Rogerson's Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers---from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World

by Barnaby Rogerson

Overview

THE STORIES BEHIND OUR ICONIC NUMBERS

Rogerson's Book of Numbers is based on a numerical array of virtues, spiritual attributes, gods, devils, sacred cities, powers, calendars, heroes, saints, icons, and cultural symbols.

It provides a dazzling mass of information for those intrigued by the many roles numbers play in folklore and popular culture, in music and poetry, and in the many religions, cultures, and belief systems of our world.

The stories unfold from millions to zero: from the number of the beast (666) to the seven deadly sins; from the twelve signs of the zodiac to the four suits of a deck of cards. Along the way, author Barnaby Rogerson will show you why Genghis Khan built a city of 108 towers, how Dante forged his Divine Comedy on the number eleven, and why thirteen is so unlucky in the West whereas fourteen is the number to avoid in China.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250058843
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	10/28/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Barnaby Rogerson is an author and publisher. Together with his partner Rose Baring, he runs Eland Books, which specializes in keeping the classics of travel literature in print. He is the author of acclaimed biographies of the Prophet Mohammed, and the Prophet's heirs, a history of The Last Crusades and travel guides to such places as Morocco, Cyprus and Istanbul. He writes frequently for Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveller (UK), Harper's Bazaar and the Times Literary Supplement.

Barnaby Rogerson is an author and publisher. Together with his partner Rose Baring, he runs Eland Books, which specializes in keeping the classics of travel literature in print. He is the author of acclaimed biographies of the Prophet Mohammed, and the Prophet's heirs, a history of The Last Crusades and travel guides to such places as Morocco, Cyprus and Istanbul. He writes frequently for Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveller (UK), Harper's Bazaar and the Times Literary Supplement.

Read an Excerpt

Rogerson's Book of Numbers

The Culture of Numbersâ"from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World

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By Barnaby Rogerson

Picador

Copyright © 2013 Barnaby Rogerson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-05884-3

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CHAPTER 1

Millions

MILLIONS OF ANGELS DANCING ON A PIN

The question of 'How many angels could dance on a pin' is often quoted as the essence of medieval scholasticism, a burning issue for the likes of Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. In fact, although Scotus certainly troubled himself over the question of 'Can several angels be in the same place?' there is no mention of dancing on pins until it was raised as mockery in the seventeenth century by Protestant academics. Still, it's a question that ought to be answered and if we take an angel to be no more or less than an atom, then 200,000 could fit in the width of a single human hair. More impressively, neuroscientist Anders Sandberg has come up with the figure of 8.6766×1049 angels, based on theories of information physics and quantum gravity.

THE 4,320-MILLION-YEAR-LONG DAY

4,320 million of our years corresponds to but a single day in the existence of the Lord Brahma, the ultimate unifying aspect of all the teeming gods of the Hindu pantheon. For Brahma is the Absolute, the Universal Soul, Ishawara – the One Great God. This day of Brahma can be divided into a thousand units or mah-yugas to give us the more homely scale of 4.32 million years. They can also be multiplied up to create a Brahmic month, 259.2 billion of our years, or a Brahmic year, which is 311.04 trillion of our years, or the 100-year life-span of the supreme deity.

It is believed that we are just over halfway through the current incarnation of Brahma – in the first day of the fifty-first year of his life. It is rather like the big bang theory, but even more so, for at the end of each cycle of 311 trillion years there is an equal period of immobile darkness before the universe explodes into another Brahmic creation.

Current scientific number-crunching pitches the universe as 12 billion years of age and our earth about 5 billion years old. On the surface of this planet, plant life has been around for 500 million years, mammals have been sniffing around for 130 million years and modern man for a quarter of a million. This is in slight variance with traditional Hindu thought, which records ten primordial kings who ruled the world for 432,000 years before the Flood.

The 432 unit of measurement was always popular, not only as a reflection of the vast scales of Brahmic time but also because it was four times 108 – a number which, as we will see later, is a very propitious concept.

10s of 1000s

237,600 MILES OR 30 EARTHS

237,600 miles is the average distance between the earth and the moon, a number which suggests an intriguing inner harmony to our universe, for it is thirty diameters of the earth, sixty radii of the earth or 220 moon radii. The mystical author and numerologist John Michell would reveal these figures with the full force of a relevation during his lectures. A self-declared 'radical traditionalist', Michell campaigned long and hard against the destruction of England's ancient number systems in favour of the decimal system.

