Did Nikola Tesla say that 3,6,9 are the key to the universe?

Question

I have seen the following quote at numerous places:

“If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have the key to the universe.”

~Nikola Tesla

For example, this Youtube video with 7.7 million views mentions the quote. Here is a blog post about the quote. People even write books about it.

At this website, I found something about his private journals:

Tesla’s Private journals, which were unsealed after his death, included many references to the number 3, 6, and 9. He would often work on problems for extended periods of time, and during these sessions, he would jot down 3, 6, and 9 as a reminder to himself to take a break.

I also found that Tesla might not have been the first to talk about 3,6,9: John Keely (1827-1898) said

"The relative frequency of all sympathetic streams is in the ratio 3:6:9. Those whose relative frequencies are 3:9 are mutually attractive, while those having the relation of 6:9 are mutually repellant."

Answer 1

UPDATE!!

Okay, so this goes deep. I initially posted that I had found the quote archived in 2002 the website of SomaEnergetics, "designed to Release Blockages in the Energy Bodies & assist you in Connecting with Source using the Ancient, Original Solfeggio Scale Tuning Forks."

We discussed in comments and observed that the 2002 post actually had a bibliography which cited books virtually unavailable online or in libraries. In particular, I had my eye on Leonard Horowitz and Joseph Puleo, Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse (Sandpoint, Idaho: Tetrahedron Publishing Group, 1999).

I obtained this book... somehow. It is a 500-page mess of conspiracy theory holy grails, including long excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and from Report from Iron Mountain. The basic claim of the book is that bird flu and mad cow disease are population control mechanisms which can be combatted using "Solfeggio frequencies". It is written in the form of a dialogue between two conspiracy theorists, and on p.156 one of them says this:

"Nikola Tesla, the great grandfather of electromagnetic technologies, also worked his miracles by referencing the Bible codes," Joey continued. "Tesla knew how to read the codes to get the magnificence. He and Keely said in many of their works: 'If you only knew the magnificence of the 3s, 6s and 9s you'd have a key to the universe.'

(The "Bible codes" here refer to numerology using a specific logic found within the book, as the authors believe Michael Drosnin's The Bible Code (1997) to be a government-sponsored disinformation campaign.)

And again on p.169, with a slightly different wording:

Remember what Tesla and Keely said, "If you only knew the power of the 3s, 6s and 9s!"

We can see that the quote on the SomaEnergetics website was misinterpreting this free paraphrase of some sort of Tesla-Keely document as a direct quotation of Tesla. But who was Keely? John Ernst Worrell Keely (1837-1898) absconded with a lot of money by claiming to have invented an "etheric generator" which could harness "luminiferous aether". Early free energy guy, basically.

So, what is this book supposedly co-authored by Tesla and John Keely? It is cited in a footnote elsewhere in the 500-page text: Dale Pond, Keely, Tesla, Cayce, et al. Universal Laws Never Before Revealed: Keely's Secrets: Understanding and Using the Science of Sympathetic Vibration (Santa Fe, N.M.: The Message Company, 1990).

I obtained this book... somehow. It is not actually co-authored by Tesla and Keely who had died long before. Rather, it contains a mixture of poorly cited quotations from Tesla, Keely with interpolations by the author. There is one section attributed to Keely entitled "Theory And Formula Of Aqueous Disintegration" which has extensive sections about "thirds, sixth and ninths."

“In the disintegration of water the instrument is set on thirds, sixths, and ninths, to get the best effects."

In reply to the question, "What do you include in the polar forces?" Keely, answers, "Magnetism, electricity, and gravital sympathy; each stream composed of three currents, or triune streams, which make up the governing conditions of the controlling medium of the universe; the infinite ninths that I am now endeavoring to graduate to a sympathetic mechanical combination, will, if I succeed, close my researches in sympathetic physics, and complete my system."

These quotations are lifted without attribution from some 19th century books by Clara Jessup Bloomfield-Moore, an investor in Keely's schemes. The real Nikola Tesla wrote to Bloomfield-Moore:

[Keely]'s method is an unscientific one and his exposition is wanting in the extreme. It is painful to read his theories. Can he have recognized something and yet be utterly incapable of expressing it? This seems impossible for there is no truth which cannot be told in simple language.

Tesla and Keely never met in the real world. So it can be seen that there is no reason Tesla would repeat Keely's nonsense about thirds, sixths and ninths constituting "the governing conditions of the controlling medium of the universe", much less a mutated version of this meant to support something about a musical scale.

I now believe the origin of this false Tesla quote is as follows:

1. Keely's mumbo jumbo, oral, 1890s
2. Summarized by Clara Bloomfield-Moore in a few publications, c. 1893
3. Jumbled together by Dale Pond who (with a certain visionary logic) listed Keely and Tesla as coauthors of his book, with the dubious claim that Keely and Tesla had the same ideas, 1990
4. An even more scrambled single-line conclusion jointly attributed to Keely and Tesla by a fictional character in a book by Leonard Horowitz and Joseph Puleo, 1999
5. Reattributed to Tesla alone on the SomaEnergetics website by David Hulse, 2002
6. Reposted many times on the Internet until it had lost the original context of "Solfeggio frequencies"

In recent years, "Solfeggio frequencies" have become a TikTok trend. Thanks to the Tesla misquote, 369 has now become a separate thing detached from these frequencies and bound up with the fad for "manifesting." Apparently you write out a wish 3, 6, and 9 times at various times of day to manifest it. This has produced a cottage industry of "369 journals" and countless other 369 merchandise. Even Cosmopolitan magazine describes 369 as "blowing up on TikTok".