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By Root 352 0

better known for her byline, Mrs. L. Dow Balliett. A woman of angular beauty, with high cheekbones and intelligent eyes, Balliett was widely respected in Atlantic City for her civic activities, such as the founding of a Women’s Research Club, and for her impressive range of books on music, mysticism, and movement therapies. A self-professed student of “Pythagorean number mysticism,” Balliett was the first intellect to assign numerals to the letters of the English alphabet. Based on the occult system of multiple digits reducing to single numerals (i.e., 10, as 1 + 0, equals 1), Balliett numbered the alphabet in a repeat pattern of 1 to 9, creating a formula to reveal and interpret the inner meaning of names, dates, and places in the manner of the ancient Greeks and Kabalists (or sort of).

The “Balliett System of Number-Vibration” achieved tremendous popularity under its more memorable name: numerology. The term seems to have been coined in 1871—with no occult connotation at all—by an American anarchist and cosmological philosopher, Stephen Pearl Andrews. He used it to refer to a universal philosophy of numbers. (Andrews also made the first use of the term scientology, again to define an all-compassing theory of life.) By the 1920s the term, which had appeared in several other contexts, was finally, and fatefully, attached to Balliett’s system by one of her most industrious students, Julia Seton, a dentist and New Thought lecturer. The name stuck, and the practice inspired thousands of books and a widespread industry in modern number mysticism—all of it emanating from the sands of Atlantic City, the Alexandria of pop occultism.

Have You a Problem???

Back home in Philadelphia, the newly anointed Sydney Omarr flummoxed his parents, a couple with the unexotic names of Harry and Rose. But Omarr saw the future in more ways than one. He produced mimeographed editions of “Sydney Omarr’s Private Course on Numerology,” which sold for $2 at Philadelphia’s famous book mart, Leary’s. He began writing for astrology magazines, trading articles for classified ad space announcing: Have You a Problem??? … Let Sydney Omarr Help You Solve It. He charged $2 for a personal astrological and numerological profile. “My father, Harry, a grocer, and mother, Rose, a housewife, stopped worrying about me when the checks started coming in,” Omarr recalled.

At seventeen, he joined the Army during World War II and attained the only official military post in astrology, though as an entertainer rather than a stargazing strategist. During the war, Omarr hosted a popular program on Okinawa Armed Forces Radio, where he predicted the results of horse races, boxing matches, and sporting events. His Army career coincided perfectly with the period when astrology was translating into mass entertainment, especially in the form of newspaper columns.

The horoscope column appears to have been born in England on August 24, 1930, when prognosticator R. H. Naylor cast a star chart for the infant Princess Margaret in the Sunday Express. Naylor’s article included “a few hints on the happenings of this week” and general forecasts for upcoming birthdays. Readers loved it and wrote in for more, leading to a widely read weekly feature. America’s newspaper empires took notice. The now ubiquitous “sun sign” columns, in which twelve short daily predictions are pegged to zodiacal birth symbols, probably got started in 1936 in the New York Post, which began running a feature by Edward A. Wagner, a reporter-turned-stargazer. By 1945, about 150 newspapers—still fewer than ten percent of all U.S. dailies—ran astrology columns. In the decades ahead, the trend exploded to the point where, by 1968, about 1,250 out of 1,750 daily papers included sun-sign columns. Reaching millions, the columns were dominated by the cohort of Omarr, Righter, and psychic Jeane Dixon (who Omarr complained to The New York Times wasn’t “running a legitimate astrology column”).

For Omarr, the 1960s and ’70s were a time flush with regular appearances as the “house astrologer” on The Merv Griffin Show, high-flying