As I write this, it’s 11:11 a.m — a sign from my spirit guides that I am on the right life path and can achieve great things. My breakfast BLT cost $9.99, a number that is associated with new beginnings and transformation. And my dog just licked my hand five times in a row, an indication that transformation, change, and personal growth are coming my way (though it could also indicate that I just had a BLT for breakfast).
These sequences are commonly known as angel numbers, a New Age concept that suggests the numerical patterns that occur in everyday life contain hidden messages. Numbers that repeat — 111, 333, 666 — are especially significant. They are also everywhere: On TikTok, there are hundreds of thousands of posts under the #angelnumbers hashtag, instructing you how to calculate your own angel number (essentially, by adding up the digits in your birth date); every month, almost half a million people ask Google what 333 means (embrace your creativity and self-expression) or 444 (the angels are sending you love, support, and guidance!). Kylie Jenner often wears a necklace sporting her own angel number, 222, while The Hills’ Kristin Cavallari also has 1111 tattooed on her bicep.
To believe in angel numbers is to believe that there are divine messages hidden in every corner of the universe, no matter where you look. They appear on clocks, on license plates, on airline tickets, on a speedometer. Taylor, a 31-year-old woman from Pennsylvania I recently spoke to, told me that angels recently tried to warn her about something bad happening to her. She woke up feeling unwell that morning at 4:11, which stands for stability and connecting with one’s intuition. She wanted to call in sick, but decided to drive to work anyway, getting into a car wreck on her morning commute. The experience, she said, “taught me that I needed to listen to myself.”
The idea that numbers contain hidden messages is not necessarily new. Numerology has been around in some form since ancient Greece, when Pythagoras postulated that numbers such as “1” and “4” contained mystical properties. (He also thought all odd numbers were male, and all even numbers female.) But the term “angel numbers” has only been around since 2004, when Doreen Virtue, a former New Age spiritual teacher, came up with the idea while sitting on her bathroom floor.
“It’s kind of perfect, because this stuff should be thrown down the toilet,” Virtue says when I reach her at her home in Washington state. “It’s garbage. I regret it, and I’m sorry that I made them.” It was the mid-’90s, and she was a stay-at-home mom of two boys in Newport Beach, California. She often locked herself inside her bathroom to meditate in peace, and one day, she says, she received a “download” that “angels were sending repeating numbers on receipts and telephone numbers, and these patterns meant something.”
Virtue was already a well-established New Age teacher and author. She started her career as a psychotherapist treating patients with eating disorders, but quit in 1995 after surviving an attempted carjacking. She became convinced that angels had been with her during the ordeal, allowing her to escape unharmed. “I started to talk to people who’d had these weird, unexplainable experiences that went way beyond coincidence,” she says. “We all thought it was angel intervention.” She began writing about her experience with otherworldly entities, publishing oracle cards and books like Healing With the Angels and Angel Therapy. Her publisher loved her angel numbers idea, and she started drafting the meanings behind the numbers with her coauthor, Lynette Brown, with whom she had already written a previous book. “It was very fortune cookie stuff, very generalized,” she says. (Brown did not respond to a request for comment.)
In 2005, the two published Angel Numbers: Angels Explain the Meaning of 111, 444, and Other Numbers in Your Life. It was a pocket-size, 306-page glossary of the hidden meanings behind every three-digit number in existence. (Want to decipher four-digit-or-larger numbers? You’ll have to find a copy of the 2008 sequel, Angel Numbers 101.) Look at the clock; is it 7:08 a.m.? “God is telling you that you’re on the right path and reaping a great bounty of abundance,” Virtue and Brown write. Is your flight number 433? “You’re loved, guided, and supported by the ascendant masters.” Mulling over a purchase of $77 pants? “Congratulations! You’re on the right path mentally and physically.”
The book sold so well Virtue took her teachings on the road, lecturing to audiences around the world about angel numbers. She went on to publish more than 50 books and tarot card sets in 38 languages worldwide, and appeared on The View, Sally Jessy Raphael, and Oprah (twice). “I was being treated like a rock star,” she says. “My husband and I were flown around the world first class, talking to standing-room-only audiences.”
At the time, Virtue insists, she genuinely believed she had received this information directly from the angels, and that what she was teaching her students was legitimate. “I thought the angels and their messages were real,” she says. “There was no trickery involved.” But she admits she had doubts.
“I knew someone whose mom was dying, and the number 444 was a comfort to her,” she says. “She thought that meant her mom would live, and she didn’t. It may be reassuring to think angels are with you, but to say, ‘I don’t have to take action, because the angels are going to do the work,’ or ‘the angels told me this is going to be okay’ — that’s false hope.” Sometimes, she’d consult angel numbers and cards to tell women to leave their partners, or to quit their jobs and move to Peru and become healers. “Just stupid, delusional things,” she says.
