Kabbalah: the numbers behind your name

Kabbalah is first of all a Jewish tradition of interpretation, many centuries old and concerned above all with texts. Popular astrology has usually kept only one procedure out of it: name analysis. It takes your name, turns each letter into a number and reads the result as a statement about character and the theme of a life. This page shows you how that arithmetic works, why letters carry number values at all, and how much weight the result will bear in the end.

Why letters are numbers

The Hebrew alphabet has no separate signs for numerals. Anyone who wanted to write a number used letters for it: aleph for one, bet for two, on through the tens and the hundreds. The Greek alphabet worked in exactly the same way. Every written word therefore carried a sum around with it as well — no secret, simply a side effect of the way writing was done.

Out of this double function grew a technique of interpretation called gematria. It compares words whose letter sums agree and treats the agreement as a hint about meaning. Originally this was a tool for working on texts: the point was to find cross-connections inside a sacred text, not statements about individual people.

How the arithmetic works, step by step

• The name is written down as it is actually used — not necessarily as it stands in the papers.
• Each letter is assigned its value from a fixed table.
• The values are added up.
• The sum is drawn together into a single digit by adding its digits again and again. Some systems let eleven and twenty-two stand as exceptions.
• Vowels and consonants are often counted separately as well, which gives two secondary numbers alongside the main one.

The decisive point sits in the second step, in the table. For the Latin alphabet there are several tables, and they do not agree. The most widespread one simply counts through: A is one, I is nine, and then it starts over. Others carry the Hebrew values across to Latin letters, which becomes a matter of interpretation at the latest with accented letters and the German eszett. Two tables, one name, two results. So when you come across a reading somewhere, the first sensible question is which table it was worked out with.

A name is not a birth detail

Here lies the great difference from the natal chart. A chart rests on a moment in time that no one can shift afterwards. A name, by contrast, was chosen, usually by the parents, and it can be changed — by marriage, by the name someone goes by, by a stage name. That is exactly why name analysis rarely yields a single result: the full name, the everyday name and the adopted name lead to different numbers.

That is not a contradiction, it is rather a hint: every spelling belongs to a role. The name on the identity card, the name friends use and the name you work under really do describe three different ways of showing up.

What a reading can do and what it cannot

Soberly considered, the name number is an occasion for thought, not a measurement. A number that stands for persistence puts a question to you: are you persistent, do you want to be, where were you persistent last? The answer comes from you, not from the arithmetic.

What such a reading does not do: predict events, take decisions about health or money off your hands, or explain why a particular relationship is running into trouble. The advice to change your name in order to change your life turns the order around as well. What changes first is something in the way a life is run. A new name can accompany that step and make it visible — it cannot set it off.

And how does this fit with astrology?

The name number and the natal chart work with completely different raw material: the one with letters, the other with date, time and place, and therefore with actual positions in the sky. Anyone laying the two side by side does better to treat them as two independent descriptions, not as proof of each other.

If you would rather start with the astronomical details: Astrology sets out the basics, Planets gives the building blocks of interpretation, and under Horoscopes you will find what a personal chart actually contains.