First Minor Challenge

The First Minor Challenge is the first of the challenge numbers drawn from the birth date: it is the absolute difference between the reduced birth month and the reduced birth day. In the four-part challenge scheme it governs the earliest stretch of life, the formative years in which its particular obstacle is said to be most keenly felt. Numerologists read it as the first recurring difficulty a person meets, the lesson set at the outset, and pair it with the Second Minor Challenge and the derived Main Challenge to map the pattern of obstacles across a lifetime.

The birth-date challenges, this one among them, are generally associated with Balliett's own line of the system more directly than the name-derived challenges are, since they need no letter chart at all, only the month, day and year already present in a birth date; Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers worked chiefly with names, and it is Florence Campbell's 1931 and Juno Jordan's 1965 books that are usually credited with folding the birth-date subtractions into the same challenge framework as the name-based ones. Not every modern numerologist derives a challenge from the birth date at all: Dan Millman's widely read 1993 book The Life You Were Born to Live works from the single Life Path number, without any minor-challenge apparatus layered onto it, a reminder that the birth-date challenge scheme described throughout this family of articles is a particular, mid-century elaboration rather than a feature of modern numerology as such.

The challenges from the birth date form a set of four: two minor challenges from the differences among the reduced month, day and year, one main challenge derived from the difference between those two, and the whole read as a sequence unfolding with age. Because they are built by subtraction rather than addition, they model obstacle rather than gift, the counterpart to the Pinnacles, which are built by addition and read as opportunities over the same spans. Both schemes belong to the twentieth-century American numerology and rest on the conventions of modern date-reckoning.

Because it depends only on the numbers already present in a birth date, this figure is the part of the modern chart least dependent on orthography or on any particular alphabet; Walter Burkert's study of the Pythagorean tradition nonetheless finds no ancient precedent for reading obstacle by subtraction between reduced birth-date components, a method that, like the rest of the challenge apparatus, belongs to the twentieth-century American system rather than to anything older. The sense that a challenge reading names a real, recurring obstacle is also the kind of effect the psychologist Bertram Forer demonstrated in 1948, when identical, deliberately vague personality sketches handed to thirty-nine students were rated, on average, better than four out of five for personal accuracy, a result skeptics cite as the likely explanation for why a vaguely stated lifelong difficulty feels specifically true.