Still, Virtue regularly consulted angel numbers herself, using them to guide decisions that she says she now regrets. She’s been married five times, she says, because she was “following the New Age teaching of ‘follow your heart, follow your dreams, meet a man, get married right away, and maybe this time it’ll be different.’ It was all based on following the angel numbers that would say, ‘Keep going, you’re on the right path.’ And I wasn’t.”
In 2015, Virtue was driving home and listening to the radio when she heard a preacher talk about the dangers of false teachers. “I felt my consciousness pricked,” she says. “I thought, He’s describing me. That was the first time I thought, Maybe I’m not helping people.” In September 2017, Virtue announced she had converted to Christianity and renounced her published work — including angel numbers, due to the teaching in Deuteronomy that interpreting omens is “detestable to the Lord.”
The backlash was immediate. “People told me they felt I was their spiritual mother, and they felt betrayed by me,” she says. Her publisher cut ties with her and started refunding people who had bought her books, and Virtue offered refunds for her classes. Because of her spending habits, including maintaining a ranch in Hawaii, raising rescue animals, and traveling the world first class, she ended up in serious debt, and says she currently owes the IRS $2 million in back taxes from the year she was fired. She and her husband were forced to sell their home, leaving the Hawaii ranch for a smaller place in Washington state to care for their ailing parents; any residuals from her old books, she says, go directly to the IRS. “I’m not rich and famous from all this stuff. It was a mistake. And I’m still dealing with it.”
Today, Virtue is a Christian YouTuber and regularly goes on podcasts warning people about things like manifesting and positive affirmations, believing that they breed “passivity” and “delusional” thought. “God gave us a whole range of emotions,” she says. “It’s okay to be angry, it’s okay to be sad, and it’s not going to attract negative things into your life if you admit these things.” Teaching otherwise, she says, is a form of “mind control.”
Her audience and income are much smaller than they were at the height of her New Age fame. On YouTube, she makes about $1,000 to $2,000 a month, she says, largely relying on Social Security and her husband’s income to get by. “I’m making in a year what I used to make in a week when I was in the New Age,” she says.
Two years ago, she heard that angel numbers were going viral on platforms like TikTok, and she started making videos denouncing them, using Evangelical Christian vernacular to criticize those wearing 444 necklaces. Believing in angel numbers “means you don’t trust God with your future,” she says in one 2024 video filmed in front of her bookcase, wearing a simple cerulean tunic in lieu of the indigo-hued robes and beaded jewelry she wore in the 1990s. “You want to peek into the future to know if it’s gonna be okay. Trusting in the Lord is what we are called to do instead. God’s got this.”
The comments on that YouTube video, as well as the other videos on Virtue’s channel, are disabled, due to the immense amount of hateful feedback she gets from former acolytes. “People find comfort in this because they want this magical solution to problems, but there is no magical solution. You have to do some hard work,” she says. “You have to get a job, and you have to be responsible with your finances, you have to go to the doctor. These are things that people often don’t want to do. They’d rather have this fantasy that the angels are taking care of all this.”
Virtue’s efforts have done little to dissuade those on spiritual TikTok. Years after she left the New Age, some of her former students still make videos theorizing why she made the change of heart, hypothesizing that she was possessed by a demonic spirit or controlled by her husband or that she experienced a form of spiritual psychosis. (Virtue says none of that is true.) Many of these influencers point to the roots of numerology in ancient Greece to make sense of Virtue’s actions and justify the veracity of angel numbers, even if the woman who coined the term insists it’s bunk. “Angel numbers still hold value,” one popular influencer puts it in one of her videos. “The angels are still using those numbers to communicate with you regardless, even though the woman who coined the term doesn’t align with her anymore. She was just a vessel for them at one point in time.”
But most angel number devotees probably aren’t aware of Virtue’s role in coining them, or of the fact that she has since disavowed them. There is still a growing number of people who use them as a guide for making significant life decisions: Look at any number of sub-Reddits and you’ll see a woman fretting that her mother, who is experiencing chest pains, may soon die because she’s seeing the number “69” everywhere; or a woman debating whether to stay with a boyfriend who has cheated on her because “the universe” is sending her repeated numbers like 888 and 666.
Taylor, the Pennsylvania woman who believes her failure to notice angel numbers led to her car crash, concedes part of Virtue’s argument when I raise it to her: “A lot of people use not just angel numbers but all woo-woo stuff to avoid responsibility,” she says. Still, Taylor, who has 888 (the symbol of abundance) tattooed on her forearm, maintains that numbers can be a conduit for divine spirits’ communication with us. “I do believe in a higher power and think the angels have something to do with it for me personally,” she says. Anything, she believes, “can be a message.”
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