The origin of numerology...

In recent decades, numerology has gained huge popularity all over the world, because it is not for nothing that they say that everything new is well — forgotten old. So it happened with numerology. In fact, it belongs to one of the oldest sciences. But it took a lot of noticeable numerical coincidences, which directly indicated the dependence of important events on numbers. And after that, interest in numerology — a very smart and intelligent science — has increased many times.

It is impossible to establish absolutely reliably when and where exactly numerology originated. In ancient civilizations (Babylon, Egypt, India, Greece, Rome) there was no such special science. At that time, a philosopher and a mathematician easily understood each other and did not think of their sciences separated from each other by any barriers.

Therefore, ancient scientists studied numbers from the point of view of both philosophy and mathematics. Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle-all the great scientists demanded from their students an impeccable command of mathematics, and most of the mathematicians of antiquity were" part-time " philosophers.

The main provisions of the current version of Western numerology were developed in the VI century BC by the ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras, who combined the mathematical systems of the Arabs, Druids, Phoenicians and Egyptians with the sciences of human nature.

In ancient times, long before Pythagoras, people revered numbers as special signs filled with a deep mystical meaning. The very knowledge of numbers and their mysterious power for a long time was available only to a very narrow circle of people, magicians and priests who had the opportunity to master the most complex systems of writing and numbering that arose in ancient times.

It is known that the ancient similar writing systems were pictographic, that is, each icon was a picture that reflected the corresponding specific concept: a person, a tree, a lake, an animal, a stone. It was very difficult to learn such "literacy", and few people mastered such writing. This was the case in ancient Egypt, where hieroglyphs were written on papyri. The Babylonian cuneiform script has also come down to us — it is also a classic pictography.

All this was before the emergence of the alphabet, which radically changed the state of things — each sound was designated by a certain letter. This accelerated the development and dissemination of knowledge in general and of all sciences, including numerology. It has become much more convenient to write numbers with letters.

It is believed that the first alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians — a people who lived on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea around 1400 BC. There were 32 letters in the Phoenician alphabet, with all consonants. Vowel sounds were added when reading. The Phoenicians, like their neighboring peoples, wrote from right to left.

Being excellent navigators and traders, the Phoenicians spread their alphabet all over the world. Many ancient and modern alphabets have evolved from the ancient Phoenician alphabet, including Russian, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Runic, Gothic, English, Mongolian, Tibetan, Korean and Sanskrit.

The European peoples adopted the alphabet through the Greeks, who, like the Phoenicians, first wrote from right to left. And the first real alphabet was created by the ancient Greeks. It already had consonants and vowels. The Greeks were the first to learn to use letters as symbols of numbers, which was a very important step in the development of human civilization in general and in the formation of numerology in particular.

The Greek system was borrowed by the Egyptians, Persians, Phoenicians, Arabs, Jews. In terms of efficiency, it is close to the modern, so-called Arabic, number recording system. In the ancient Greek alphabetic system of denoting numbers, each word was endowed with a certain numerical content — this, in principle, meant the birth of numerology as a science — after all, it is the translation of meaningful words into numerical values that is one of its foundations.

The Greeks learned to add up the numerical values of all the letters of important words for them and at the same time received a mystical number meaning this word. The Greeks called this process of addition isopsephy ("iso" - equal, "psephos" - a pebble, and the Greeks used pebbles when studying arithmetic). Later, for the interpretation of the Torah, this method was called gematria (presumably from the Greek word "geometry").

Pythagoras was undoubtedly familiar with isopsephy and used it in his research and magical actions. It was believed that if two words or two phrases have the same numerical value, then there is some invisible connection between the concepts corresponding to these words. In addition, the numerical sum of a word or phrase itself could have some mystical meaning.

For example, the name Jesus in the Greek transcription has the sum of 888, and exactly the same amount is obtained as a result of adding the letters of the phrase "I am Life". The names of the ancient Greek gods also had corresponding numerological parameters.

However, there is no complete correspondence between ancient Greek isopsephy and modern numerology. This science has gone through many stages of development and has been filled with new knowledge, methods, and interpretations. Nevertheless, there is a connection between them, and the most direct one.