The use of number
s as divination tool
s. There are two major numerological system
s both of which come from the Kabala.
The first (and more complex of the two) is gematria in which the Hebrew spelling of a word is converted to a number, and all words which convert to the same number are considered connected if not equivalent. In ancient Hebrew there were no seperate symbols for numbers, and so it was quite natural to read the words as numbers.
The second method is to assign meaning to the numbers one through nine, and reduce all other whole numbers to one of those nine numbers via "Theosophical Arithmetic". Theosophical Arithmetic is an algorithm: add up all the digits of a base-ten number, test if the number is bigger than ten and if not repeat the process. Interestingly, Theosophical Arithmetic always results in the last digit of the base-nine representation of a whole number.