Address Number

Almost every position in a numerology chart is derived from a person: from the name given at birth, from the date of birth, or from the name currently in use. The Address Number is the exception. It is derived from the building, and it is held to describe the character of life lived there rather than the character of whoever lives there. Two unrelated households at the same address are given the same reading.

The calculation takes the street number and nothing else. The digits are added and reduced to a single figure, and a letter appearing in the number, as in 221B, is converted through the same letter table the name positions use, so that 221B gives two plus two plus one plus two. The street name, the town and the postcode are excluded. Master numbers are kept unreduced where they appear, on the same rule as elsewhere in the system.

Practitioners use it as an environmental reading rather than a personal one. A dwelling reducing to four is described as suited to steady work and unsuited to a household wanting movement; one reducing to five is described the other way round. The advice that follows is normally about fit: whether a particular household should take a particular place, and what the place will tend to draw out of them.

Because it attaches to a building rather than to a person, it is the one position in the chart that changes when you move and changes for nobody else.

The Address Number rests on the assumption that a building has a number in a stable sense. It does not. Street numbering is a municipal administrative act, most of it carried out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the schemes vary in ways that change the answer completely.

Sequential numbering along a street gives one figure. Block numbering of the kind common in North American cities, where the hundreds digit records which block you are on, gives a different one for the same physical house. Metric or distance-based numbering, used on rural roads in several countries, gives a third. Renumbering happens: streets are extended, plots are subdivided, and authorities periodically rationalise a stretch that has grown confusing. Where a country has no street numbering at all, and several do not, the position cannot be computed.

The rule that excludes the postcode is doing a great deal of work and has no stated justification. A postcode identifies a delivery point at least as precisely as a house number does, and in some systems more precisely. Excluding it, and excluding the street name whose letters would convert perfectly well through the same table, is a choice made by the authors rather than a consequence of anything in the method.

None of this makes the position unusable within the tradition, which is a system of assigned meanings rather than of measurements. It does mean the figure records a decision taken in a municipal office, and that is the honest description of what is being read.