144,000 TO BE SAVED

This is the number who will be saved at the end of the world, as anyone who has given time to a Jehovah's Witness can attest – 12,000 from each of the twelve tribes of Israel – though the religion's more merciful interpreters declare it the number of kings who will rule over us in Heaven.

The source for this belief is Revelation 7: 4–5: 'And I heard the number of those who had received the seal. From all the tribes of Israel there were a hundred and forty-four thousand.' Verse 14 goes on to define them as the righteous, who 'alone from the whole world have been ransomed. These are men who did not defile themselves with women, for they kept themselves chaste and they follow the Lamb wherever he goes ... No lie was found in their lips; they are faultless.'

124,000 PROPHETS

The traditional number of prophets sent by God to teach the world before the coming of the Prophet Muhammad is 124,000, as recorded in a remembered saying (Hadith) of Muhammad, though nowadays this is considered to be of doubtful veracity. But, for those who like a definite figure, it is a useful figure to put beside the Koranic declaration, 'to every people we have sent a Prophet'. Other Islamic sources make mention of 77,000 great saints or sheikhs sent since the death of the Prophet to remind mankind of the Truth.

84,000 STUPAS OF EMPEROR ASHOKA

Mount Meru, the mythical Buddhist centre of the universe, was considered to be 84,000 Yojan units high (which makes it about 672,000 miles in elevation). This respect for 84,000 is repeated by the Jain, who measure their cycle of time in units of 84,000 years and also by belief that the Lord Buddha left behind 84,000 teachings. And so this was the number of memorial stupas that the great Buddhist Emperor of India, Ashoka, is believed to have created to hold the Lord Buddha's ashes, which he scattered across the landscape of South Asia.

10,000 BLESSINGS OF A PEACH

'Ten thousand' is poetic Chinese for 'infinite', as in 'may the Emperor reign 10,000 years' or, as it now says over the gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen) in Tiananmen Square, 'May the People's Republic of China last 10,000 years.' This unit of time is symbolised by a peach, as the Chinese delight in making associations between the sounds or tonal connections of (otherwise unconnected) words. So when you look at Chinese imagery, be it an ancient watercolour or strident propaganda poster, keep an eye out for a propitious scattering of peaches, birds, bats and vases. A bird, especially a crane, has tonal connections with 'harmony', a bat with 'prosperity', a vase with 'peace' and, as we have already heard, a peach can say 10,000 years.

XENOPHON'S 10,000 MERCENARIES

Xenophon's Anabasis tells the story of 10,000 elite Greek mercenaries who are left isolated on the losing side of a Persian civil war and fight their way across the mountain tribes of Anatolia to reach the safety of the Black Sea coast. The history of this march in 401 BC was the original story of swashbuckling adventure against the odds and was said to have inspired Philip of Macedon to take on the Persians. T.E. Lawrence had the book in his camel bag during the Arab revolt of 1916. And, more recently, transplanted to the gangs of New York, it became the Warriors video game.

1000s

6,585 DAYS OF THE SAROS CYCLE

There are 6,585 days between one total solar eclipse and another, which is 18 years, 11 days and 8 hours. This has been known, observed and calculated for many thousands of years, but was probably first chronicled in ancient Babylon (in Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq). It would later be disseminated by the Greeks as the Saros cycle.

YEAR ONE – 2696 BC

The year 2696 BC used to be considered the start date for Chinese civilisation, for the winter solstice of that year was held to be the beginning of the reign of the Yellow Emperor. Most historians had accepted that the period of the Three Sovereigns and the Five Emperors is mythic time, though Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor (who comes at the end of this period), could have been based on a true historical character. Huangdi was honoured as the man who taught the Chinese how to build shelters, tame wild beasts, build boats and carts, and plant and reap the five cereals, while his wife taught weaving and silk-making, and their chief minister set out how to write, keep laws and the annual calendar.

If we were all to agree to a new world calendar system, the Chinese Year One would not be such a bad start date, for it calibrates pretty closely with other great memory pegs of world history, such as the construction of the first pyramid (2630 BC), the first era of Stonehenge (3100-2400 BC) and the first recorded king (Enme-Barage-Si of the Sumerian city-state of Ur., c.2600 BC).

