The Number Five

Five is the number of one hand, and perhaps for that reason it is a favourite way of gathering the essentials of a religious life into a list that can be counted off on the fingers. Islam, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism all have fivefold sets of duties or vows, and Judaism places its foundational law in five books.

In Islam a well-known hadith says that the religion is built on five: bearing witness that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is his messenger, performing the prayer, giving alms, fasting in the month of Ramadan and making the pilgrimage to Mecca. These became known as the Five Pillars. The daily prayer itself is performed five times, at dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset and night. Tradition tells that during his night journey to heaven Muhammad was first commanded fifty daily prayers, and returned to God several times on the advice of Moses until the number was reduced to five. Many Shi‘i Muslims pray the same five prayers but combine them into three sessions.

For Sikhs, five is bound up with the founding of the Khalsa, the community of initiated Sikhs. Tradition holds that at the spring festival of Vaisakhi in 1699 Guru Gobind Singh called for volunteers willing to give their heads, and five men stepped forward. They became the Panj Pyare, the five beloved ones, and were the first to be initiated. Khalsa Sikhs wear the five Ks, named after their Punjabi initial letter: kesh, uncut hair; kangha, a wooden comb; kara, a steel bracelet; kachera, cotton undershorts; and kirpan, a short sword. Five initiated Sikhs still conduct the initiation ceremony today.

Judaism calls the first section of its scripture the Torah, made up of five books from Genesis to Deuteronomy, traditionally attributed to Moses. Greek-speaking readers called it the Pentateuch, ‘five scrolls’. The rabbis divided the Psalms into five books as well, which a midrash compares to the five books of Moses. In Indian traditions, Jain monks and nuns take five great vows, and lay Buddhists undertake five precepts. Hindu philosophy counts five great elements: earth, water, fire, air and space.

Chinese thought gave five its most elaborate role. The theory of the five phases (wuxing), systematised by thinkers such as Zou Yan in the third century BCE, holds that wood, fire, earth, metal and water are not substances but stages of change. Wood feeds fire, fire makes earth (ash), earth bears metal, metal collects water and water nourishes wood; in the other direction each overcomes another. The scheme linked the phases to the five directions (including the centre), five colours, five seasons, the organs of the body and the five visible planets, whose Chinese names still mean wood star, fire star, earth star, metal star and water star. It shaped Chinese medicine, astrology, politics and Daoist ritual.

The five-pointed star has a long and changing history. A star sign of this shape appears in early Mesopotamian writing. Later Greek writers report that the Pythagoreans used the pentagram as a sign of recognition and called it health; mathematicians were fascinated by the way its lines divide one another in the golden ratio. Medieval Christians read its five points as the five wounds of Christ, and the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight explains the pentangle on the hero’s shield through the wounds, the five joys of Mary and other fives. Renaissance writers such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa drew a human figure inside it as an image of the human being as a small universe.

The association with evil is recent. In the nineteenth century the French occultist Éliphas Lévi taught that the pentagram with one point upwards stood for the spirit ruling matter, while a pentagram turned upside down, with two points upwards, represented the opposite and could hold the head of a goat. In the late 1960s the Church of Satan, founded in California in 1966, adopted an inverted pentagram with a goat’s head as its emblem, and films did the rest. Modern Pagans and Wiccans, meanwhile, use the upright pentagram, often within a circle, as a sign of their own faith.

Five remains visible in daily religious life. The call to prayer sounds five times a day in Muslim cities. The steel kara on a Sikh’s wrist is one of the most familiar signs of the faith. Across the Middle East and North Africa, a protective open-hand amulet is often called the khamsa, from the Arabic word for five; it is popular among Muslims, Jews and Christians alike, though it belongs more to folk custom than to official teaching in any of them.

Christian and Jewish fives are quieter but persistent. Christians in the Middle Ages prayed devotions to the five wounds, and some Catholic rosaries and church decorations still show five red points or roses. Jews read the whole Torah in synagogue over a yearly cycle, finishing the fifth book and starting again with Genesis on the festival of Simchat Torah, the ‘rejoicing of the Torah’.

The Chinese five phases also live on, in traditional medicine, in the calendar and in the arrangement of homes and gardens. As with many sacred numbers, the reasons behind the number are partly natural, the hand and the visible planets, and partly the result of long traditions of teaching that found it a convenient way to remember what mattered most.