The standard Western meanings, fixed in the form Balliett printed: 1, the Monad, initiative and leadership; 2, the Dyad, partnership and sensitivity; 3, expression and creation; 4, order, work, the builder; 5, freedom and change; 6, responsibility and nurture, Balliett's Cosmic Mother; 7, analysis and the inner life, her Finished Number, a complete temple; 8, power, material mastery, balance; 9, completion and the humanitarian. The framing descends from Pythagorean opposites, odd as active, even as receptive, through Nicomachus' catalogue and Agrippa's 1533 scale tables.
The founding story: at Croton, the Pythagoreans treated numbers as beings, with friendships, rivalries, genders, and marriages, 5 as the wedding of the first female 2 and first male 3. They swore their deepest oath by the Tetractys, 1+2+3+4=10, the mother of all numbers, and the school's secrets were worth killing over, if the Hippasus legend is to be believed. The nine digits were not labels to them. They were the cast of a cosmic drama, and you were assigned your role at birth.
The claim: every civilization converges on the same number meanings because the meanings are real archetypes, 3 as creation, 4 as earth, 7 as spirit, discovered everywhere independently. The counterexample is documented and fatal to the strong version: in China, Japan, and Korea, 4 means death, because the words sound alike, and towers omit the fourth floor from Shanghai to Seoul. One tradition's bedrock is another's bad omen.
If 4 means stability in the West and death in East Asia, is the number's meaning in the digit, or in the culture doing the counting?