Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Numbers

35

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Origin 1908 to 1965

Thirty-five is 5 x 7 and the fifth pentagonal number. It is also the number of free hexominoes, the distinct shapes six squares can make edge to edge, which is a fact of recreational geometry rather than of religion. Attested symbolic use is thin: thirty-five appears in scripture only inside census and inventory totals, and traditions that assign it a character are reasoning from the properties of 5 and 7 rather than from any usage of thirty-five itself. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 8.

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)
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: 3 + 5 = 8. Whatever the system says of 35 it therefore says of 8, 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)
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Largely abandoned as a comparative category 1
Learn More
The Midpoint of a Life

Thirty-five is five times seven and reduces to eight. Its clearest traditional resonance is as the midpoint of the biblical lifespan: Psalm 90 gives the measure of human years as threescore and ten, seventy, so thirty-five is the middle of the road of life, the sense Dante gives his opening line, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, in the middle of the journey of our life, written when the poet was about that age. In the priestly law the Levites are numbered for service in their prime years, and thirty-five falls within that span. The number itself carries little independent symbolism; its weight is borrowed from the seventy it halves.

Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers assigns thirty-five the reading already given to twenty-six, and the two numbers do share a digital root, eight, thirty-five by three plus five and twenty-six by two plus six; Florence Campbell's 1931 Your Days Are Numbered and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved the pairing, one of a family of higher compound numbers Cheiro's original scheme resolves by pointing back to a number already defined rather than by writing a fresh description for each. Thirty-five has one further mathematical property beyond the triangular and Fibonacci readings noted elsewhere in this family: it is a tetrahedral number, the sum of the first five triangular numbers, one, three, six, ten and fifteen, so that thirty-five spheres stack into a complete tetrahedron with five spheres along each base edge.

What the Systems Assign

Modern numerology reduces thirty-five to eight and reads it as a number of material capability and worldly balance, the eight arrived at through a three of expression and a five of change, a reading internal to the twentieth-century American system. Older traditions did not develop thirty-five, and the responsible summary is that its one durable association is the midpoint of the seventy-year life, the pivot at which, in the moralists' reckoning, a person turns from ascent to descent. Beyond that it is a composite number without its own body of lore.

A separate and older letter-value system, generally called Chaldean numerology, assigns digits to letters irregularly rather than in Balliett's simple repeating sequence, deliberately omits nine from the chart as too sacred to attach to an ordinary letter, and is favoured by some Indian and Vedic-influenced numerologists over the Balliett-Cheiro-Jordan chart described throughout this family of articles; a name totalling thirty-five in the Chaldean system need not match the total the Pythagorean-labelled American chart would give the same name, since the two rest on entirely different letter values. In chemistry, unconnected to any reading above, thirty-five is the atomic number of bromine, one of only two elements that exist as a liquid at ordinary room temperature.

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.

Source Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras WroughtUnderwood Dudley
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997View 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
The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
Anonymous (multiple authors)Psalm 90:10 (the seventy-year span)View the Source
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