Numbers
25
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Twenty-five is five squared, and the sum of the squares of 3 and 4, the smallest Pythagorean triple. It marks dates rather than doctrines. Hanukkah begins on 25 Kislev, the day of the Temple's rededication in 164 BCE, and Christmas was fixed at 25 December in Rome by the middle of the fourth century, the earliest surviving record being the Chronography of 354. The Samkhya school of Indian philosophy enumerates twenty-five tattvas, the categories of reality running from purusha and prakriti down through the gross elements. Beyond those, twenty-five has little independent symbolic weight. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 7.
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 SourceChristianity keeps December twenty fifth as Christmas, the feast of the nativity, in the Western calendar, a fixed date rather than one set by the lunar reckoning that places Easter. Historians of the date weigh two rival explanations for why it fell there, a calculation from the presumed date of Christ's conception, and a deliberate placing of the feast against the Roman winter solstice calendar, without either being settled beyond dispute. 3Tradition: Christianity (the December 25 date of Christmas) Meaning in the Attesting SourceHanukkah begins on the twenty fifth of Kislev, the date the book of Maccabees gives for the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple after its desecration under Antiochus IV. The date rather than any property of the number twenty five itself is what the festival marks, but it is that date the number names every year the holiday is observed. 4Tradition: Rabbinic Judaism (Hanukkah, the twenty fifth of Kislev) Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemThe modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 2 + 6 = 8. Whatever the system says of 26 it therefore says of 8, which its own description already states directly ("In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 8"), 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. 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
A Square and a Quarter
Twenty-five is five squared and a quarter of a hundred, and much of its use is that of a convenient rounded milestone: the silver jubilee marks twenty-five years, a quarter-century. In the Hebrew calendar the twenty-fifth of Kislev begins Hanukkah, the eight-day festival of the rededication of the Temple, and Christian tradition placed the Nativity on the twenty-fifth of December, a date fixed in the fourth-century West and variously explained as a calculation from the supposed date of the conception or as the taking-over of an existing midwinter observance. As five multiplied by itself, twenty-five reads in numerological terms as an intensified five, the number of the senses and of change, though the tradition attaching to it is thin compared with the sacred milestones themselves.
Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers reads twenty-five as a figure of success won through steady effort rather than through fortunate timing, a reading that sharpens rather than contradicts the reduced seven this article already describes; Florence Campbell's 1931 Your Days Are Numbered and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both carried Cheiro's compound reading forward largely unchanged, one of several cases in the chart where the 1926 book's wording persisted through the later mid-century elaborations with little revision.
Twenty-Five as a Milestone
Beyond the festivals, twenty-five functions chiefly as a threshold of maturity or completion. In the priestly law of Numbers the Levites begin their service at twenty-five, and the quarter-century remains the natural unit for marking anniversaries and generations. Modern numerology, following the reduction of twenty-five to seven, reads the number as a call to inward analysis and learning through experience, the seven arrived at by way of the doubled five of restless change, a reading that belongs to the twentieth-century American system rather than to any older source. The durable content of twenty-five is calendrical and commemorative: the date of Hanukkah, the traditional date of Christmas, and the silver jubilee, rather than any deep body of lore.
Walter Burkert's study of the Pythagorean tradition finds that the ancient arithmological reading of the small numbers, one as source, two as division, four as justice and so on, reaches modern readers through Neopythagorean writers of the centuries after Plato rather than from Pythagoras himself; twenty-five, as five multiplied by itself, would on that older logic read as an intensified five, the number the Neopythagoreans associated with marriage and with change, a reading distinct from, and considerably less developed than, Balliett's own twentieth-century American system.
Correspondences & Relations
Numerology Meanings
Born on the twenty-fifth, the root is seven and the compound is read as understanding gained through experience rather than instruction. The older tables treat twenty-five as a number of learning by trial, and the gift assigned here is judgement that improves markedly with age, which the tradition contrasts with the seventh of the month's early inwardness.
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. Toward the Origins of Christmas
Susan K. Roll, Kok Pharos, 1995
4. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah
Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition
Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Macmillan Reference USA, 2007s.v. Hanukkah (25 Kislev)View the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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