Meridian Numerology
It was autumn. My reading said spring.
Almost every numerology reading you can buy is written in the northern hemisphere. When it tells you the light is returning and it is time to plant, it means March in London. In Johannesburg that is harvest, and the year is closing. The numbers are right. The season carried along with them is somebody else's.
Numerology for the people of the south.
The layer the northern books never had to write
Numerology came to us through Europe and America, and that is where almost all of it is still written. The interpretation carries a calendar with it, quietly and without anyone noticing: March means spring and beginnings. June means high summer, visibility, being out in the world. September means harvest and letting go. December means the dark, and turning inward.
None of it was written for where you are standing. It did not need to be.
- Written for
- Where you live
- March — plant, begin, the light returns
- March — harvest, and the light going
- June — high summer, be seen, expand
- June — midwinter, the shortest days
- December — rest, retreat, the dark
- December — midsummer, the year at full
It is in the founding text
“…the 21st March to the 28th April, when the Sun enters the Vernal Equinox and is considered elevated or all-powerful during this period.”
The equinox itself is not in dispute — it falls on the same day everywhere. What travelled south with the books was the meaning attached to it: the strength, the rising, the beginning. Written where March is spring, and inherited for a century by everyone who read them.
The same author, thirty pages later, dismantles the fear of the number thirteen by pointing out that it “has only a limited geographical range” — that in India and in Mexico the number is honoured, and the dread is local rather than universal. He was right. He simply never turned that test on his own seasons.
Nobody was careless. They were writing where they stood, for the people standing with them. The southern half of that reading was simply never anybody's job.
It is this practice's job. That is the whole of it.
Here is the part that matters, and it is the reason this is a practice and not a gimmick. The numbers are not wrong. A Destiny number is arithmetic done on your date of birth, and it comes out the same on any continent. Nothing about the calculation needs correcting for the southern hemisphere, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
What is missing is the season you are actually standing in. The books carry a season of their own — planting in March, retreating in December — because that is what was outside the window while they were being written. It was never put there to describe your year. It was put there to describe theirs.
Which is why it feels almost right. Nothing in it is flatly false, so you never quite argue with it. It simply never describes your year, and one day you stop reading and cannot say exactly why.
There is a second layer. A personal year turns over on your birthday rather than on the first of January, so no two people cross the seasons in the same order — a March birthday runs autumn, winter, spring, summer, while an October birthday runs the reverse. Your year is worked out for your birthday and for the hemisphere you actually live in.
Where it comes from
The name is older than the system.
Which is worth saying plainly.
What I use is called a Pythagorean system, and that is the conventional name for it rather than a claim about its age. Pythagoras taught that number underlies reality. There is no evidence he assigned these values to letters, and he could not have used this alphabet — he died around 495 BC, and the Latin letters this grid runs on were not his.
Giving numbers meaning is genuinely ancient and genuinely widespread — Greek isopsephy, Hebrew gematria, and much else besides. But the particular system read here, the one where A is 1 and I is 9, was assembled in English within the last century and a half. Older writers claimed descent from Chaldea and Egypt. That is their claim, and it is tradition rather than documented history.
So I will not sell you a lineage. What I will tell you is exactly whose method this is — Richard Abbot’s modification of that modern system — and show you every step of the arithmetic so you can check it. Where a thing came from matters less than whether it is applied honestly where you are standing.
Illustration, not evidence. Nobody knows what the first person to give a number a meaning looked like.
What you receive
A written reading of your chart, prepared by hand and delivered as a document you keep.
The four roads
Destiny, Approach, Ultimate Goal and Link — what you are here for, how you begin, what you are drawn toward, and where you go when life is hard. Plus the Power Number they add up to.
Your name, read three ways
The first letter people meet, how you seem to others, and what actually draws you. Set against your date, because the gap between them is usually the reading.
The year you are in
Your personal year runs birthday to birthday, and it is worked out against the seasons you actually cross — not the ones a northern calendar assumes.
Every reduction printed
You can check the arithmetic yourself, and you are welcome to. Nothing here asks to be taken on trust.
A document, not a screen
Around a dozen pages, typeset and printable, yours to keep and to return to. Most people read it twice — once when it arrives, and again a year later when the year has turned.
If you know it, bring it
Your isiduko or isithakazelo — your clan name. It carries its own number, and it is read alongside your chart rather than folded into it. No published system has a place for a name that belongs to a lineage rather than a person, so this part is new work and is offered as an open enquiry rather than a settled reading. It is optional, and a reading is complete without it.
The method, stated once
A modified Pythagorean system — the calculation taught by Richard Abbot, whose course in numerology I studied through the College of Psychic Studies in London. Components are added whole, each calculation carries its own set of permitted answers, and the full current legal name is used rather than the name on a birth certificate.
The readings, and the seasonal frame applied to the personal year, are this practice’s own.
Readings are prepared by hand. The arithmetic is checked by machine and then checked again, which is why every step of it appears in your document.
Get a reading
I will need your full current legal name, including any middle names you never use, and your date of birth. Both have to be exact — the arithmetic runs on them. Your chart is drawn and the reading written by hand, and it is usually with you within 24 hours.
Something you want to ask first? Write to me.
A reading is not medical, psychiatric, financial or legal advice, and is not a substitute for professional care. Nothing in it diagnoses or treats a condition.