Thread by @owenbroadcast

lots of people (like an oddly large number) have asked me what i think about numerology recently and, im doing my laundry right now, so, here is my take after many years on the “weird mystical stuff circuit”.

first up is the caveat. yes, numbers can have a mystical or symbolic dimension to them. there is numerical symbolism in the bible, there can be some symbolism to things coming in groups of 3, 4, 5, etc., and i do use symbolism like this in my images sometimes.

there also can be a symbolic nature and a metaphysical usefulness to analyzing things in terms of their component parts, ie breaking them down into their twofold, threefold, etc. nature. the trinity is sort of the ultimate example of this.

theres the 3 primes in alchemy (imo this is kind of a corrupted version of seeing things in terms of the trinity, thats another convo though), theres the zodiac (12), theres the four elements, these could be seen as “real” or they can just be a lens through which to view things

in fact dissecting things and analyzing them in terms of their fivefold nature was so common in antiquity and beyond that this is where the word quintessential comes from. you can see the latin word for five right in the front there, quintessential is a things basic 5 fold nature

so, there is a legitimate dimension to it. basically with everything that is deceptive or that people get sucked into its important to remember that things are rarely 100% wrong or nonsensical, there is usually a foundation onto which the deceptive aspects of something are built

i am against what is often called numerology for 2 reasons. one, most people are completely and totally unequipped to pick up an informational tool that totally blurs the line between signal and noise in your life. it often makes people go insane. thats an aspect of schizophrenia

numerology often takes what is the legitimate aspect of numerical symbolism and takes it way over the top, and suddenly you have someone thinking that all of the numbers in a certain thing or in their life in general are symbolic.

this is bad because unlike other symbols things have to come in numbers. things always come in a group of X, or a thing is X feet tall, or we naturally assign numbers to things in general. its a huge mistake (that many people make, sometimes intentionally) to 100% read into this

(this is a little obvious but im setting something up). so if we take a symbol like a cloaked figure riding a horse, okay yeah, that is symbolic if it occurs somewhere probably. but now we get to the second dimension of how such a study is often used in a predatory way.

often what systems like this do (a lot of charlatan mystical systems rely on this actually) is they take someone who has no experience with thinking of things symbolically or really i should say, looking at things in a symbolic way, and it introduces them to that world.

thats good i guess, in + of itself. but what these systems do is they then take this universal ability to view things as symbols and, because this system is the first time this person has encountered viewing things in this way, they think it somehow proves the system or something

here’s what i mean. you take someone who has no experience viewing things in this way, and you flood them with this information. 3 is the triangle, its the threefold nature of things. the trinity. the three primes in alchemy. what does “4” mean? show them some geometry, etc.

and then just keep stacking this vague and somewhat universal way of reading deeper into things on top of them and suddenly they think theyve accessed some deeper level of knowledge and that (most importantly) that what theyre hearing is somehow unique to their system (its not)

this happens a in general faux esoterica. take someone + give them the “secret” meanings of things, show them some sacred art from a few different cultures and give them kind of a jungian joseph campbell analysis of it, you can suck them in easily if they’ve never heard it before

the problem is that you can also take this lens and read a deep profound meaning into anything. oh im wearing TWO shoes, theyre the opposite poles of life, dark and light, + each shoe has 7 lace holes, those are the polarized 7 classical planets of the heptarchia, and on and on.

so suddenly you have some girl convinced that her boyfriends license plate is symbolically related to the address of the home she grew up in and her birthday because she never thought of things through this lens and now shes basically schizophrenic. unironically: many such cases

okay so thats all extremely obvious. but i think what most people are unaware of is that there is a slight intentional dimension to this wherein these systems are intentionally designed to generate what i call tautological information.

most modern systems like this really take their heritage from one place, even if they dont realize it (most do not). thats just my opinion. i actually brought the book to the laundromat so i can post some excerpts from it but i gotta put my wash into the dryer so, pause.

alright so herein id like to give a little bit of a window into what people get into with this stuff and the ideological core of it that in my opinion most practitioners dont even realize that they’re orbiting around.

when you talk to people really into specifically numerology most will tell you something about it being an ancient art and will trace the roots of what theyre doing back to pythagoras and people like that. this is just a tale, of course tales often have a slight basis in reality.

