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88

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Origin 1908 to 1965

Eighty-eight is 8 x 11. The International Astronomical Union recognises exactly eighty-eight constellations: the list was adopted in 1922, and the boundaries drawn by Eugene Delporte were approved in 1928 and published in 1930. The set includes all forty-eight of Ptolemy's. A piano has eighty-eight keys. In Chinese usage the doubled eight is considered fortunate because the word for eight sounds like the word for prosperity, a homophone preference that is genuine, widespread and highly commercial in its modern form. In digit-reduction numerology its digits sum to 16 and reduce to 7.

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: 8 + 8 = 16, then 1 + 6 = 7. Whatever the system says of 88 it therefore says of 7, 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 delimitation prepared by Delporte and adopted in 1930 fixed eighty-eight constellations and drew their boundaries along lines of right ascension and declination, so that every point of the sky falls inside exactly one of them. 3Tradition: Modern astronomy (International Astronomical Union)
Learn More
The Luckiest of the Doubled Digits in China

Eighty-eight reduces to sixteen and then seven, but its chief significance is Chinese and phonetic. The word for eight, ba, sounds close to fa, to prosper, so eight is the most auspicious of numbers in Chinese culture, and the doubled eight of eighty-eight intensifies the good fortune; it is sought in phone numbers, addresses and licence plates, and the written character resembles the character for double happiness. The number is a byword for wealth and prosperity across the Chinese-speaking world, one of the clearest cases of a number's meaning arising from the sound of the word rather than from any count.

In chemistry, eighty-eight is the atomic number of radium, discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, from the Latin radius, ray, for its intense radioactivity; its use in glow-in-the-dark watch dials later caused the well-documented poisonings of the factory workers, remembered as the radium girls, who painted them through the 1920s.

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.

Eighty-Eight Elsewhere, and a Modern Abuse

Eighty-eight has neutral modern uses, the eighty-eight constellations recognised by the International Astronomical Union, the eighty-eight keys of the piano, and one that must be reported plainly: among neo-Nazi groups eighty-eight is used as a coded salute, the eighth letter of the alphabet doubled standing for the initials of a Nazi slogan. The coding is a twentieth-century invention with no connection to any older symbolism, and it is noted here only so that the number's modern associations are given honestly. The durable and overwhelmingly positive meaning of eighty-eight remains the Chinese one of doubled prosperity.

Eighty-eight factors as 2^3 x 11 and carries 8 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives 92, more than the number itself, which makes it an abundant number in the classical sense the Pythagoreans used to sort integers into deficient, perfect and abundant classes.

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), 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. Delimitation Scientifique des Constellations
Eugene Delporte, International Astronomical Union / Cambridge University Press, 1930View the Source
A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought
Wolfram Eberhard, Routledge, 1986s.v. eight; the auspicious numberView the Source
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