1,460 YEARS OF THE SOTHIC CYCLE OF ANCIENT EGYPT

Ancient Egypt ran a number of calendar systems, of which the simplest was a three-season farming year. The four-month seasons were Akhet (the Nile flood), Peret (growth) and Shemu (harvest) and this pragmatic division of time could be followed by anyone working in the Nile valley, though the onset of the flood could vary by up to three months.

The Egyptian priests also observed and recorded the twelve months of the lunar cycle; their twelve sets of 29-30 days fits almost but not exactly into our solar year of 365 days. The thirty days of the month were divided into three ten-day-long decan weeks, rather than our system of four seven-day-long weeks. This gave 36 decans in a year, each of which was named after a visible star. These were grouped into pairs and given a totemic spirit-animal (not unlike our zodiac) to create a succession of eighteen identities – as can be seen in one of the rings of the Dendera temple planisphere. The addition of five extra days, the Epagomenae, allowed the lunar cycle (12 times 30-day months) to tie in with the 365 solar year. In some cultures these odd five days were days of dread, when malignant spirits were believed to range over the earth, but the Egyptians made an annual festival of the event, and so the five great gods, Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys, were all honoured in turn before New Year's Day. This customarily started on the spring equinox (21 March) so that, like the modern signs of the zodiac, the months ran from the 21st of a month to the 20th of the next.

The priests recorded important correlations between the seasons and the rising of the stars. The most famous of these was the heliacal rising or zenith of the star Sirius (known as Sopdet), which follows a very similar pattern to our solar year, dropping back just one day every four years so that every 1,460 years the zenith of Sirius's route through our skies coincides with Midsummer Day. If we believe that such stone circles at places such as Nabta Playa in Egypt can be seen of evidence of highly organised star-watching, it is possible that the first Sothic cycle was consciously witnessed around 4242 BC, followed by those in 2782 BC and 1321 BC, as well as that described in 139 AD and that observed by Kabbalists in the seventeenth century.

PTOLEMY'S 1,022 STARS

The great quest of medieval science was for a perfect copy of Claudius Ptolemy's Almagest, written in Egypt in 147AD. It was known to have thirteen sections, with the most accurate analysis of star and planetary paths ever achieved, alongside a catalogue of 1,022 stars, listed on a scale of magnitude of 1 to 6. It was a key that threatened to unlock the secrets of the heavens.

1,003 CONQUESTS OF DON GIOVANNI

Leporello, manservant of the fictional rake Don Giovanni (Don Juan), revealed that his master made 1,003 sexual conquests in his Spanish homeland ... as well as 640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France and 91 in Turkey. Of course, it must be remembered that Leporello's purpose was to gently persuade Donna Elvira not to put too much trust in his master – and to amuse an operatic audience. Still, Don Giovanni's figures stack up well alongside his historic rivals. Casanova claimed to have slept with a mere 122 women. Byron (who wrote his own Don Juan) raced through more than 300 women (plus numerous Venetian rent boys and transvestites) before his early death in Greece, aged 36.

THE 1,001 NIGHTS

The Kitab Alf Laylah wa-Laylah – 'The Book of the Thousand and One Nights' – has inspired countless films, musicals and novels. The original tales are breathtakingly inventive, vulgar and discursive, full of cliff-hanger action, scented with sex, royalty and magic. Western scholars have been arguing over their origin, composition and textual tradition for some 300 years, a debate animated by the schism between an eighteenth-century French translation of a Syrian manuscript and a later English translation of an Egyptian one. It seems clear that there is an ancient Persian, Indian and Mesopotamian collection of stories at the core of 'The Nights', which came together as a coherent whole in Arabic in ninth-century Baghdad, was then embroidered by Iraqi storytellers, and further embellished by tales added from the streets, cafes and imagination of the medieval cities of Egypt, North Africa and Syria.

Long known as 'The Thousand Nights', the collection did not become 'A Thousand and One' until the twelfth century. Curiously, too, many of the most celebrated adventures, such as 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves' and 'Aladdin and his Lamp', were added at the very last 'textual' moment by the first French translator (Antoine Galland), sourced from a Maronite story-teller of Aleppo.

