Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme

Switch Atlas

The Inner World

The Civil World

The Natural World

Numbers

110

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Origin 1908 to 1965

One hundred and ten is 2 x 5 x 11. Its one genuine claim is Egyptological: a hundred and ten years was the ideal lifespan in Egyptian wisdom literature, a formula for a complete and blessed life rather than a demographic figure, since actual life expectancy was a fraction of it. Genesis 50:22 and 50:26 give Joseph exactly a hundred and ten years, and Joshua 24:29 gives Joshua the same, a correspondence widely read as evidence that the Joseph narrative knows Egyptian convention, though the borrowing is an inference rather than a documented one. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 2.

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: 1 + 1 + 0 = 2. Whatever the system says of 110 it therefore says of 2, 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 SourceSourced to the subject's own account
In number theory one hundred and ten is a sphenic number, the product of three distinct primes, two, five and eleven. It carries no religious or scriptural significance recorded in any tradition this atlas has surveyed. 3
Learn More
The Ideal Egyptian Lifespan

A hundred and ten reduces to two. Its firmest traditional meaning is Egyptian: a hundred and ten years was the ideal span of a good and blessed life in ancient Egypt, the age wished upon the righteous in the texts, and the age at which the best-favoured were said to die. The Hebrew Bible preserves the same figure in two Egyptian-flavoured deaths: Joseph, who rose to power in Egypt, dies at a hundred and ten, and so does Joshua, whose formative years belonged to the Egyptian generation, a detail scholars read as an echo of the Egyptian ideal.

In chemistry, a hundred and ten is the atomic number of darmstadtium, first made in 1994 at the GSI laboratory near Darmstadt, Germany, and named for the city.

A hundred and ten factors as 2 x 5 x 11 and carries 8 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives only 106, short of the number itself, which places it among the deficient numbers in the same classical scheme.

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.

What the Systems Assign

Beyond the Egyptian ideal and the deaths of Joseph and Joshua, a hundred and ten carries little independent symbolism. Modern numerology reduces it to two and reads it through that root as a number of partnership and balance. The number's honest and genuinely interesting content is the Egyptian one, the perfect lifespan of a hundred and ten years, quietly carried into the biblical accounts of two men whose lives were bound up with Egypt.

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.

Nicomachus's own arithmetic sorted whole numbers into deficient, perfect and abundant by comparing them with the sum of their own divisors, a genuinely ancient classification that has nothing to do with the letter charts later numerologists built; the modern system that assigns meaning to digit sums is a distinct, twentieth-century construction that happens to borrow the Pythagorean name.

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. 110 (number) (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, 2026View the Source
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt
Donald B. Redford (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2001s.v. lifespan; the ideal 110 yearsView the Source
The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
Anonymous (multiple authors)Genesis 50:26; Joshua 24:29View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.