The Philosophy of Numbers

Balliett's central book, The Philosophy of Numbers: Their Tone and Colors (1908), combined a Pythagorean letter to number correspondence with material she read as biblical precedent, deriving a name number and a birth number for each person and pairing each number with a musical tone and a color. She wrote it, by her own account in the preface, in response to requests from readers across the world who wanted a clearer statement of a numerology that already circulated in less organized form.

Her most durable technical contribution was the convention of treating eleven and twenty two as master numbers, left unreduced rather than collapsed to two and four as ordinary Pythagorean reduction would do. That distinction became a standard feature of the numerology practiced after her, carried forward directly by her student Juno Jordan and, through Jordan's own students, into most of the Pythagorean numerology taught in English today. The system remains popular rather than scholarly: it has no standing as an empirical account of personality or fate, and the atlas describes it as the tradition its practitioners hold it to be. The book was aimed at general readers rather than specialists, and its plain instructional tone, walking a reader step by step through deriving their own numbers, was part of why it reached as wide an audience as it did.