Numbers
21
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Twenty-one is a number of completion, success, and fulfillment, marking the end of a great cycle. It is three sevens, and it closes the numbered journey of the tarot's major arcana. Made of two and one, it joins the balance of the two with the initiative of the one and reduces to the root vibration three, the essence of expression and creativity brought to full flower. In tarot it is The World, card twenty-one, the final trump, the image of wholeness achieved, the dancer within the cosmic wreath at the successful end of the Fool's journey. Its keywords are completion, attainment, integration, and triumphant fulfillment. As a compound number twenty-one carries the creative joy of three arrived at through partnership and self-assertion, one of the most favorable compounds, the number of the goal reached and the cycle whole.
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 SourceEhyeh asher ehyeh, I Am That I Am, the name God gives Moses at the burning bush, opens with ehyeh, spelled aleph, heh, yod, heh, whose numeral values sum to twenty one. Kabbalistic commentary treats this as the gematria of God's own self declared name, distinct from and prior to the more commonly cited value of the Tetragrammaton. 3Tradition: Kabbalah (gematria of Ehyeh, I Am That I Am) Meaning in the Attesting SourceSourced to the subject's own accountHadith attributed to the Prophet instruct believers to seek Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Decree, among the odd numbered nights of Ramadan's last ten, the twenty first among them, since the Quran itself does not name the exact night. Many mosques hold special observance on the twenty first for this reason even where local practice favors a later odd night as the more likely one. 4Tradition: Islam (Ramadan, the odd numbered nights of the last ten sought for Laylat al-Qadr) Meaning in the Attesting SourceIn the tarot's standard trump sequence the twenty first and final numbered card is the World, read as completion, the closing of the Fool's journey that the unnumbered Fool card began. Its position at the end of the sequence rather than any property of the number itself is what carries the meaning. 5Tradition: The tarot pack Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemThe modern system leaves 22 unreduced rather than reducing it to 4 (2 + 2 = 4). Its own already-cited rival-attribution fact states this directly: 22 is a master number, not to be reduced to a single digit, the second of three (with 11 and 33) said to carry a heightened vibration in its own right, even though its own description draws on the resonance of 4 in reading its character. 1 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 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
Three Sevens and the World
Twenty-one is three sevens, and it is triangular, the sum of the numbers one through six. In the tarot it is the number of the World, the final and most fortunate of the twenty-two trumps of the major arcana, depicting the dancing figure within a wreath, completion and fulfilment, the journey of the Fool arrived at its end. The number's association with attainment carries into ordinary life, where twenty-one has long marked the age of majority in the English-speaking world, the traditional coming of age, and gives its name to the card game whose object is to reach it. As three times the complete seven, twenty-one reads naturally as a heightened or perfected completeness, and its calendar and ritual uses tend to follow that sense.
Twenty-one has a Kabbalistic gematria distinct from its tarot and coming-of-age associations: the divine name Ehyeh, I Am, that God gives Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3:14, is spelled aleph, heh, yod, heh, whose values of one, five, ten and five total twenty-one, so the number carries the weight of God's own self-declared name alongside its already-noted status as three sevens and the World of the tarot; Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers, working independently of the Hebrew tradition, titles the same compound number the World in his own scheme, a genuine convergence between the two systems rather than a borrowing.
The Twenty-One Forms of Tara
Tibetan Buddhism venerates Tara in twenty-one forms, praised in the widely recited hymn known as the Praises to the Twenty-One Taras, each verse invoking a different aspect and colour of the bodhisattva of compassionate action. The set is a fixture of daily practice across the Himalayan traditions and is among the clearest religious uses of the number. In Christian devotion the number is less fixed but appears in counts of days, Daniel fasts twenty-one days before his vision in Daniel 10, and in the arithmetic of three weeks. Between the twenty-one Taras, the World card and the coming-of-age, the number's associations converge on the idea of a completed and blessed whole, three times over the sacred seven.
Balliett's 1908 chart reduces twenty-one to three, self-expression and sociability in the standard modern keyword list; Florence Campbell's 1931 Your Days Are Numbered and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both kept that root reading alongside Cheiro's 1926 compound title, so a name or birth date totalling twenty-one is read in the American system on two levels at once, the compound World and the reduced three, a doubled reading Cheiro's own book is generally credited with popularising across the chart's two-digit numbers.
Correspondences & Relations
Numerology Meanings
Born on the twenty-first, the root is three and the compound joins two and one, which the tradition reads as expression supported by both cooperation and initiative. Twenty-one is treated favourably in the compound tables, and the gift assigned to this day is creative capacity that succeeds socially rather than in isolation.
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.
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