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86

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Origin 1908 to 1965

Eighty-six is 2 x 43. It has no traditional symbolic use. Its only real currency is American slang, in which to eighty-six something means to remove, refuse or be rid of it, a restaurant and bar usage attested from the 1930s whose origin has never been established, despite several confidently repeated stories. 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)
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Elohim, the generic Hebrew word for God used throughout Genesis, is spelled aleph, lamed, heh, yod, mem, whose numeral values sum to eighty six. Kabbalistic writing sets this beside the gematria of hateva, nature, which also sums to eighty six, and reads the coincidence as evidence that nature itself expresses the divine order rather than standing apart from it. 3Tradition: Kabbalah (gematria of Elohim)
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: 8 + 6 = 14, then 1 + 4 = 5. Whatever the system says of 86 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)
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
God and Nature

Eighty-six is twice forty-three and reduces to fourteen and then five. In Jewish gematria it is the value of Elohim, God, aleph, lamed, he, yod, mem, totalling one, thirty, five, ten and forty, the name that denotes God in the aspect of judgement and natural power, as YHWH denotes mercy. Strikingly, the word ha-teva, nature, spelled he, tet, bet, ayin, also totals eighty-six, a coincidence that later thinkers, in the tradition associated with Spinoza's identification of God with Nature, took to express a hidden identity between the divine and the natural order.

In chemistry, eighty-six is the atomic number of radon, discovered in 1900 by Friedrich Ernst Dorn, who called it radium emanation; it was briefly renamed niton in 1908, from the Latin nitens, shining, before settling as radon in 1923.

Eighty-six factors as 2 x 43 and carries 4 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives only 46, short of the number itself, which places it among the deficient numbers in the same classical scheme.

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.

What the Systems Assign

Apart from the twin gematria of Elohim and ha-teva, eighty-six carries no developed symbolism, and its wider modern uses, the slang to eighty-six, meaning to discard or refuse, are unrelated and of uncertain origin. Numerology reduces it to five and reads it through that root. The honest and genuinely interesting core of eighty-six is the equality of God and Nature in Hebrew letter-value, one of the most cited coincidences in gematria.

Where the Chaldean chart and the Balliett-descended chart assign different values to the same letters, a name totalling one figure in one system need not total the same figure in the other, since the two rest on unrelated letter-value tables rather than on a shared inheritance from any single ancient source.

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.

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 (Elohim = 86; ha-teva)View the Source
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