Number Symbolism

number symbolism, cultural associations—including religious, philosophic, and aesthetic—with various numbers.

Humanity has had a love-hate relationship with numbers from the earliest times. Bones dating from perhaps 30,000 years ago show scratch marks that possibly represent the phases of the Moon. The ancient Babylonians observed the movements of the planets, recorded them as numbers, and used them to predict eclipses and other astronomical phenomena. The priesthood of ancient Egypt used numbers to predict the flooding of the Nile. Pythagoreanism, a cult of ancient Greece, believed that numbers were the basis of the entire universe, which ran on numerical harmony. The Pythagoreans’ ideas were a mixture of prescience (the numerical features of musical sounds) and mysticism (3 is male, 4 is female, and 10 is the most perfect number). Numbers were associated with names for magical purposes: the biblical “number of the beast,” 666, is probably an example of this practice. More recently, cranks have sought the secrets of the universe in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Giza, an aberration so common that it even has a name—pyramidology. Millions of otherwise rational people are terrified of the number 13, to the extent that hotels omit it from their floors, airplanes do not have a row 13, and the numbers for Formula 1 racing cars skip from 12 to 14 so that, for example, 22 cars would be numbered from 1 to 23. Learned tomes are written about the significance of such stalwarts as the golden number (1.618034), which does occur in flowering plants and modern architecture but does not occur in the shell of the nautilus and ancient Greek architecture, despite endless myths to the contrary. Many religions have their sacred numbers, as do organizations such as Freemasonry; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music, notably the Magic Flute (1791), includes many intentional references to Masonic numerology.

Mathematics is the study of numbers, shapes, and related structures. Number mysticism belongs elsewhere and is generally categorized as numerology. Numerology sheds light on the innermost workings of the human mind but very little on the rest of the universe. Mathematics, meanwhile, sheds light on much of the universe but, as yet, very little on human psychology. Between the two lies fruitful scientific ground, yet to be cultivated extensively.