So a few things to think about with regard to this and related concepts (numerology in general, and really with different arguments about almost any other kind

So a few things to think about with regard to this and related concepts (numerology in general, and really with different arguments about almost any other kind of divination): Understanding _what math is_ is a very deep concept that we didn't really have a firm foundation of until the 19th century. Numbers in many languages were represented by letters. They understood that they could find true things about the world by manipulating those symbols and letters using rules (ie, doing math). It was not at all clear then (and perhaps not even now) why that should be the case, and it's not especially obvious on its face how to know which manipulations will yield useful results and which won't. A lot of _real_ math they were doing seemed like magic to them, and indeed were sometimes used in the context of magic or in theurgical rituals. And there's nothing wrong with numerological methods as mathematical manipulations necessarily, it's interpretations of those results that are where they go wrong. These people were not _stupid_, in a lot of cases they make quite sophisticated arguments to justify the validity of it, and invalidating those arguments required invalidating many of the assumptions they held about the nature of reality (many of which are still held by many people today, intuitively, if they haven't thought deeply about it). It's also the case that divination had a practical value in terms of being a way to get out of analysis paralysis and bike shedding. You can't decide what to do, you go to some theoretically neutral third party and he does some random process that produces an answer and you just go with that. It doesn't really matter what the reasoning is behind it or if it "works", the important thing is that it's a decision that stakeholders respect and nobody gets blamed for following it. It's no different than flipping a coin, really. Also, if you squint, word2vec and related concepts are sort of a very sophisticated version of this.