Numerology Positions
Minor Soul Urge
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Minor Soul Urge is one of the many derived number types used in modern Western numerology, a system whose letter to number correspondence is loosely traced to Pythagorean number theory but was systematised into its present, many named form no earlier than the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is calculated from the vowels of a name as it is actually used in daily life, rather than the full birth name used for the standard Soul Urge number, reduced to a single digit except for the master numbers, which are kept unreduced. Numerologists read it as a narrower, everyday counterpart to the full Soul Urge number, reflecting inner motivation as expressed through a commonly used name rather than the name recorded at birth. It is paired with the Minor Personality, its counterpart drawn from the same commonly used name's consonants rather than vowels.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin PeriodThe numerological chart and its positions were built in the United States between 1908 and the 1960s. Balliett's The Philosophy of Numbers of 1908 supplied the letter-value chart and the first positions; the pinnacles, challenges, cycles and personal-year figures were added by later authors. No position here is attested before the twentieth century. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Attributed Author / CompilerMrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors. The atlas's own sources for these thirty-two positions name four different authors, Balliett in 1908, Cheiro in 1926, Florence Campbell in 1931 and Juno Jordan in 1965, for a scheme presented to readers as one system with one pedigree. The layering is the honest fact about them. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Attributions
CalculationSum the values of the vowels in the name as it is actually used; reduce, masters kept 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Identity
Number CategoryName Number 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Learn More
The Vowels of the Working Name
The Soul Urge, sometimes called the Heart's Desire, is taken from the vowels of the birth name and read as what a person wants when nothing is watching. The Minor Soul Urge runs the same calculation over the name the person actually uses. The vowels of the working name are summed, the consonants ignored, and the total reduced to one figure, with the master numbers eleven, twenty-two and thirty-three left standing.
Of the three minor positions this is the one practitioners treat most carefully, because the claim behind it is the strongest. The Soul Urge is supposed to describe something interior and given, and it is not obvious why adopting a shorter form of your own name should alter it. The usual answer in the literature is that the minor figure describes not a change in what a person wants but a change in what they are currently able to want: the desire as it is available to them in the life the working name belongs to.
Whether that distinction survives examination is a fair question, and it is the sort of question the tradition does not settle by argument. What the position gives practically is a reading in which the birth name and the working name are held together, with the gap between them treated as the finding. A person whose two Soul Urge figures diverge sharply is described as living at some distance from what they most want, and the reading is built on that gap rather than on either number alone.
A Late Addition to a Chart Built in Layers
The chart this position belongs to is presented to readers as one system with one pedigree, and it is not. It was assembled in the United States across roughly sixty years by several authors who did not all agree, and the sources for these positions name four of them between 1908 and 1965.
L. Dow Balliett published the letter-value chart and the earliest positions in 1908, out of New Thought material rather than out of anything Greek. Cheiro, whose real name was William John Warner, brought a rival letter table and a large popular audience in the 1920s. Florence Campbell and Juno Jordan added and systematised further positions in the decades after. The pinnacles, the challenges, the cycles and the personal year figures all arrived in this way, and so did the minor positions, which presuppose the major ones and therefore cannot be older than them.
That layering is the honest fact about the chart, and it is worth stating because the system is usually introduced with a claim about Pythagoras. There is no line of descent from the Pythagorean societies to any of this. The ancient arithmological literature is interested in what numbers are, in the classification of odd and even and perfect and triangular; it is not interested in what a number says about a person, and it has no letter table.
The Minor Soul Urge is therefore a twentieth-century refinement of a twentieth-century instrument. That is not a criticism of it. It is what it is.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
The chart positions a numerological reading is built from, as distinct from the numbers themselves.
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