The soul number: vowels, consonants and what they are supposed to mean

Besides the name number taken from all the letters, numerology recognises two further values: the soul number from the vowels and the expression number from the consonants.

The distinction

The soul number (vowels) is said to concern the inner side — what someone wants without showing it.
The expression number (consonants) is said to concern the outer side — the impression someone makes.
The name number (all the letters) is said to cover the whole.

The reasoning comes from an old idea about language: vowels are the sustained sound, the breath; consonants shape it and set its limits. Inside and outside, matter and form — an image that occurs in many traditions and is applied here to the spelling of a name.

Working it out

As with the name analysis: every letter is turned into a number through the table A–I = 1–9, J–R = 1–9, S–Z = 1–8, the values are added up and reduced to a single digit — once with the vowels alone, once with the consonants alone.

Two stumbling blocks

The letter Y. Sometimes a vowel, sometimes a consonant, depending on its position in the word — and on the system. With names containing a Y, two readings give two different soul numbers, and no rule settles which one holds.

The language. Which letters count as vowels is a property of the script in question. In Hebrew, where the idea comes from, vowels are traditionally not written at all — the distinction the method appeals to cannot be drawn there in that form.

How to handle it

Anyone who uses numerology as a prompt — as an occasion to think about oneself — gets on with it well enough. Anyone who takes it as a statement about facts should know that the result depends on decisions made by the person doing the interpreting: which name, which transliteration, which Y.

With living people the same applies here as with charts: anyone who has not asked for it is not given a reading on these pages.