Based on your date of birth and full name, key numerological values are calculated: life path number, destiny number, soul number, personality number and maturity number. Each number carries specific energy revealing talents, karmic lessons, periods of fortune and challenge, and dominant character traits. The analysis also includes a review of Master numbers (11, 22, 33) if present.

Where it comes from

Assigning meaning to numbers is older than any single school. Pythagoras and his followers in the sixth century BC held that number was the principle behind everything, and that view fed into later European esoteric thought. The system most people meet today — life path, destiny, soul and personality numbers derived from a birth date and a full name — was assembled in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century, largely through the work of L. Dow Balliett and Juno Jordan. The older Chaldean method, which assigns different values to letters and leaves out the number nine, survives alongside it.

How the method works

The calculation reduces numbers by adding their digits until a single digit remains, with eleven, twenty-two and thirty-three kept whole as master numbers. The life path comes from the birth date and is treated as the main line of the reading. The destiny or expression number comes from every letter of the full name at birth. The soul number uses the vowels of that name, the personality number the consonants. The maturity number is the life path and destiny added together, and is read as what the second half of life tends toward.

What a reading covers

A full reading gives each of those numbers with its meaning, then reads them against one another — a life path that pulls one way and a destiny number that pulls another is itself the finding. It also covers the personal year, which cycles from one to nine and is used to say what kind of year you are in, and the karmic debt numbers thirteen, fourteen, sixteen and nineteen where they appear in the calculation.

Common questions

Which name do I use if I changed it?: The full name from the birth certificate is used for the destiny, soul and personality numbers. A later name is read as a second layer, describing what you have taken on rather than what you were given.
What makes eleven, twenty-two and thirty-three different?: They are not reduced to a single digit. They are read as carrying the meaning of their reduced form intensified — eleven as a heightened two, twenty-two as a heightened four — together with more difficulty in living it out.
Pythagorean or Chaldean?: The Pythagorean system maps the letters A to I onto one to nine in order and is the common one. The Chaldean assigns values by sound rather than alphabetical order and never uses nine for a letter. They give different numbers for the same name, so a reading should say which it used.