sower and the shepherd's hundred sheep at Luke 15:4 work as figures of speech. Genesis 21:5 makes Abraham a hundred at Isaac's birth. The Roman century, the per centum behind percentages, and the hundred-year lifespan all rest on the same convenience. Nothing about a hundred is special in any base other than ten. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 1.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin Period Origin PeriodThe arithmological reading of the first numbers, one as source, two as division, four as justice, seven as virgin, ten as completion, reaches us through Platonic and Neopythagorean writers of the centuries after Plato. Burkert's finding is that it cannot be traced to Pythagoras himself, whose activity was religious rather than mathematical: the doctrines were credited backwards to him. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Origin PeriodThe system that gives a number a personality, and a person a number, was assembled in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century out of New Thought material. Balliett's The Philosophy of Numbers appeared in 1908; the chart positions, pinnacles and cycles were added by her successors over the next fifty years. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Place of OriginThe Greek world, and above all the Greek cities of southern Italy where the Pythagorean societies were established; the arithmological literature itself is later and largely eastern Mediterranean. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Place of OriginThe United States, and specifically the New Thought circuit of the north-eastern seaboard; Balliett worked from Atlantic City. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Attributed Author / CompilerAttributed by the tradition to Pythagoras. Burkert's study is the standard demonstration that the number-doctrines carrying his name are the work of later hands, and that almost nothing in them can be shown to go back to the sixth century BCE. The attribution is recorded because it is what the tradition says, not because it holds. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Attributed Author / CompilerMrs. L. Dow Balliett, who published the first version of the modern system in 1908 and to whom Dudley devotes a chapter. What later authors added, the pinnacles, the challenges, the cycles, the personal year, is theirs, and this atlas's own numerology-position entries cite four different authors between 1908 and 1965 for what is presented as one system. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Origin of the NamePythagorean numerology is a twentieth-century label. The system it names has no demonstrable descent from Pythagoras, from the Pythagorean societies, or from the ancient arithmological literature; the letter-value chart it rests on was drawn up in the United States after 1900. The name borrows a pedigree, the oldest move in the subject. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemThe modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 1 + 0 + 0 = 1. Whatever the system says of 100 it therefore says of 1, because it holds no separate doctrine for the higher numbers. The stated exceptions are 11, 22 and 33, which it leaves unreduced and calls master numbers. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceSourced to the subject's own accountIn number theory one hundred is a perfect square, ten squared, and the base of the decimal percent and century. It carries no religious or scriptural significance recorded in any tradition this atlas has surveyed; its cultural weight comes from the decimal system rather than from any tradition treating it as symbolically significant. 3 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseNumerology has been sold since Balliett as a basis for decisions: which name to take, which date to marry on, which house number to buy. Dudley's survey of what numerologists sell is the standard critical account and its finding is blunt, numbers have power over minds, not over events. These entries record what the tradition says, not advice. 1 Learn More
The Round Hundred
A hundred is ten squared and reduces to one, and it serves throughout scripture and culture as the round number of fullness and long life. Abraham was a hundred years old when Isaac was born, so the number marks the completion of the long wait for the promised son. The parable of the sower speaks of seed that yields a hundredfold, the image of complete abundance. The Greeks offered a hecatomb, literally a hundred oxen, as the great sacrifice, and Latin gives the century, the hundred, as the unit of the fullest count. In Hebrew the letter qof carries the value one hundred.
In chemistry, a hundred is the atomic number of fermium, named after Enrico Fermi and first identified in the debris of the Ivy Mike hydrogen bomb test of 1952, a discovery kept classified for several years afterward.
The whole apparatus of digit-reduction numerology is a twentieth-century invention rather than an inheritance from antiquity. Mrs. L. Dow Balliett published the first systematic version, The Philosophy of Numbers, in 1908, fixing the letter-to-number chart still used today and ruling that eleven and twenty-two must stand as master numbers rather than reduce further; her colleague, the physician Julia Seton, is credited with coining the word numerology itself around 1912.
The Hundredth Name
A well-known Islamic tradition holds that God has ninety-nine names that are known and recited, and a hundredth that is hidden, the Greatest Name, unknown to all but, in a widely told story, to the camel, which wears its knowing expression because it alone has learned it. The completeness of the hundred over against the ninety-nine expresses the idea that beyond every name that can be spoken there remains one that cannot. As the square of ten and the base of percentage, a hundred is also the natural figure for wholeness in ordinary speech, the hundred per cent, which is why it so readily stands for the complete and the perfect.
A hundred factors as 2^2 x 5^2 and carries 9 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives 117, 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 genuine Pythagorean number philosophy that this modern chart borrows its name from left no writings of its own: Pythagoras and his early followers taught only by mouth, and what survives of their number theory comes instead through Nicomachus of Gerasa, whose Introduction to Arithmetic of the first century CE became the standard authority for a thousand years, and through Iamblichus, who drew on Nicomachus two centuries later; neither wrote anything resembling a name-and-birthdate numerology.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
The modern numerological system assigns this number a meaning, which is why the atlas records it as a subject in its own right, though this does not endorse what the discipline says about it. This link shows only that the discipline works with this particular number; the readings of the number itself belong to whichever tradition holds them.
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