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66

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Origin 1908 to 1965

Sixty-six is triangular, the sum of 1 through 11, and equals 2 x 3 x 11. The Protestant Bible contains sixty-six books, thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New; Catholic and Orthodox canons are larger, so the figure is denominational rather than universal. The book of Isaiah has sixty-six chapters, and nineteenth-century writers made a great deal of the parallel, but chapter divisions were only introduced in the thirteenth century and the resemblance is therefore an artefact of medieval editing. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 3.

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
The Protestant biblical canon holds sixty six books, thirty nine in the Old Testament and twenty seven in the New, a narrower count than the Catholic and Orthodox canons, which retain the deuterocanonical books Protestant reformers set aside. The number is a direct consequence of that sixteenth century decision rather than a figure fixed from the earliest church. 3Tradition: Protestant Christianity (the sixty six books of the biblical canon)
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: 6 + 6 = 12, then 1 + 2 = 3. Whatever the system says of 66 it therefore says of 3, 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
The Books of the Bible

Sixty-six is a triangular number, the sum of the integers one through eleven, and reduces to twelve and then three. Its most widely recognised meaning is the count of books in the Protestant Bible, thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New, so that sixty-six is shorthand for the whole of scripture as reckoned in the Reformed tradition, against the seventy-three of the Catholic canon, which includes the deuterocanonical books. The number owes this significance entirely to the particular canon settled at the Reformation rather than to any symbolic property.

In chemistry, sixty-six is the atomic number of dysprosium, named from the Greek dysprositos, hard to get at, a name its discoverer Paul-Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran chose in 1886 after more than thirty attempts to separate it out from holmium oxide.

Sixty-six factors as 2 x 3 x 11 and carries 8 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives 78, more than the number itself, which makes it an abundant number in the classical sense the Pythagoreans used to sort integers into deficient, perfect and abundant classes.

The whole apparatus of digit-reduction numerology is a twentieth-century invention rather than an inheritance from antiquity. Mrs. L. Dow Balliett published the first systematic version, The Philosophy of Numbers, in 1908, fixing the letter-to-number chart still used today and ruling that eleven and twenty-two must stand as master numbers rather than reduce further; her colleague, the physician Julia Seton, is credited with coining the word numerology itself around 1912.

What the Systems Assign

A triangular number and a repdigit, sixty-six has the tidy form that number-mystics enjoy, but it carries no traditional religious symbolism beyond the biblical book-count; the doubled six sometimes invites uneasy comparison with six hundred and sixty-six, though the two are unrelated in scripture. In the twentieth century the number gained an incidental fame through Route 66, the American highway, a purely modern association. Numerology reduces it to three and reads it through that root. The honest core of sixty-six is the Protestant canon, a fact of ecclesiastical history rather than of number lore.

Florence Campbell, a student of Balliett's, restated and extended the chart in Your Days Are Numbered in 1931, and Juno Jordan, founder of the California Institute of Numerical Research, standardised the modern four-part chart of life path, expression, soul urge and personality numbers in 1965; both writers worked from name and birth date rather than from any older number philosophy.

The genuine Pythagorean number philosophy that this modern chart borrows its name from left no writings of its own: Pythagoras and his early followers taught only by mouth, and what survives of their number theory comes instead through Nicomachus of Gerasa, whose Introduction to Arithmetic of the first century CE became the standard authority for a thousand years, and through Iamblichus, who drew on Nicomachus two centuries later; neither wrote anything resembling a name-and-birthdate numerology.

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 Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority
Lee Martin McDonald, Hendrickson, 2007View the Source
Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024s.v. biblical literature; the Protestant canonView the Source
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