number symbolism英文清晰版.pdfVIP

Table of Contents  Article  Numerals and numerology  Arithmomancy  Pythagoreanism  Cultural associations of some numbers o 1 o 2 o 3 o 4 o 5 o 6 o 7 o 8 o 9 o 10 o 11 o 12 o 13 o 14 o 15 o 16 o 17 o 18 o 19 o 20 o 100  Number and reality o Nature’s numbers o Number’s nature  Additional Reading  Citations ARTICLE from the Encyclopæ dia Britannica 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 repre sent 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 p