Kabbalistic name analysis: the name before the number

Before a name became a number, it was something else: a word with a history. Kabbalistic name analysis converts letters into digits and pulls them together into a single sum. This page takes the opposite route and looks at what is inside a name before anyone adds it up.

What is inside a first name

Many of the old German first names are made of two word elements that once meant something on their own. Bernhard holds the bear and hardness, Gertrud the spear and strength, Hildegard battle and protection. Nobody has read these pairs literally for a very long time; what was handed down was often a single element taken from the family, with a second one attached to it.

Later came the names of the saints and of the biblical figures, Johannes and Maria, Peter and Elisabeth, carried by baptism and by the name day. And since the last century the choice has been driven above all by fashions, which come and go in waves. A first name today often gives away which decade someone was born in – which makes it tell more about the parents than about the child.

And the surname

Family names are younger than many people assume. They took hold between the High Middle Ages and the early modern period, in the towns earlier than in the country. Four origins account for almost all of them:

• the trade: Müller, Schmidt, Schneider, Bauer;
• where the family came from or where the house stood: Bayer, Böhm, Bachmann, Steinbach;
• the first name of the father: Peters, Jansen, Petersen;
• a characteristic, often a nickname: Klein, Lang, Krause.

That Müller is one of the commonest family names in the German-speaking world therefore says nothing about the people who carry it today, and a fair amount about the number of mills there once were. A name of that kind is a job title that got stuck centuries ago.

What the arithmetic picks up of all this

None of it. For the table that assigns a digit to every letter, a name is a string of characters and nothing else. Whether there is a bear in it, a mill or a fashionable word from the year of birth makes not the slightest difference to the sum. Two names whose backgrounds could hardly be more opposed end up on the same digit without any trouble at all.

That is no argument against the arithmetic itself. It only limits what a result is able to say anything about. Who chose the name, which other suggestion it won out against, which great-aunt it was named after – all of that stays outside the arithmetic. And it is often the more interesting part.

The questions your name really answers

If your name is on your mind, there is a way that brings in more than any digit sum: ask, while there is still someone left to ask. Who chose it? Who wanted a different one? Was there a name in the family that was handed on over generations, and one that was never given again after a falling-out?

There is just as much in how your name is handled day to day. Is it constantly misspelt? Do you have to spell it out every time? Does it sound, in another language, like something you have to explain there first? Those are experiences that really do shape a person, and they appear in no digit.

What remains

A name is a more modest thing than the number reading gives it credit for, and still not a small one: the first present most people are given, chosen by people who did not know them yet and already had something in mind for them.

Anyone who wants to know what a family name has to say about their own forebears gets further with old parish registers and record books than with a sum of letters: they hold places, trades and roads that someone actually travelled. And if what interests you more is what can be read from the time and place of your birth, you start with Astrology.