Citations:psephology

English citations of psephology

Greek numerology

• 1912, The Quest: A Quarterly Review, volume 3, page 194:

  It must, however, be admitted that Mr. Pryse is sometimes exceedingly ingenious in his analogies, and that he has probably got on the right track in his number-interpretations, led to it by the famous '666.' This is not to say that his elaborate ' key ' actually does fit the lock, but the work done of late on Pythagorean number-values or psephology shows that some of the writers of the New Testament were not unacquainted with this artifice […]

• 1917, The Quest - Volume 8, Part 2, page 698:

  Let us first see how the matter of this letter-numbering or psephology stands generally. The authors think that both the Greek and Hebrew method derive from a common source. But there is no proof of this; indeed the weak point in the whole of this exposition is that they entirely neglect the historical side of the matter and give no references.

• 1922, The Quest - Volume 14, page 409:

  Paragraph vii. treats of the so-called yematria and psephos speculation, an almost too fascinating subject at leastfor the present reviewer, who still believes that psephology and arithmomancy have had an enormous historical importance in the history of ancient mysticism, ancient philosophy, and cosmology, both in its first incipient and latest mystico-religious stage.

• 1924, George Robert Stow Mead, Gnostic John the Baptizer: Selections from the Mandæan John-Book, Together with Studies on John and Christian Origins, the Slavonic Josephus' Account of John and Jesus and the Fourth Gospel Proem, →ISBN:

  The numbers 99, 88, and 22 seem to belong to some system of mystic psephology, Or gematria as the Kabbalists afterwards called it.

• 1926, The Quest, volume 18, page 58:

  This mystic number occurs frequently; for instance, Yohana begins his mission at the age of 22. When he is conceived, his father is 99 and his mother is 88. But so far no one has given a key to this mystical psephology.

• 2013, Andrew Gregory, The Presocratics and the Supernatural, →ISBN:

  What I want to point out here is that there is a considerable breadth of numerological practices, ranging from psephology/gematria through to practices close to mathematical physics which are deemed to be too much driven by mathematical or aesthetic considerations.

The Study of elections and voting

• 1978, E. P. P. Thompson, Poverty of Theory, →ISBN, page 74:

  By the 1950s structuralisms - sometimes the product of lonely minds working in prior contexts - were flowing with the stream, and replicating themselves on every side as ideology: psychology was preoccupied with "adjustment" to "normality", sociology with "adjustment" to a self-regulating social system, or with defining hertics as "deviants" from the "value-system" of the consensus, political theory with the circuits of psephology.

• 1998, Communicator - Volume 33, page 20:

  Psephology is a field in which a paractitioner needs to tread very carefully. It is both a science and an art and while the science can be learned the art has to be developed through practice.

• 2003, David Butler, “British Psephology 1945-2001: Reflections on the Nuffield Election Histories”, in Still More Adventures With Britannia, →ISBN, page 250:

  The word psephology first appeared in print in the opening sentence of my British General Election of 1951, but I did not invent the term. It was in 1948 that Ronald McCallum, hearing that there was to be a sequel to The British General Election of 1945, remarked at a college High Table that there ought to be a word for the study of elections. Frank Hardie, a classical scholar and later President of Corpus, said "Why not call it psephology? The Athenians dropped a psephos, a pebble, into an urn when they voted."