Numbers
0
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Zero is the void and infinite potential, the circle that contains everything and nothing, the empty ground from which all number arises. It is not absence so much as the unmanifest, the cosmic egg and the fertile silence before the first stirring of one. In tarot it is The Fool, card zero, the open beginning that steps off the cliff in perfect trust, unnumbered and free to become anything. Mathematically it is the placeholder that gives every other number its scale, a concept refined in India as sunya, emptiness, before it reached the West. In numerology zero has no vibration of its own; instead it amplifies and deepens whatever digit it accompanies, adding spiritual weight and unlimited possibility. Its keywords are potential, wholeness, the eternal, and the space in which all things are still possible. As a challenge or life number it imposes no single fixed lesson, so the discipline one lives by is freely chosen rather than given.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1908 to 1965 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Origin Period500 BCE to 300 CE 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Origin PeriodThe 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. 2 Origin PeriodThe 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. 1 Place of OriginThe 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 OriginThe 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 / CompilerAttributed 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 / CompilerMrs. 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 NamePythagorean 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) Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe Sanskrit word for zero, sunya, is also the word for void or emptiness in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, and historians of mathematics read this as more than a coincidence of vocabulary: the philosophical concept of a real, nameable emptiness gave Indian mathematicians a way to treat nothing as a number rather than as a mere absence of one. Brahmagupta's seventh century Brahmasphutasiddhanta is the first known text to state rules for arithmetic with zero, including division, treated as a number alongside positive and negative quantities. 3Tradition: Hindu-Buddhist philosophy and Indian mathematics (sunya, the concept behind the numeral zero) Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemIn the modern system zero is not itself reduced the way the numbers one through nine are. Its own already-cited entry states that zero carries no vibration of its own; instead it amplifies and deepens whatever digit it accompanies, so the system's usual reduction, adding digits until one remains, has no separate value to reduce it to. 1 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseNumerology 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 Learn More
The Number That Is an Absence
Zero is the youngest of the small numbers and the last to be accepted as a number at all. The Greeks and Romans counted without it, and their arithmetic managed by other means; a symbol for the empty place in positional notation appears in Babylonian and, independently, Maya practice, but treating zero as a quantity that can be added and multiplied is an Indian achievement. Brahmagupta, in the Brahmasphutasiddhanta of 628, was the first to set out rules for arithmetic with zero, including the troublesome case of division by it. The Sanskrit word is shunya, emptiness or void, the same term that carries the Buddhist idea of shunyata, and the sign travelled west through Arabic as sifr, from which come both cipher and zero. The number that stands for nothing is therefore a relatively late and quite specific invention, not a universal intuition.
Zero's reception in the medieval West was slower and more contested than its Indian and Arabic transmission suggests. Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, set out the Hindu-Arabic numerals, zero among them, for a European readership in his Liber Abaci of 1202, having learned the system from Arabic-speaking merchants and mathematicians in North Africa; adoption was nonetheless slow and locally resisted, and a 1299 statute of the Arte del Cambio, the moneychangers' guild of Florence, is recorded as barring the new figures from ledger-keeping, requiring sums to be written out in Roman numerals or in words instead, partly from a fear that the new digits, zero included, were too easily altered or forged.
The Void as a Theological Figure
Because zero names an absence, traditions that value negation have found it useful. In the Kabbalah the highest aspect of the divine is Ein Sof, the Without-End, and beyond even that the mystics place Ayin, Nothing, not a deficiency but a fullness too complete to be a thing, from which the something of creation emerges. Daoist thought gives wu, non-being, as prior to and generative of being, a theme the Tao Te Ching states directly when it makes the useful part of a vessel the empty space inside it. The Buddhist shunyata, from which the numeral takes its Sanskrit name, is not blankness but the absence of independent self-existence in things. None of these systems is doing arithmetic, but each reaches for a figure of productive emptiness, and zero, once it existed, supplied one.
The modern American numerology chart that assigns digits to letters, A to I as one to nine and then repeating, credited by its own successive writers to Balliett in 1908, Cheiro in 1926, Florence Campbell in 1931 and Juno Jordan in 1965, has no letter that answers to zero; the cycle runs one through nine and starts again, so zero never arises as a name-derived core number in that system. It appears only where a birth date already contains it, the tenth or twentieth or thirtieth of a month, and there it simply contributes nothing to the digit sum, a different kind of absence from the missing letter, one built into ordinary arithmetic rather than into the chart's design.
Correspondences & Relations
Numerology Meanings
A zero here means the full-name totals of the parts matched. The tradition reads this as an obstacle with no fixed shape: nothing stands between the person and their capacity as a given condition, so whatever stands there was put there. It is a null result within a measure that is already a modern derivation.
A zero as the first Challenge means the reduced birth month and birth day matched, so no difference arose. The tradition does not read this as an absence of difficulty but as one without a fixed shape, sometimes called a challenge of choice: nothing is imposed, so the discipline has to be selected and then kept.
A zero as the Major Challenge means the two Minor Challenges were equal. This is the most common Major Challenge in practice, since subtracting differences collapses toward zero. The tradition reads it not as a life without difficulty but as one with no assigned lesson, in which whatever discipline is kept has been chosen freely.
A zero here means the consonant totals of the name parts matched exactly. The tradition reads this as a challenge with no fixed content rather than no challenge at all: nothing about how one is seen is imposed as a lesson, and whatever discipline applies has to be adopted deliberately. It is a null result within an already derived measure.
A zero as the second Challenge means the reduced birth day and birth year matched. The tradition reads it as a difficulty without assigned content: nothing in the later years is set as a lesson, so whatever discipline applies has been adopted rather than imposed. Zero is the only Challenge value that carries no direction at all.
A zero here means the vowel totals of the name parts matched, so no difference arose. The tradition reads a zero challenge not as an absence of difficulty but as one with no assigned shape: nothing is imposed, and the discipline has to be chosen. Being both a derived measure and a null result, it is the least determinate figure a chart produces.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
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.
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997on the pedigree claimed for modern numerologyView the Source 2. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1962the chapters on Pythagoras and on Pythagorean number theoryView the Source 3. The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero
Robert Kaplan, Oxford University Press, 2000
The Mystery of Numbers
Annemarie Schimmel, Oxford University Press, 1993on zero and the voidView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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