The inventor of angel numbers later called them garbage
In 2004 the writers Doreen Virtue and Lynnette Brown popularised angel numbers, repeating digits like 111 or 444 said to carry hidden messages. The idea spread through magazines and social media for two decades. Then, in a 2024 interview after converting to Christianity, Virtue disowned it completely, saying she regretted ever creating it.
Angel numbers are only the latest chapter in a very old habit. Numerology is the belief that numbers have a mystical link to events, people or ideas, and it often involves converting the letters of a name into numbers and reading meaning into the total. Before the 20th century it went by arithmancy, from the Greek for number and divination; that word dates to the 1570s, while numerology does not show up in English until around 1907.
Ancient rulers took it seriously. An 8th-century BC Assyrian inscription of Sargon II boasts that the wall of his city Khorsabad was built 16,283 cubits long to match the numerical value of his name. Using letters as numbers began in the Greek city of Miletus, and Aristotle reported that followers of Pythagoras practised isopsephy, adding up letter values in words. The Jewish tradition of gematria, used by rabbis to interpret scripture, works the same way, as do systems based on Arabic abjad, Armenian and Greek numerals.
The practice kept resurfacing. The Arab alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan built his experiments around the numerical values of substance names. In 1658 Sir Thomas Browne wrote The Garden of Cyrus to show the number five and the quincunx pattern turning up across art and nature. In the 16th century Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa assigned numbers to the Latin alphabet, and the modern Pythagorean method maps letters to values from 1 to 9. The poet John Skelton used an English letter-number scheme as early as 1523.
Science uses the word as a put-down. A theory gets labelled numerology when it seems driven by striking patterns in numbers rather than by any mechanism. Meanwhile the popular version persists: celebrities announce they are entering personal nine-year cycles, and enthusiasts keep finding significance in dates with repeating digits.
Source: Numerology
