Numbers
17
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Seventeen is a number of hope, renewal, and enduring aspiration, regarded in some numerological traditions as one of the more fortunate compound numbers, sometimes called the star of hope. Made of one and seven, it joins the initiative of the one with the wisdom of the seven and reduces to the root vibration eight, the essence of power and manifestation, so that its spiritual insight is meant to be realized in the world. In tarot it is The Star, card seventeen, the serene figure pouring out water beneath the stars, the very emblem of hope, healing, and faith restored after the Tower's upheaval. Its keywords are hope, faith, inspiration, and lasting achievement. As a compound number seventeen carries the worldly mastery of eight illuminated by the wisdom of seven, promising success that endures because it is founded on insight and integrity.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1908 to 1965 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Origin Period500 BCE to 300 CE 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore 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. 2 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. 1 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 + 7 = 8. Whatever the system says of 17 it therefore says of 8, which its own description already states directly ("reduces to the root vibration eight"), 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. 1 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe five daily obligatory prayers of Islam are made up of a fixed number of rak'ahs each, two at dawn, four at midday, four in the afternoon, three at sunset and four at night, for seventeen in total across the day. The count is established through the sunnah and Islamic legal practice rather than stated as a single figure in the Quran itself. 3Tradition: Islam (the seventeen daily obligatory prayer rak'ahs) 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 Prime the Pythagoreans Mistrusted
Seventeen is prime, and Plutarch preserves the report that the Pythagoreans disliked it, because it falls between sixteen and eighteen and so, in their musical arithmetic, breaks the neat ratio the two even numbers make around it. In Italy seventeen, not thirteen, is the unlucky number: the Roman numeral XVII can be rearranged into VIXI, Latin for I have lived, and so read as a memento of death, which is why some Italian buildings and airlines skip the seventeenth. Plutarch also places the death of Osiris on the seventeenth of the month Athyr, tying the number to the beginning of the god's dismemberment. These are scattered rather than systematic associations, but they share an undertone of unease that is unusual for a small number.
Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers gives seventeen a reading that sits closer to the Italian unease already described than to Islam's positive use of it: his compound-number scheme names seventeen the Star, read as hope glimpsed but not yet reached, an unusually apt pairing with the wary, not-quite-arrived character the number carries in the Mediterranean tradition, though Cheiro's own reading is a twentieth-century construction and no evidence ties it to the older Roman unease over the anagram VIXI.
The Seventeen Cycles of Prayer
Islam gives seventeen a wholly positive and highly practical role: the five daily obligatory prayers contain seventeen units, rakahs, in total, two at dawn, four at midday, four in the afternoon, three at sunset and four at night. Every observant Muslim performs seventeen rakahs of fard prayer each day, so the number is woven into the basic rhythm of religious life. Elsewhere seventeen is the syllable count of the Japanese haiku, arranged five-seven-five, and it appears in scattered devotional lists, but nothing rivals the prayer cycle for making it a lived number. The contrast is striking: a number treated with suspicion in the classical Mediterranean is, in Islam, the daily measure of devotion.
Balliett's 1908 chart reduces seventeen to eight, material capability and authority in the standard modern keyword list, a root shared with twenty-six and thirty-five; none of Balliett, Cheiro, Florence Campbell or Juno Jordan record any awareness of the older Roman or Pythagorean unease over seventeen described above, and Walter Burkert's study of the Pythagorean tradition would treat the coincidence, an American chart independently landing on a number the classical Mediterranean also distrusted, as exactly that, a coincidence rather than a shared inheritance.
Correspondences & Relations
Numerology Meanings
Born on the seventeenth, the root is eight and the compound is read favourably in the older tables, which treat seventeen as a number of endurance and eventual recognition. The gift is capability that outlasts opposition, and the literature reads seventeenth-of-the-month people as slow to be acknowledged and difficult to remove once they are.
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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