What is the concept of the magic number?

Answer 1

Magic numbers have a couple of different sources.

First (and most importantly) were the Pythagoreans. This group of Greek mystics and scholars (headed by Pythagorus) believed that the most fundamental "thing" was number. One was always one was always one.

They taught that it was by understanding numbers and mathematics, one would understand the universe. While this certainly seems to be the case, the Pythagoreans did, at times, take this idea too far. They believed that EVERYTHING could be reduced to numbers, including human experience, and that the relations between these numbers would give occult knowledge of the past, present and future. For instance, using 1=A 2=B 3=C... etc, by adding the numbers of the word CAB (1+2+3) together (6) you would learn something important about the nature of a taxi cab. To this end, there was a fairly simple hierarchy to guide interpretations:

• 1= Unity. The totality of the universe
• 2= Duality. Night/Day, Good/evil. The balance between opposing forces
• 3=Creation. Mother+Father+Child. The triangle being one of the most stable geometric forms
• 4=Strength. The Stability of the square, the totality of the seasons

And so on. Now Pythagoreans reduced all things to a single digit (1-9) so, say (just as an example) your name was Bob, (2+15+2=19) they would then add the 1+9 (10) and then the 1+0 (1), resulting in a single digit to interpret.

As time went on, numerology got more complex. Qabalistic numerology (for instance) accepts values up to 500. Sometimes there are additional rules or constructs (Pythagorus also assigned each planet a number and a divine ratio, so if your number was the same as mars, its qualities were said to be the same as yours) and so on.

The other source of numerology is primitive language. Many early alphabets (like the Hebrew alphabet) did not have separate characters for their letters and their numbers. Depending on the context, their character 'a' (aleph) could be an 'a' or a '1'. This meant that every word had a numerological value and by comparing values of certain words, we could learn more about the universe.

With all these competing sources, there is no single concept for "magic number" it depends a lot on how you're defining your terms.

One other example to demonstrate this: the number '6' is called a magic number because its factors add and multiply to equal 6 (1+2+3=6, 1*2*3=6). There are other such 'magic numbers' but they're few and far between, and from an occult perspective, not all that 'magical'.