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Origin 1908 to 1965

Seventy-eight is triangular, the sum of 1 through 12, and equals 2 x 3 x 13. A standard tarot deck has seventy-eight cards, twenty-two trumps and fifty-six suit cards. The structure is Italian and fifteenth-century, the earliest explicit attestation is the tarocchi poem of Matteo Maria Boiardo, written at Ferrara between 1461 and 1494, though decks of other sizes circulated alongside it, and the divinatory use is an eighteenth-century French development. Seventy-eight is also the number of lines in Metatron's Cube, since thirteen points joined in every pair give seventy-eight connections. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 6.

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)
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
Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern System
The modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 7 + 8 = 15, then 1 + 5 = 6. Whatever the system says of 78 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)
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The standard tarot pack numbers seventy-eight: fifty-six suit cards, twenty-one trumps and the fool. Dummett establishes the pack as a fifteenth-century Italian invention for a trick-taking game, with divinatory use appearing only in the late eighteenth century. 3Tradition: The tarot pack
Learn More
The Seventy-Eight Card Deck

A standard tarot pack has seventy-eight cards: twenty-two trumps, now called the major arcana, and fifty-six suit cards in four suits of fourteen, ace through ten, plus page, knight, queen and king.

The structure is Italian and fifteenth-century, and it was made for a card game. Tarot begins as tarocchi, a trick-taking game in which the trump suit is a permanent one, and the game is still played in parts of Europe. The earliest documentary references to trionfi decks are from Ferrara and Milan in the 1440s. The Visconti-Sforza cards of about 1445 to 1460 are the most famous survivals, but no complete deck of them exists, they are reconstructed from fragments held in several collections, and they cannot be used to establish a count. Deck sizes varied: two decks documented at Ferrara in 1457 had seventy cards.

The earliest source that lists all twenty-two trumps is an anonymous Franciscan sermon against gambling, the so-called Steele Sermon, datable to roughly 1450 to 1480. The earliest explicit attestation of a seventy-eight card structure is the tarocchi poem of Matteo Maria Boiardo, written at Ferrara between 1461 and 1494 and printed in 1523.

The divinatory use is much later and French. Antoine Court de Gebelin published an essay in 1781 asserting that the tarot preserved Egyptian priestly wisdom, an assertion for which he offered no evidence and which was false; Jean-Baptiste Alliette, writing as Etteilla, produced the first deck designed for divination shortly afterwards. Everything that follows, Levi, the Golden Dawn, Waite and Smith in 1909, descends from that eighteenth-century reinvention, not from the fifteenth-century game.

Triangles and Thirteen Points

Seventy-eight is the sum of the numbers from 1 to 12, which makes it the twelfth triangular number. That single fact accounts for its appearance in several places that look unrelated.

Triangular numbers count the ways of choosing two things from a set. Choosing two from thirteen gives seventy-eight, and this is why Metatron's Cube has seventy-eight lines: the figure is constructed by joining each of the thirteen circle-centres of the Fruit of Life to every other, and thirteen points taken two at a time give seventy-eight connections. No line is selected and none omitted, which is what makes the construction determinate. Because the thirteen centres lie on a regular triangular lattice, many of those lines overlap visually, so a drawing shows far fewer than seventy-eight distinct strokes, seventy-eight is a fact about the points, not a count of marks on the page.

The same reasoning gives seventy-eight as the number of distinct pairs in any group of thirteen, and as the number of tiles in a double-eleven domino set.

Seventy-eight is also 2 x 3 x 13, with eight divisors. It has no other distinguished arithmetic properties, and it is worth saying so, because the coincidence of the tarot count with the triangular number is exactly the kind of thing that attracts unjustified interpretation. The tarot has seventy-eight cards because twenty-two trumps were added to a fifty-six card game pack. That the total happens to be triangular is a coincidence, and no fifteenth-century source shows the least awareness of it.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Tarot, Disciplines

The standard tarot pack numbers seventy-eight: fifty-six suit cards, twenty-one trumps and the fool.

Source The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake CityMichael Dummett

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 Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City
Michael Dummett, Duckworth, 1980View the Source
The Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume I
Stuart R. Kaplan, U.S. Games Systems, 1978the 78-card deckView the Source
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