100s

666 – THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

Saint John saw the beast 'rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy', which seems to fit temptingly close to the old Phoenician-Canaanite myth of a sea monster Lord of Caos (Yam/Lotan) coming up out of the deep to do battle with a hero god like Baal/Hadad. In amongst the complex imagery of John's Book of Revelations, some commentators have argued that the seven-headed beast also represents the seven Roman emperors who had been responsible for the degradation of the Temple, the destruction of Jerusalem and the persecution of Judaism and its heretical offshoot – early Christianity. Counting back from John's contemporary, Domitian, these seven emperors would be Titus, Vespasian, Nero, Claudius, Caligula, Tiberius and Augustus.

But it is the 666 number that most resonates, the numerical value Saint John ascribes as the mark of the beast: 'Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore-and-six.' This hint at numerological coding allows (with different values given to each letters) that 666 would seem to identify 'Nero Caesar' when written in Hebrew (it was Nero who organised the first popular pogrom against the Christians after the great fire of Rome). 666 is also the number created when you list – or add – the first six symbols of the Roman numeral notation together, as in D (500), C (100), L (50), X (10), V (5) and I (1).

In Chinese, 666 is a tonal equivalent for 'things go smoothly' and a favoured number. It also has an alliance with the roulette table, as the sum of all the numbers on the wheel.

540 GATES OF VALHALLA

Valhalla, the Heavenly hall of feasting presided over by the Norse god Odin, was reserved for only the bravest and strongest of warriors who died a hero's death on the battlefield. It had 540 doors and was set in an immense grove of golden yew trees.

THE CINQ-CENTS

Cinq-Cents – the Council of 500 – was the elective assembly which ruled France at the end of the Revolution, between the end of the Terror and the seizure of power by General Bonaparte (1795–99). Much overlooked now, the so-called Directory period was an attempt at creating a stable and balanced democracy, with the Assembly empowered to nominate five directors, who, once they had been approved by the 250-strong Senate of 'Ancients', ruled the Republic.

The Assembly consciously looked back to the democracy of ancient Athens, which was governed through the Boule, an assembly of 500. However, the ancient model attempted to avoid the perils of influence-peddling and the factionalism of party politics by cutting out the voting process; instead, each of the ten tribes of Athens and its hinterland held a ballot to send fifty of their men to attend this standing council for a year. After a year's service, they had to resign.

THE 400

'The Four Hundred' is the nickname for the social elite of New York, an alliance of old landed families, financial speculators, manufacturers and entrepreneurs who had assimilated European social manners and snobbery in the late nineteenth century. They overlooked the divisions of the Civil War, delighted in transatlantic marriages with the nobility of Europe and guarded themselves from 'new money' coming in from the West, especially those who put too much crushed ice in their wine. The concept of the Four Hundred was popularised by Ward MacAllister, the Beau Brummell of Manhattan, who coined the expression from the number who could be comfortably entertained, and felt 'at ease', in Mrs Astor's ballroom.

365 DAYS OF HAAB

The Mayan solar calendar was divided into eighteen twenty-day months (vigesimal notation). This produced 360 days, or one tun. In common with many religious calendars of the world, the shortfall of five extra days added on to make the 365 days of the solar year was a spirit-haunted period of ill omen, the five nameless Wayab days.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson. Copyright © 2013 Barnaby Rogerson. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Introduction,
Millions,
Tens of Thousands,
Thousands,
Hundreds,
Hundred and ...,
Hundred to Ninety,
Eighties,
Seventies,
Sixties,
Fifties,
Forties,
Thirties,
Twenties,
Nineteen to Eleven,
Ten,
Nine,
Eight,
Seven,
Six,
Five,
Four,
Three,
Two,
One,
Zero,
Acknowledgements,
Index,
Copyright,

Editorial Reviews

Now, thanks to Rogerson's Book of Numbers, we have a delicious collection of the world's holiest, most significant, and wackiest integers....This little volume is a tightly packed hamper of intellectual treats.” —The Spectactor (London)

“Eclectic...[Rogerson] brings abstraction to vibrant life. Full of interest and learning...this is an admirable and entertaining book.” —Country Life

From the Publisher