Cast & Chart

Life Path number

2

Numbers describe tendencies in a symbolic tradition. They cannot decide health, money, law, marriage or children.

In the sources

And first it is the general opposite to the Monad, the cause of dissimilitude, the interval between multitude and the Monad.

W. Wynn Westcott, Numbers: Their Occult Power and Mystic Virtues (3rd ed., 1911; first published 1890)

About this number

Few numbers divide the old books as sharply as 2. Sepharial's 1911 list for name totals gives it death, fatality and destruction, and the 1651 English of Agrippa reports a Pythagorean view that two is no number at all, only a confusion of units. Westcott, gathering Greek sources, admits that the ideas attached to it are so unlike each other that he struggles to explain how they arose.

American writers of the early twentieth century went the other way. Walton in 1914 calls 2 kind, diplomatic and fond of peace, with a strength that works inwardly. Cheasley in 1916 names it Collection and pictures a peacemaker who gathers experience and minds the smallest details, and Taylor in 1926 lists tact and diplomacy.

Today's popular Life Path 2 descends from that American line: the partner, the mediator, the person who reads the mood of a room. Modern practitioners also warn against keeping the peace at one's own expense. None of this reaches back to Westcott's material, where 2 is a puzzle about unity and division.

Where this text comes from

Statements credited to an older writer follow the scanned text named here and are paraphrased unless quoted. The modern readings are labeled as modern and come from none of these works.

Our own plain wording. It is not a translation of any single source.