Numerology Positions
Minor Personality
Name Number
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Minor Personality is one of the many derived number types used in modern Western numerology, a system whose letter to number correspondence is loosely traced to Pythagorean number theory but was systematised into its present, many named form no earlier than the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is calculated from the consonants of a name as it is actually used in daily life, rather than the full birth name used for the standard Personality number, reduced to a single digit except for the master numbers, which are kept unreduced. Numerologists read it as a narrower, everyday counterpart to the full Personality number, reflecting the impression given by a commonly used name or nickname rather than by the name recorded at birth. It is paired with the Minor Soul Urge, its counterpart drawn from the same commonly used name's vowels rather than consonants.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin PeriodThe numerological chart and its positions were built in the United States between 1908 and the 1960s. Balliett's The Philosophy of Numbers of 1908 supplied the letter-value chart and the first positions; the pinnacles, challenges, cycles and personal-year figures were added by later authors. No position here is attested before the twentieth century. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Attributed Author / CompilerMrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors. The atlas's own sources for these thirty-two positions name four different authors, Balliett in 1908, Cheiro in 1926, Florence Campbell in 1931 and Juno Jordan in 1965, for a scheme presented to readers as one system with one pedigree. The layering is the honest fact about them. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Attributions
CalculationSum the values of the consonants in the name as it is actually used; reduce, masters kept 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Identity
Number CategoryName Number 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Learn More
The Consonants of the Working Name
The Personality number is taken from the consonants of the birth name, and the system reads it as the outer surface: what other people meet first, the manner rather than the motive. The Minor Personality applies that same rule to the name the person actually uses. The consonants of the working name are summed, the vowels are ignored, and the total is reduced to a single figure, with the master numbers kept.
The division of a name into vowels and consonants is the structural move on which three positions in this chart depend. Vowels are held to carry what is interior and unspoken, consonants what is presented. Soul Urge takes the vowels, Personality takes the consonants, and Expression takes both together, so that the two halves are supposed to add up to the whole in meaning as well as in arithmetic.
Applied to the working name, the position is used to describe the impression a person makes in the setting where that name is current. A performer with a stage name and a very different legal name is the textbook case: the Minor Personality is offered as an account of the persona, and the Personality of the person the persona is built over. Practitioners read the two together and treat a wide gap between them as the interesting result rather than an error.
The Letter Y, and Where the Rule Runs Out
Splitting a name into vowels and consonants sounds like a mechanical operation and is not. English orthography does not divide cleanly into the two categories, and the system has to legislate for the awkward cases, which it does inconsistently between authors.
Y is the standing difficulty. In Yvonne it is doing the work of a consonant; in Mary it is doing the work of a vowel; in Bryan opinions differ. Numerological texts give rules of thumb, usually that Y counts as a vowel when no other vowel is present in the syllable, and the rules of thumb do not agree across the sources this atlas cites for the chart. W raises the same question in names such as Bowen. Since a letter moved from one column to the other changes both the Personality and the Soul Urge, and leaves the Expression alone, the disagreement is not cosmetic.
Behind that sits a deeper mismatch. Vowels and consonants are categories of sound, and the chart applies them to letters. In a language whose spelling has drifted as far from its pronunciation as English has, the two do not line up. A silent letter counts; a sound with no letter does not.
The result is that a Minor Personality is well defined only once someone has ruled on the spelling conventions, and the ruling is editorial. Knowing that is not a reason to discard the reading, but it is the reason two competent practitioners can produce different figures from the same name.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
The chart positions a numerological reading is built from, as distinct from the numbers themselves.
Sources
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