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 wrapped around them is upside down.

Numerology for the people of the south.

Why your readings have always felt half a year out

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.

Read any of that in Johannesburg and it is wrong by six months.

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

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 wrong is the season the writing wraps around the number — being told to plant while you are reaping, to rest while the light is returning, to expand into a summer that is, where you are standing, the middle of winter.

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.

An illustration of a scribe at work on a papyrus of figures and ruled grids

Where it comes from

It travelled from Alexandria to Athens to London.

It is coming home.

The tradition holds that the Chaldeans and the Egyptians were the first masters of the hidden meaning of numbers, and it is from there that the study reached Greece, then Europe, then the English-speaking world that writes most of it today.

Whatever the route, the reading has spent a long time away from this half of the world. Bringing it back is not a matter of changing the arithmetic. It is a matter of reading it from where we are standing.

Illustration. The account of transmission is tradition rather than documented history, and is offered as such.

What you receive

A written reading of your chart, prepared by hand and delivered as a document you keep.

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, so allow a few days rather than a few minutes.

Get a reading

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.