The people who invented numerological techniques knew that you could manipulate numbers using particular rules and discover new facts about the world -- for exa

The people who invented numerological techniques knew that you could manipulate numbers using particular rules and discover new facts about the world -- for example that you could measure the length of strings and use that to determine, which ones would sound good if you plucked them at the same time. Give the large number of successes that mathematics lead to, it only made sense that they would try to encode more things as numbers, including a more general method of translating _all words_ to numbers, using the most straight forward encoding they could think of -- just having the letters stand in for the numbers that the _same letters_ stood for when they were doing math. It didn't develop this way in reality of course, but you could probably draw a fairly straight line of logical developments from numerology to word2vec and LLMs.