there are ancient examples of numerology but like i said above in my opinion i dont really think theyre much like the modern stuff, nor do i think theres an actual lineage of direct informational praxis here, its mostly an imagined connection.

it really all comes back to, this is just my opinion now, but you know who it is. if it sucks and if its wrapped in a fat layer of what is supposed to be a sexy mystique.. if its occult and after 1900 with a vague origin story, you know this guy is in the mix, every time baby

this book is not very well known outside what id call semi-serious occult studies but its absolutely seminal (pun intended) in terms of analyzing all this stuff, really in my opinion this lays the informational framework for most post 1900s weird “made up” modern occult stuff.

really the whole stage is set for post 1900s faux esoterica in this essay about his concept of a magical alphabet. basically, he, the first of many people in the west to have this situation after being exposed to many religions and ideas from around the world, had this problem:

theres all these systems and religions and ideas around and, they all use similar but different terms and lenses to describe the world. so the hindu and christian both say “soul” and “god” but mean different things when they use these terms.

so instead of actually learning what each term means to each group and just dealing with the fact that these viewpoints are in conflict, he (and many after him) attempt to harmonize these apparently conflicting terms and views into one system:

so, to do this, he decided to take the kabbalistic tree of life and basic numbers and use them as an excel spreadsheet to lay all these conflicting systems over to harmonize them:

huge echoes of this stuff in new age btw. there is this impulse that “well, all of these systems cant be wrong, but, how can they all sync up?” and this is really the first and most densely informational manifestation of this urge that would characterize post 1900 “spirituality”

just gotta say im really laying it out here. most people have never even heard of this book even if it sets the stage for exactly what theyre doing in their own spiritual practice every day.

anyway thats the whole point of this book, to create this framework. about 60% of the book is just tables and charts mapping different “sets” of things onto this chart. precious stones, hindu gods, early christian churches, the I Ching, every part of each “set” gets a number here

this type of system is combined with something called gematria (assigning each number in the alphabet a letter based on its order and reading into it, so CAB would be given the value 3 1 2) and other ways of generating information from this.

so for example, one thing these people (in the most general numerology sense) do, is then take these numbers (any number) and then reduce them to a single integer by adding up their component parts.

so if you did the gematria of someones name and got 415 youd add 4 and 1 and 5 and get 10 and then add 1 and 0 so their name reduces to one. you reduce all gematria in this way and then read into the coincidental sync ups.

i thought id go a little bit more into stuff like that but, that gives you a pretty good idea of what its like and the systems get much more absurd and elaborate and they all stack over each other. this is what i call tautological information generation.

not a catchy name but over time i just started using that term for these systems that generate their own information and then present that information as progressive levels of depth for someone theyre sucking deeper into it, when really its just tautological self referential info

gonna post one more excerpt from the book and wrap this up but my laundry is done so hold UP.

okay gonna wrap this up. anyway the most telling part of this cursed genesis comes in a part of the book where he is explaining some of the more complex gematria and has to address the fact that its pretty obvious that you can manipulate this system to make anything mean anything

he actually does what most people do when confronted with some obvious absurdity like this or some way in which their system is contradictory, or tautological, he says “of course it can mean anything! thats the whole point man its a mystery bro”.

basically what im getting at are there are some people who understand that these matrices of information generation can be built out of anything to create whatever meaning u want, and think that this is somehow deep or mystical or something. then you have people who dont get this

theres a big difference between these 2 groups. i guess the whole point of this thread is that in my opinion most modern faux occult stuff that relies on this type of meta number symbolism matrix can trace itself back to someone who knew it could be manipulated to mean anything

this is an extreme oversimplification, of course no system can be said to originate the idea of numbers having a deeper meaning and almost no active groups actually trace themselves back to this book and style of working but in my opinion this is a huge part of modern occult

its kind of like one of those albums that maybe most people dont know about but when you really look at where groups originate or trace their pedigree and lineage and where their ideas come from, this is a huge node and where a lot of things started. in my opinion.

so thats basically what i think about numerology and more specifically what i think about when people ask me about numerology. of course some numerical symbolism is real but overall what is called numerology is bad for a variety of reasons and i advise against counseling it.