Numbers
31
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Thirty-one is prime, and a Mersenne prime: two to the fifth power minus one. It is the length of the longest calendar months, seven of the twelve in the Gregorian year. Beyond that its traditional symbolic use is genuinely thin, and entries claiming otherwise are working backwards from digit reduction rather than from any attested source. In that system, given its modern form by L. Dow Balliett in the first decade of the twentieth century and popularised through her successors, thirty-one reduces to 4.
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) Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemThe modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 3 + 2 = 5. Whatever the system says of 32 it therefore says of 5, which its own description already states directly ("In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 5"), 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 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceSourced to the subject's own accountIn number theory thirty one is the eleventh prime and a Mersenne prime, two to the fifth power minus one, one of the smallest known members of that family. It forms a twin prime pair with twenty nine. It carries no religious or scriptural significance recorded in any tradition this atlas has surveyed. 3 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 of El
Thirty-one is prime, and its principal traditional weight is again a matter of gematria: the Hebrew word El, one of the oldest names of God, is spelled aleph and lamed, one and thirty, totalling thirty-one. The name is the common Semitic word for a god and forms the root of Elohim and of countless personal names, Isra-el, Micha-el, Gabri-el, so its numerical value of thirty-one carries the weight of the divine name in the shorter form. As with twenty-six for the Tetragrammaton and eighteen for chai, the significance is generated by the letters of a word rather than by counting, and thirty-one belongs to the small set of numbers that Jewish tradition treats as sacred because a name of God resolves to them.
Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers treats thirty-one as sharing the same reading as thirty-two, a step in the compound-number scheme where several consecutive figures are read together rather than individually; Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved the pairing. Outside numerology, thirty-one has a wholly secular modern association: Baskin-Robbins, founded in Glendale, California in 1953, built its identity around the slogan "31 flavors," one flavor for every day of the month, an American commercial coinage with no bearing on El or on any older tradition.
Thirty-One in Scripture and Reckoning
The thirty-first chapter of Proverbs closes the book with the acrostic poem in praise of the woman of valour, the eshet chayil, its twenty-two verses running through the Hebrew alphabet, a passage recited in many households on the eve of the sabbath, and the reason the chapter number is widely recognised. Beyond El and Proverbs 31, the number carries little developed symbolism; it reduces to four, the number of order and the built world, and modern numerology reads it through that root. Its durable significance is the name of God in its shorter form, one of the arithmetical anchors of Kabbalistic reading.
Balliett's 1908 chart reduces thirty-one to four, order and the built world in the standard modern keyword list, a reading in some tension with El's own weight as a divine name, since four in the American system is generally read as the steady, material root rather than the transcendent one; the two traditions, Hebrew gematria and American numerology, converge on thirty-one by entirely unrelated routes, one finding in it the name of God, the other the discipline of ordinary structure. Thirty-one is also prime, and it carries a second scriptural echo distinct from Proverbs: Psalm 31:5, Into thy hand I commit my spirit, is the verse Luke's Gospel (23:46) gives as Jesus's last words from the cross, so the same number anchors both the closing acrostic of Proverbs and one of the seven last words of the crucifixion. In chemistry, unrelated to either, thirty-one is the atomic number of gallium.
Correspondences & Relations
Numerology Meanings
Born on the thirty-first, the root is four and the compound joins three and one, which the tradition reads as practical capacity with an expressive edge. It is the last possible day and occurs in only seven months, making it the least common Birthday Gift by a wide margin. The gift is craftsmanship: structure with something individual in it.
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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