The Number Nine

Nine is the last of the single digits. In a world that counts in tens, it stands on the threshold: one more step and the count starts again. It is also three times three, and since three was already a holy number in many cultures, nine could be read as holiness multiplied. These two facts help explain why so many traditions, with no contact between them, came to treat nine as a number of fullness, completion or the highest degree.

In the Bahá’í Faith this meaning is explicit. Bahá’í writers point out that nine is the highest single digit and so contains all the others, and that in the Arabic system of letter values the word Bahá, “glory”, adds up to nine. Bahá is the root of the name of the faith’s founder, Bahá’u’lláh, “Glory of God”. The nine-pointed star has become the faith’s most familiar emblem. Every Bahá’í House of Worship, from Wilmette near Chicago to the Lotus Temple in New Delhi, has nine sides and nine entrances, which believers read as a welcome to people coming from every direction. The local and national councils that run Bahá’í communities, and the Universal House of Justice at the faith’s world centre in Haifa, each have nine elected members.

Hindu tradition uses nine in festival and cosmos alike. Navaratri, whose name means “nine nights”, is celebrated across India in autumn in honour of the goddess. In many regions each night is dedicated to one of nine forms of Durga, and the festival ends on the tenth day with Vijayadashami, the victory of good over evil, often marked by burning effigies of the demon king Ravana. Hindu astrology recognises nine navagraha, celestial influences that include the sun, the moon, five visible planets and two shadow points, Rahu and Ketu, linked to eclipses. Shrines to the nine stand in many temples.

The Greek poet Hesiod, writing around 700 BCE, names nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. They sing on Mount Helicon and give poets their words. The Odyssey also mentions nine Muses, though later writers such as Pausanias record an older local tradition of three; the canonical nine names come from Hesiod. Later Roman tradition assigned each Muse an art, such as Clio for history and Urania for astronomy, and that scheme passed into European painting and into the word “museum”, a place of the Muses.

Christian tradition took up nine in a different way. Around 500 CE an anonymous writer, who presented himself as Dionysius, a convert of the apostle Paul, wrote The Celestial Hierarchy. Scholars call him Pseudo-Dionysius. He arranged the angels mentioned in the Bible into nine choirs, grouped in three triads: seraphim, cherubim and thrones; dominions, virtues and powers; principalities, archangels and angels. Through medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and poets such as Dante, whose Paradiso is built around nine heavenly spheres, the scheme shaped how Europeans pictured heaven. Catholic piety also developed the novena, nine days of prayer. Tradition links it to the days the disciples spent in prayer between the Ascension of Jesus and Pentecost.

In Judaism nine appears less as a symbol than as a practical count. The Hanukkah lamp, the hanukkiah, has eight lights for the eight nights of the festival plus a ninth, the shammash or “servant”, used to light the rest. The ninth day of the month of Av, Tisha B’Av, is the saddest day of the Jewish year, when tradition holds that both the First and the Second Temple were destroyed.

In imperial China nine belonged to the emperor. In Chinese cosmology odd numbers are yang, linked with heaven, and nine is the highest of them. The word for nine, jiu, also sounds like the word for “long-lasting”. Palace gates in Beijing were decorated with nine rows of nine gilded studs, dragon screens showed nine dragons, and imperial rites at the Temple of Heaven used multiples of nine in the stones of the altar. The Double Ninth Festival, on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, is still a day for climbing hills and honouring the elderly.

Further north, Old Norse poetry, recorded in Iceland in the 13th century, speaks of nine worlds bound together by the great ash tree Yggdrasil. In the poem Hávamál the god Odin hangs on the tree, wounded by his own spear, for nine nights, and at the end of his ordeal he gains the knowledge of the runes. Norse religion has no living institutional heir among the traditions covered here, but its nines remain well known through literature and modern revivals.

Many of these nines are still visible. Bahá’í temples rise with their nine sides on every inhabited continent. Navaratri is one of the largest festivals in India, with nine nights of dance in Gujarat and great Durga images in Bengal. Catholic parishes still pray novenas before feast days, and the nine Muses survive in museum names and in the language of “inspiration”.

In East Asia, nine remains a lucky number for weddings, phone numbers and dates, because of its link with long life. In Japan, by contrast, nine can be avoided, since one reading of the word, ku, sounds like the word for suffering. The same digit can therefore be welcome in one country and shunned in its neighbour, which shows how much of a number’s meaning comes from language rather than from the number itself.

Historians of ideas see the pattern clearly. Nine was not sacred because of any power of its own, but because people who counted on their fingers, watched the months of pregnancy, and loved the number three found in it an image of completion. Each tradition then filled that image with its own stories, gods and rites.