Chaldean numerology vs gematria

One table, two practices

The Chaldean chart assigns 1 to 8 to the letters by sound — A, I, J, Q, Y = 1; B, K, R = 2; C, G, L, S = 3; and so on — and never assigns 9. Type a word into a gematria calculator that offers the chart, or hand it to a Chaldean numerologist, and the first sum is identical.

Everything after that sum is different. Gematria stops at the number and asks what other words share it — a question about language and texts. Chaldean numerology continues: it reduces the number, looks it up in a table of meanings, combines it with a number drawn from the birth date, and produces a reading of a person. The chart was fixed in its modern form by Cheiro’s Book of Numbers in 1926^{[1] Source: Cheiro’s Book of Numbers}, and the encyclopaedic histories of numerology treat it as one of the two standard modern systems alongside the “Pythagorean” 1–9 chart^{[2] Source: Numerology}. The table itself, its sound-based logic and the reasons for the missing 9 are covered on the Chaldean calculator page; this article is about the second half.

What Chaldean numerology adds

• The name number. The name is summed with the Chaldean chart; the unreduced total is called the compound number and is read first. Cheiro gave each compound number from 10 upward a picture-name and a meaning — 23, for instance, is “the Royal Star of the Lion” and is read as fortunate^{[1] Source: Cheiro’s Book of Numbers}. The compound number is then reduced to a single digit, which is read as well.
• The name used. Chaldean practice typically sums the name a person is actually called by, not the full legal name — the opposite of the Pythagorean convention — on the theory that the name in daily use is the one that acts on the person.
• The birth number. The day of the month a person was born (and, in some presentations, the whole date reduced) is treated as fixed and primary; the name number is judged by whether it harmonises with it.
• Meanings and advice. Each digit has a character (1 leadership, 2 sensitivity, and so on), and practitioners advise altering the spelling of a name to reach a more favourable number — which is the clearest sign that the practice is about the person, not the word.

None of this exists in gematria. Gematria has no meaning table for 1–9, no birth numbers, no advice, and no concept of a favourable value. It keeps the full sum, as Chaldean numerology keeps the compound number, but for a different reason: because the full sum is where matches with other words are found.

One name, three ways

Take “Sarah Cohen”, born on 7 March 1990. All arithmetic below is done by the site’s engine.

The numerologist now reads 37 and 1 against 7 and 2 and produces a character and a forecast. The gematria user notes that 92 and 580 are values, looks for other words that share them, and — for a personal name — usually finds nothing worth reporting. Same first step; the practices part at the second.

The actual Chaldeans

The Chaldeans were the ruling people of the Neo-Babylonian empire of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE; by Roman times “Chaldean” had come to mean “astrologer”, which is why the name was attractive to a twentieth-century occultist. Their scribes wrote cuneiform and counted in base sixty^{[3] Source: Sexagesimal}. They had no alphabet, so no alphabetic letter-table can descend from them; a system assigning 1–8 to Latin letters by their English sounds is, whatever its merits, not Babylonian.

There is a genuine Mesopotamian link to gematria, and it is not the one the name implies. The earliest known instance of a name treated as a number is the inscription of the Assyrian king Sargon II, who built a wall to the numerical value of his name in the eighth century BCE^{[4] Source: Gematria}, and scholars have traced several rabbinic interpretive techniques, gematria among them, to Mesopotamian scribal practice^{[5] Source: Gematria}. So the ancient Near East does stand behind gematria — behind the Hebrew practice, by way of scholarship, not behind Cheiro’s chart. The history page gives the timeline.

The differences, listed

Which calculator you want

If you want your Chaldean name number and compound number, the Chaldean calculator gives both and shows each letter’s value; the meanings are Cheiro’s and are yours to consult. If you want the value of a word in order to compare it with others, the same page serves, but the decoder shows all fourteen ciphers at once and is the better tool. If you want to know how much weight either result can bear, the accuracy page measures it — and its conclusion, that a shared number is where a comparison begins rather than what it proves, is one the rabbis who first ranked gematria as a “side-dish of wisdom” would have recognised^{[6] Source: Gematria}.