Numbers
51
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Fifty-one is 3 x 17 and the sixth pentagonal number. Like 57, 87 and 91 it belongs to the small class of numbers that reliably look prime and are not. Its traditional symbolism is negligible; where fifty-one appears in older writing it is as a count rather than as a sign, and readings that give it a character are working from the sum of its digits rather than from any attested usage. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 6.
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: 5 + 1 = 6. Whatever the system says of 51 it therefore says of 6, 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
The Psalm of Penitence
Fifty-one is three times seventeen and reduces to six. Its firmest association is Psalm 51, the Miserere, the great psalm of repentance ascribed to David after the prophet Nathan confronted him over Bathsheba, Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness, which became a central penitential text in both Jewish and Christian liturgy and was set to music most famously by Gregorio Allegri for the Sistine Chapel. Beyond the psalm, fifty-one carries no developed traditional symbolism; it is a composite number that the older systems passed over.
Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers gives fifty-one a description of its own rather than pointing back to a lower number: strong fortune, or at least a greater ease in overcoming conflict and challenge, one of the more favourable readings among the higher compound numbers in his scheme and, since Cheiro's original compound-number scheme runs only from ten to fifty-two, one of the last individually described figures before the pattern of pointing back to earlier numbers, already seen throughout this family of articles, takes over almost entirely. In chemistry, fifty-one is the atomic number of antimony, whose symbol, Sb, comes from its old Latin name stibium; antimony compounds served as the black cosmetic eyeliner kohl in the ancient Near East and Egypt long before the element was isolated and formally named.
What the Systems Assign
In the modern era fifty-one has picked up an incidental notoriety through Area 51, the Nevada site whose secrecy made its number a byword for the hidden and the conspiratorial, a purely twentieth-century association with no bearing on older lore. Numerology reduces fifty-one to six and reads it as a number of responsibility and harmony, the six reached through a five of change and a one of initiative. The honest summary is that fifty-one's one durable meaning is the penitential psalm; the rest is modern accretion or reductive reading.
Florence Campbell's 1931 Your Days Are Numbered and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved Cheiro's favourable reading of fifty-one; neither writer connects it to Psalm 51's penitential weight or to the later, purely secular notoriety of Area 51, and the coincidence of a number of overcoming and ease sitting beside David's psalm of repentance and forgiveness sought is, once again, unremarked in either source, the two traditions having reached the same number by entirely unrelated roads. Mathematically, fifty-one is a semiprime, the product of exactly two primes, three and seventeen, a class of numbers of particular interest in cryptography, since factoring a large semiprime back into its two prime factors is computationally hard, the basis of RSA encryption.
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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