Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme

Switch Atlas

The Inner World

The Civil World

The Natural World

Numbers

58

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Origin 1908 to 1965

Fifty-eight is 2 x 29. It is the sum of the first seven primes: 2 plus 3 plus 5 plus 7 plus 11 plus 13 plus 17. Its traditional symbolic use is negligible, and there is no honest way to make more of it. The readings in circulation derive from its digits rather than from any attested usage, which is a fact about decimal notation rather than about the quantity. 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)
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
Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern System
The modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 5 + 8 = 13, then 1 + 3 = 4. Whatever the system says of 58 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)
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Largely abandoned as a comparative category 1
Learn More
A Composite Without Lore

Fifty-eight is twice twenty-nine and reduces to thirteen and then four. It is among the many integers in the fifties that carry no traditional symbolism; the older systems, which loaded meaning onto the small numbers, the notable primes and the round figures, left it undeveloped. What can honestly be said of it is structural, it is twice a prime, it is the sum of the first seven prime numbers, and none of that is lore.

Fifty-eight falls outside Cheiro's 1926 compound-number scheme, which stops at fifty-two, so no reading attributed to his book is given here; Balliett's 1908 chart reduces it instead to four, order, work and material stability in the standard modern keyword list, one of the numbers in this family of articles where the American system's reading is the only symbolic content the number attracts at all, exactly as this article's own opening line already states.

Fifty-eight factors as 2 x 29 and carries 4 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives only 32, short of the number itself, which places it among the deficient numbers in the same classical scheme.

A separate and older-claimed system, generally called Chaldean numerology, assigns letters to digits irregularly rather than in Balliett's repeating one-to-nine sequence, and deliberately omits nine from the chart as too sacred to attach to an ordinary letter; its popular billing as a genuinely ancient Babylonian system rests on assertion rather than on any textual evidence that has been traced back that far.

What the Systems Assign

Modern numerology reduces fifty-eight to four and reads it as a number of order, work and material stability, the four reached through a five of change and an eight of worldly power. This reductive reading, internal to the twentieth-century system, is the whole of the number's symbolic content. Fifty-eight is best described as an integer without significant tradition, sourceable only through the standard machinery of numerological reduction.

Chinese numerology, unlike the older Western symbolic traditions surveyed above, does in fact find real content in fifty-eight, or in any number containing the digit eight: ba is a near-homophone of fa, to prosper or make a fortune, the single most favoured digit in Chinese numbering, sought after in phone numbers, license plates and addresses at a documented price premium; the candid Western verdict that fifty-eight carries no traditional symbolism therefore holds only within the traditions that verdict was written to summarise. In chemistry, fifty-eight is the atomic number of cerium, the most abundant of the rare earth elements despite the group's name, and the element used in the flint of a standard cigarette lighter, where an alloy of cerium and iron throws the spark. Cerium's name predates the lighter by decades, chosen in 1803 after the dwarf planet Ceres, discovered just two years earlier, in the era's fashion for naming new elements after newly found celestial bodies.

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
Numerology: The Romance in Your Name
Juno Jordan, DeVorss, 1965on the reduction of numbers to a root digitView the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.