Numbers
38
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Thirty-eight is 2 x 19. It has no meaningful traditional symbolism. Where it appears in scripture it is a duration rather than a sign: the man at the pool in John 5:5 has been ill thirty-eight years, and Deuteronomy 2:14 gives thirty-eight years for the journey from Kadesh-barnea to the crossing of the Zered. Neither passage treats the number as significant in itself. In digit-reduction numerology its digits sum first to 11, treated as a master number in that system, before resolving to 2.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin Period 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. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore 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. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) 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) 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 Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemThe modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 3 + 8 = 11, then 1 + 1 = 2. Whatever the system says of 38 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) Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Learn More
A Span of Waiting
Thirty-eight is twice nineteen and reduces to eleven and then two. It appears twice in scripture as a period of waiting or infirmity. In the Gospel of John a man lies beside the pool of Bethesda, unable to reach the healing water, having been ill for thirty-eight years, until Jesus heals him. In Deuteronomy the wandering in the wilderness between the spies' report at Kadesh and the crossing of the brook Zered is reckoned at thirty-eight years, the bulk of the forty spent in the desert. In both cases the number marks a long, near-complete but unfulfilled span, just short of the round forty of testing, which gives it a quiet thematic role as the length of a waiting that is almost, but not yet, over.
Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers assigns thirty-eight the reading already given to twenty-nine, uncertainty, treachery and deception from others; the pairing holds by digital root, thirty-eight reducing through eleven to two and twenty-nine reducing the same way, and Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved it, so the biblical thirty-eights of waiting already described above sit beside a distinctly unflattering modern reading with no bearing on either scriptural passage.
What the Systems Assign
Because thirty-eight reduces to eleven, some numerological schemes treat it as carrying the intuitive, illuminating charge of that master number, before its further reduction to two of partnership and balance. Beyond the two biblical spans of thirty-eight years and this reductive reading, the number has little traditional development; it is not a figure the older symbolic systems dwelt on. Its honest description is a scriptural number of prolonged waiting, twice nineteen, standing just below the forty of completed trial.
None of the four foundational twentieth-century texts, Balliett's 1908 chart, Cheiro's 1926 book, Campbell's 1931 book or Jordan's 1965 systematisation, extends unreduced master-number status beyond eleven, twenty-two and thirty-three; treating thirty-eight's intermediate eleven as itself a live master-number charge before its final reduction to two is accordingly a later, minority elaboration rather than a reading any of the system's own founding authors are on record as endorsing. Unconnected to either the scriptural spans or the master-number debate above, thirty-eight is the atomic number of strontium, an element first identified in ore found near the Scottish village of Strontian in the late eighteenth century, which gave the element its name. Strontium's own best-known modern use, the bright red of some fireworks and flares, comes from the same element, an entirely secular application.
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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