Attitudes and A Path With Heart - FAQ - Numerology

What Is The Pythagorean System, Or Alphabet?

The Pythagorean alphabet is where each letter of the alphabet is assigned a number value from 1 through 9. At first glance, this seems like a simplistic and arbitrary way of doing things. One criticism aimed at the Pythagorean system is that it doesn't take the actual sound of the letter into account.

Well, there is a bit more to the story. The cipher, or decimal method of counting came to the west from the Arab world, who in turn absorbed it from the Indian culture. Our present decimal system of 0 through 9 is about 1500 years old.

Parallel to this, western languages were beginning to develop, and the growth of their alphabets has been a constant evolution. Remember, numbers and letters are one and the same thing. What is important is how we think about numbers and letters. For a thousand years or more, no thought has been given to the sounds of letters, while a tremendous amount of attention (thought) has been paid to the structure of western languages.

This means that the meanings we give to letters and numbers, in the western hemisphere, have grown alongside each other in our collective, cultural consciousness. This is what has decided the form that the Pythagorean system, or alphabet, follows.

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