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49

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Origin 1908 to 1965

Forty-nine is seven squared, and its meaning everywhere derives from that. Leviticus 23:15-16 commands the counting of seven complete weeks from the barley offering, forty-nine days, with the festival on the fiftieth; the Omer count is still kept in Judaism. Leviticus 25 builds the Jubilee on the same arithmetic, seven sabbaths of years. Tibetan Buddhist tradition describes the bardo between death and rebirth as lasting up to forty-nine days, seven periods of seven, and funerary observance is timed to it; forty-nine is the maximum and the ritual frame rather than a fixed duration. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 4.

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)
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Leviticus 23 counts seven complete weeks from the day after the sabbath of Passover, forty-nine days, and appoints the fiftieth day as a festival. The counting of the Omer preserves that reckoning, which makes forty-nine a span rather than a quantity. 3Tradition: Hebrew Bible
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Tibetan funerary practice reckons the intermediate state between death and rebirth at up to forty-nine days, seven weeks of seven, and the rites for the dead are timed to that span. Cuevas traces how the literature that fixed the figure was assembled and revised. 4Tradition: Tibetan Buddhist funerary literature
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Largely abandoned as a comparative category 1
Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern System
The modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 4 + 9 = 13, then 1 + 3 = 4. Whatever the system says of 49 it therefore says of 4, 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)
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
Learn More
Seven Weeks of Days

Forty-nine is seven squared, and every significant use of it is a seven of sevens rather than a use of forty-nine as such.

Leviticus 23:15-16 commands that from the day the sheaf of the first barley is brought, seven complete weeks be counted, forty-nine days, and that the festival be held on the fiftieth. This is the Counting of the Omer, still observed nightly in Judaism between Passover and Shavuot, each evening announced with its number in weeks and days. The count is spoken aloud, which makes it one of the few commandments performed purely by enumeration, and it turns the interval between the exodus and the giving of the Torah into a structure rather than a gap.

Leviticus 25 applies the same arithmetic on a larger scale. Seven sabbaths of years, seven times seven, forty-nine years, are counted, and the fiftieth is the Jubilee, in which land returns to its original holders and debt slaves go free. Whether the Jubilee was ever practised as legislated is doubted by historians, and there is no clear record of a Jubilee year being observed, but the scheme is one of the most striking pieces of economic thought in the Hebrew Bible: it makes land inalienable and treats every sale as a lease.

Later Kabbalistic practice attaches a further structure to the Omer, pairing each of the forty-nine days with a combination of seven lower sefirot taken two at a time, seven weeks of seven qualities. That system is medieval and Lurianic, developed at Safed in the sixteenth century and after, and it should not be projected back onto Leviticus.

The Forty-Nine Days of the Bardo

Tibetan Buddhist tradition describes the intermediate state between death and rebirth, the bardo, as lasting up to forty-nine days, structured as seven periods of seven. The text most associated with this in the West is the Bardo Thodol, the Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State, and the funerary practice built on it involves reading to the deceased over that period, describing what will be encountered and instructing them how to respond.

Several things about it are commonly stated wrongly.

The title Tibetan Book of the Dead is not Tibetan. It was invented by Walter Evans-Wentz for his 1927 edition, by analogy with the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and it has shaped Western reception of the text ever since, including Carl Jung's commentary and a good deal of 1960s psychedelic literature that treated it as a manual of consciousness.

The text is a terma, a revealed treasure, attributed to Padmasambhava in the eighth century but brought forward by Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth. Within the tradition that attribution is a claim about transmission rather than about authorship in the ordinary sense; historically, the fourteenth century is when the text appears.

The forty-nine days are a maximum and a ritual framework, not a fixed duration. The texts allow that rebirth may occur sooner, and that some beings pass through the bardo very quickly or not at all. Popular accounts frequently present forty-nine days as the standard length of an afterlife stage, which flattens a considerably more careful position.

Forty-nine-day observances after a death are also widespread in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese Buddhist practice, with rites at each seventh day.

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. The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
Anonymous (multiple authors)Leviticus 23:15-16 (the counting of the omer)View the Source
4. The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead
Bryan J. Cuevas, Oxford University Press, 2003View the Source
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