Numerology is an ages-old system, thought to have begun as early in man’s history as the first formalized written communication thousands of years ago.  As its name suggests, numerology involves the relationships between written characters and a consistently applied set of numerical values, and different cultures derive different meanings from these numerical relationships with textual forms.  Most commonly found is the variety of numerology which involves additive sums of these numerical values, but being a flexible system, numerology can also accomodate schemes which follow a multiplicative or even more complex mathematical relationships between letter forms.

In this section, we look at several different numerological schemes, generally from the kabbalistic tradition.  There is also a primer here on simple kabbalistic number theory.