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71

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Origin 1908 to 1965

Seventy-one is the twentieth prime and forms a twin pair with 73. Its one substantial use is institutional: the Great Sanhedrin, the supreme rabbinic court, numbered seventy-one according to the Mishnah at Sanhedrin 1:6, the seventy elders of Numbers 11:16 together with Moses, and the odd number ensures no tied verdict. Rabbi Yehuda dissents in the same passage, holding seventy, on the ground that Moses presided without being counted. Lesser courts numbered twenty-three. Beyond this the number has no symbolic tradition. 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)
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: 7 + 1 = 8. Whatever the system says of 71 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)
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The Great Sanhedrin is reckoned at seventy-one, the seventy elders together with the head of the court, and the lesser courts at twenty-three. The odd number is deliberate, so that a majority can always be reached. 3Tradition: Rabbinic Judaism (Babylonian Talmud)
Learn More
The Great Sanhedrin

Seventy-one is prime and reduces to eight. Its firmest traditional use is Jewish institutional law: the Great Sanhedrin, the supreme court of ancient Israel, comprised seventy-one members, the seventy elders appointed to assist Moses, together with Moses himself as head, so that seventy-one is the number of the full high court, one more than the seventy of the elders. The odd number was deliberate, ensuring that the court could never be evenly split. Lesser courts were fixed at twenty-three, and the seventy-one of the Great Sanhedrin at the apex.

In chemistry, seventy-one is the atomic number of lutetium, named after Lutetia, the Latin name for Paris, the city of its discoverer Georges Urbain, and the last and heaviest of the lanthanide elements.

Seventy-one is prime, with no factors beyond one and itself. It is a twin prime, paired with 73, a prime just two away.

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.

What the Systems Assign

Apart from the Sanhedrin, seventy-one carries little developed symbolism; it is a prime the older systems mostly passed over, its significance borrowed from the seventy it exceeds by the presiding one. Modern numerology reduces it to eight and reads it as a number of authority and material mastery. The honest core of seventy-one is the composition of the Great Sanhedrin, seventy elders and one head, a structure designed so that judgement could always fall one way or the other.

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.

A separate and older-claimed system, generally called Chaldean numerology, assigns letters to digits irregularly rather than in Balliett's repeating one-to-nine sequence, and deliberately omits nine from the chart as too sacred to attach to an ordinary letter; its popular billing as a genuinely ancient Babylonian system rests on assertion rather than on any textual evidence that has been traced back that far.

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), 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
3. The Babylonian Talmud
Anonymous (multiple authors), Soncino Press, 1935Sanhedrin 1:6 (Great Sanhedrin, 71)View the Source
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