Numbers
18
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Eighteen is a complex number of tension, imagination, and the testing of ideals against material forces. Made of one and eight, it joins the initiative of the one with the power of the eight and reduces to the root vibration nine, the essence of completion and compassion, so that its conflicts are meant to resolve into wisdom and service. In tarot it is The Moon, card eighteen, the realm of dream, illusion, and the unconscious, where things are not as they seem and intuition must guide the way through uncertainty. Its keywords are imagination, illusion, emotional depth, and the struggle between the material and the spiritual. As a compound number eighteen brings the humanitarian breadth of nine by way of trial and inner conflict, the play of dream and desire that must be seen through before the compassion of nine can be reached.
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 + 8 = 9. Whatever the system says of 18 it therefore says of 9, which its own description already states directly ("reduces cleanly back to the root vibration one"), 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 Hebrew word chai, life, is spelled chet and yod, whose numeral values sum to eighteen. The equivalence is the best known piece of everyday Jewish gematria and the reason gifts of money and charitable donations are conventionally given in multiples of eighteen, a custom addressed as giving chai rather than simply giving a round sum. 3Tradition: Rabbinic Judaism (gematria of chai, life) 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
Chai, the Number of Life
Eighteen is, in Jewish tradition, the number of life. The Hebrew word chai, meaning alive or living, is spelled chet and yod, whose gematria values of eight and ten total eighteen; the word is worn as an amulet and the number treated as auspicious, which is why charitable gifts and wedding cheques are so often given in multiples of eighteen, chai, double chai, and so on. This is one of the clearest cases in which a number acquires meaning purely through the numerical value of a word, the technique of gematria, rather than through counting anything. The association is genuinely traditional and still in everyday use, and it makes eighteen almost the opposite of an unlucky number in Jewish life: a small sum given as a blessing.
Chai's gematria of eighteen is the clearest possible illustration of Kabbalistic method for a general reader, and it has a documented modern civic afterlife: American Jewish charitable and political giving is conventionally reckoned in multiples of eighteen, a eighteen-dollar or one-hundred-and-eighty-dollar donation read as symbolically doubling or tenfold-ing life itself, a twentieth-century American custom built directly on an ancient technique rather than a survival from it.
The Eighteens of India
Indian tradition is unusually rich in eighteens, most of them clustered around the Mahabharata. The epic has eighteen books, its central war lasts eighteen days, and the armies that fight it number eighteen akshauhinis; the Bhagavad Gita, set on that battlefield, has exactly eighteen chapters, and its teaching is sometimes read as turning on the number. Beyond the epic, the Puranas are traditionally counted as eighteen major texts with eighteen minor ones. East Asian Buddhism expanded the sixteen arhats to a set of eighteen, the Luohan of Chinese temples. The eighteen of India is thus a number of totality within a tradition, quite independent of the Hebrew chai, and the coincidence of two major cultures loading the same number with meaning for unrelated reasons is a good caution against reading significance across traditions.
Balliett's 1908 chart and its later elaborators reduce eighteen to nine, completion and humanitarian breadth in the standard modern keyword list, a root the American system shares with twenty-seven and thirty-six; none of Balliett, Cheiro, Florence Campbell or Juno Jordan drew on the Hebrew chai or the Mahabharata's eighteens already described in building that reading, so the American nine-root and the two older eighteens described above are three independent bodies of association converging, by coincidence of arithmetic rather than of source, on the same number.
Correspondences & Relations
Numerology Meanings
Born on the eighteenth, the root is nine and the compound is read with caution in the older tables, where eighteen is associated with conflict between the material and the spiritual. The gift is a wide sympathy that has to be exercised in contested conditions, and the tradition treats this day as producing people whose generosity is repeatedly tested.
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.
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997on the pedigree claimed for modern numerologyView the Source 2. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1962the chapters on Pythagoras and on Pythagorean number theoryView the Source 3. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition
Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Macmillan Reference USA, 2007s.v. Gematria (chai = 18)View the Source The Mystery of Numbers
Annemarie Schimmel, Oxford University Press, 1993s.v. eighteenView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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