Numerology, Ir. Chris Engels

 One of the people who were involved with the spiritual encounters at the Palace Het Oude Loo, and later at a Hotel Het Open Veld in the Netherlands in the 50's and early 60's, was the engineer Chris Engels. Something attracted him to what he calls the qualitative meaning of numbers - i.e. as opposed to their more prominent and manifest quantitative meaning. He describes how his interest was kindled by a chance meeting in a German POW camp in world war II, by Rudolf Steiner's work especially on the Gospel of Matthew, the well-known Dutch pediatrician Dr. G.P. van Wijnmalen, who studied the meanings of numbers for many years. Eventually he met Miss M. Hofmans, and in '76 was inspired to discover something about the numerical meaning of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

Dr. G.P. Wijnmalen (1880-1962) was a Dutch pediatrician who studied the qualitative meanings of numbers for some 40 years, however he never published on the topic. But J.W. Kaiser cites him here and there, and I know that my psychiatrist father has consulted him a few times in situations where some how a number seemed to be key to a therapeutic situation. Numbers in this context can have symbolic meaning. And clearly those meanings have sometimes ancient origins, going back as far as Plato, and who knows before him. 

The following observations are taken from the Dutch manuscript of Ir. Engels that was published privately in the 1990s, with the title (translated) of: Peculiarities Regarding the Expressive Potential of Numbers, also in Antiquity. (An Impossible Story). And it was in three sections, so I will start with the first one, section A, which is titled "Expressions." Engels considers that the whole development of these perceived meanings stretches over 45 centuries and he calls them a hidden red thread, demonstrating the central theme of humanity, of human creativity ranging from procreation all the way to including in the spiritual sense, of transcendence to the Higher Self.  

The first number he discusses is 23, and his explorations are fascinating, including the idea that Plato concidered the dodecahedron a divine symbol of the universe and that if you connect all the internal lines between the points, you get 22 regular multi-faceted shapes, with many intersections and among them are 22-regular multi-surface shapes, resulting in 22+1 regular shaped multi-surface forms, including the initial dodecahedron itself. He connects this to a variety of antique artifacts where 23 appears to be parsed as 22+1. He explores examples in the Odyssee, and elsewhere, and calls the number 23 the Rhythm of Time and Space. And he mentions that in biorhythms, 23 the physical rhythm is. 

The second number he discusses is 42, referring first to an Attic plate with a rim motif of 7 sections of 6 spiral motives, noting that it is a representation of Persephone who alternates between the day world and the underworld, and again the surrounding decoration makes up the number 42. The mystery temple at Eleusis in Greece has 42 columns in 7 rows of 6. And another example from Thracian culture of a plate that celebrates yet another symbol of crossing over between life and death, but noting that in Thracian culture the appreciation was reversed from what we commonly think, considering a birth sad, coming to this vale of misery and a death a happy event, returning to eternal life. He notes how in Egyptian mythology Osiris has 42 servants  as the Lord of Life and Death. Next, he is on to the trek to the promised land where in the book Numbers, 42 stations are mentioned on the journey. Again from the Bible how there are 42 generations from Abraham to Jesus, something Steiner had drawn attention to. Then he gives other examples from Platonic geometry, and a Buddhist tradition that speaks of the 42 streams of the Ganges river. he mentions that in the cycle of Venus, from the time of Morning star to Evening star, and vice-versa it is approximately 2x42 weeks, another way of connecting life and death. He explores the notion of the numbers 6 (Law) and 7 (Wisdom) and explores the meaning of the Wise application of the Law. or also 21 x 2, as the Word in the pairs of opposites.

I might add that J.W. Kaiser in his magnum opus, a commentary and translation of the Gospel according to Mark, adds to this picture by observer that a time, times and half a time, adds up to 1+2=3 + 1/2, totaling 3-1/2 cycles through the zodiac (i.e "time" being one year), or 42 months, which is the 3-1/2 years of Jesus' ministry on earth, and again 42 months being comparable to the 42 "years"  of the trek through the desert in Exodus and Numbers. A journey of salvation, a journey from life in the dream (slavery) to the promised land (salvation). Suggesting this is not so much about the connection between life and death as it is between life in the dream and the time of waking up in the dream.

And that is just the first two of 19 chapters in Section A of the book, respectively 10 and 18 pages long, so I have evidently just lifted out a few interesting details out of what was this man's life's work.