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111

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Origin 1908 to 1965

One hundred and eleven is 3 x 37 and a repunit, a number written entirely in ones. It is the magic constant of the six-by-six magic square, whose full total is 666, which is the arithmetic behind a good deal of speculation about that figure. In modern angel-number literature, an internet genre of the 2000s descended from earlier New Age writing, 111 is the most cited sequence of all. That practice has no lineage before the late twentieth century, and its appeal depends entirely on how the number is written. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 3.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1908 to 1965 1
Origin Period
500 BCE to 300 CE 2
Origin Period
The 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 Period
The 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 Origin
The 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 Origin
The 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 / Compiler
Attributed 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 / Compiler
Mrs. 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 Name
Pythagorean 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)
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Largely abandoned as a comparative category 1
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Numerology 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
Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern System
The modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 1 + 1 + 1 = 3. Whatever the system says of 111 it therefore says of 3, 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 account
Agrippa's square of the Sun is six by six, holding the numbers one to thirty-six. Every row, column and diagonal adds to one hundred and eleven, and the whole square to six hundred and sixty-six. 3Tradition: Renaissance planetary magic (Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy)
Learn More
The Repunit

A hundred and eleven is the three-digit repunit, three times thirty-seven, and reduces to three. It is the magic constant of the six-by-six square, the grid in which every row, column and diagonal sums to a hundred and eleven, a square the Renaissance tradition assigned to the Sun. In Jewish gematria a hundred and eleven is the value of the letter aleph spelled out in full, aleph, lamed, pe, so the first letter, when written as a word, contains the number, a fact the Kabbalists took to express the hidden fullness within the simple unity of aleph.

In chemistry, a hundred and eleven is the atomic number of roentgenium, named after Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895 and won the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901; the element itself was first synthesised at GSI in Darmstadt in 1994.

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 Arithmetic of a Hundred and Eleven

Because a hundred and eleven is three times thirty-seven, it stands behind a family of arithmetical curiosities: six times a hundred and eleven is six hundred and sixty-six, the number of the beast, and the repdigits two hundred and twenty-two through nine hundred and ninety-nine are its multiples. In the modern vocabulary of angel numbers a hundred and eleven, like the other repeated ones, is read as a sign of alignment and new beginnings, a twenty-first-century usage with no older pedigree. The number's genuine interest is its repunit form and the gematria of the spelled-out aleph; the rest is recreational arithmetic or recent invention.

A hundred and eleven factors as 3 x 37 and carries 4 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives only 41, short of the number itself, which places it among the deficient numbers in the same classical scheme.

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

Numerology, Disciplines

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.

Source Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras WroughtUnderwood Dudley
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997on repunits and magic squares (6x6 constant)View the Source
2. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1962View the Source
3. Three Books of Occult Philosophy
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Llewellyn, 1533View the Source
Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition
Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Macmillan Reference USA, 2007s.v. Gematria (aleph spelled full = 111)View the Source
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