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73

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Origin 1908 to 1965

Seventy-three is the twenty-first prime. The Catholic biblical canon contains seventy-three books, seven more than the Protestant, the difference being the deuterocanonical works; Orthodox canons are larger again, so this is a marker of tradition rather than a property of the number. Beyond that, seventy-three has no symbolic history, and the enthusiasm it attracts online rests on features of its decimal notation rather than on anything a reader of scripture or of mathematics would call significant. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 1.

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: 7 + 3 = 10, then 1 + 0 = 1. Whatever the system says of 73 it therefore says of 1, 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 SourceSourced to the subject's own account
In number theory seventy-three is the twenty-first prime and, with seventy-one, forms a twin prime pair, two primes differing by two. It carries no religious or scriptural significance recorded in any tradition this atlas has surveyed; the interest in it, where any is recorded, is mathematical rather than symbolic. 3
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 Number of Wisdom

Seventy-three is prime and reduces to ten and then one. In Jewish gematria it is the value of chokhmah, wisdom, chet, kaf, mem, he, totalling eight, twenty, forty and five, and Chokhmah is the second sefirah on the Tree of Life, the flash of insight from which all else unfolds. Seventy-three also has a celebrated arithmetical link to scripture: it is the mirror of thirty-seven, and the two multiply to two thousand seven hundred and one, the gematria of the opening verse of Genesis, a coincidence long treasured by those who read the Torah numerically.

In chemistry, seventy-three is the atomic number of tantalum, named after Tantalus of Greek myth, condemned to stand forever in water he could never drink, a fitting name for a metal whose oxide resisted dissolving in acid however it was treated. Anders Gustaf Ekeberg discovered it in 1802.

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.

The Wider Canon

Seventy-three is the number of books in the Catholic Bible, forty-six in the Old Testament, including the deuterocanonical books, and twenty-seven in the New, against the sixty-six of the Protestant canon. As a prime that is also, with thirty-seven, tied to the gematria of Genesis 1:1, seventy-three gathers an unusual amount of arithmetical interest for its size. Its two firm associations are the value of Chokhmah, wisdom, in the sefirot and the extent of the Catholic canon, one Kabbalistic, one ecclesiastical.

Seventy-three is prime, with no factors beyond one and itself. It is a twin prime, paired with 71, a prime just two away. Because it leaves a remainder of one when divided by four, it is a Pythagorean prime, expressible as a sum of two squares: 3 squared plus 8 squared.

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. 73 (number) (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, 2026View the Source
Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition
Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Macmillan Reference USA, 2007s.v. Gematria (Chokhmah = 73)View the Source
Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024s.v. biblical canon (73 books, Catholic)View the Source
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