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68

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Origin 1908 to 1965

Sixty-eight is 4 x 17, and equals 4 plus 64, the squares of 2 and 8. Its proper divisors, 1, 2, 4, 17 and 34, sum to 58, less than the number itself, which makes it deficient, the ordinary condition of most numbers. Its symbolic record is empty: no scripture, no calendar, no liturgy and no attested folk usage attaches to it. The number is better known now for a year than for any property of its own, and the meanings assigned to it in modern numerological writing are arrived at by adding its digits to 14 and then to 5. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 5.

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)
Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern System
The modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 6 + 8 = 14, then 1 + 4 = 5. Whatever the system says of 68 it therefore says of 5, 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)
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Chaim, the plural form of life and a common Hebrew given name, is spelled chet, yod, yod, mem, whose numeral values sum to sixty eight. It sits beside chai, eighteen, as a second, less famous life related gematria value, and both are cited together in discussions of Jewish numerology built around the theme of life. 3Tradition: Rabbinic Judaism (gematria of chaim, life)
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Largely abandoned as a comparative category 1
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 Plural of Life

Sixty-eight is four times seventeen and reduces to fourteen and then five. In Jewish gematria it is the value of chaim, life, the plural form of chai used in the toast le-chaim, to life, and in the many names built on it, spelled chet, yod, yod, mem, totalling eight, ten, ten and forty. So where eighteen is chai, singular life, sixty-eight is chaim, life in its fuller plural, and the number carries a positive charge in Jewish usage, though it is far less commonly invoked than the eighteen of chai.

In chemistry, sixty-eight is the atomic number of erbium, the fourth element named for Ytterby, alongside yttrium, ytterbium and terbium, a single Swedish quarry village that lent its name to more elements than any other place on Earth.

Sixty-eight factors as 2^2 x 17 and carries 6 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives only 58, short of the number itself, which places it among the deficient numbers in the same classical scheme.

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

Beyond the gematria of chaim, sixty-eight carries no traditional symbolism; it is a composite number the older systems did not develop. Modern numerology reduces it to five and reads it through that root as a number of change and freedom. Its honest core is the value of the plural life in Hebrew, a genuine but minor thread beside the far better-known chai of eighteen.

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.

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. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
Gershom Scholem, Schocken Books, 1961View the Source
Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition
Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Macmillan Reference USA, 2007s.v. Gematria (chaim = 68)View the Source
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