I am home and bored and "Secrets" is being frustrating, so... meme time!
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askerian: Comment with a story I've written, and I will tell you one thing I knew, learned, or wondered about while writing the story that didn't make it onto the page.
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3. Harai's numerology
Date: 2009-10-28 08:07 pm (UTC)Harai subscribes to a numerology system prevalent in the Empire, which goes like this:
0 = sterility, emptiness, the void
1 = potential, solitude, perfection, the infinite, God
2 = instability, scales, pendulums, arguments, aborted journeys
3 = stability, fellowship, love, the joining of disparate elements
4 = the world, the elements, nature
5 = humanity, the body, union of matter and spirit
6 = a quest, a journey, or a pause along the way
7 = chance, luck, change
8 = foresight, planning, skill
9 = endings, closure, destruction, comprehension
10 = dominion, power, control, fame
11 = innocence, the unknown, the soul, spirituality
12 = perfection, completion, experience, stasis
13 = imbalance, ill-luck, the unnatural, separation of matter and spirit
14 = time, the past, the future
15 = war, strife, anger, parallel elements
16 = return to beginnings, cycles, balance, completed journeys
17 = creation, breaking patterns, risk, glory
Whether numbers are auspicious or not depends on the context. 1, 4, 9, and 16 are particularly important because they're square numbers. Each number has a shadow or mirror, counting inwards toward 9. So 17 mirrors 1, 16 mirrors 2, and so on, until 9 itself mirrors 0, which is set outside the pattern.
Because the system allows two-digit numbers, it's nearly impossible to add things up to equal 1. You almost always get 10 instead. This is, in fact, deliberate, since 1 is such a powerful number. There are alternate numerology systems that only allow single-digit numbers -- these seem to have been brought to Camia by the Jenjani -- but they assign different meanings to the numbers, and are not used in Church scriptures and Circle stories.