The Number Thirty-Three

Thirty-three is not a number that nature hands to us. There are no thirty-three planets, months or fingers. Yet it turns up in the scriptures and rituals of traditions that had little contact with one another, usually as a sign of a complete company: all the gods, all the forms of a saviour, a full life.

The oldest example is Indian. The Rigveda, composed in the second millennium BCE, refers several times to “the thirty-three gods”, without listing them. Priestly texts written somewhat later did the arithmetic: eight Vasus (gods of the elements), eleven Rudras (storm gods) and twelve Adityas (sovereign gods linked with the sun), to which two more are added, sometimes Indra and Prajapati, sometimes Heaven and Earth. Later Hindu writers spoke of “thirty-three koti” of gods, and because koti can mean either “ten million” or “kind”, the phrase became the famous claim of 330 million deities.

Buddhism inherited the Vedic company and gave it a place in the sky. Above the human world, on the summit of the world-mountain Meru, lies Trayastrimsha, the Heaven of the Thirty-Three, where the god Shakra (the Buddhist form of Indra) presides. A much-loved story tells that the Buddha spent a rainy season there teaching his mother, who had died after his birth, and then came down to earth on a jewelled staircase.

In Christianity, thirty-three is the age tradition gives to Jesus at his death. The Gospels never state it. Luke says Jesus was “about thirty” when he began his ministry, and John’s Gospel mentions three Passover festivals during it; read together, they yield thirty-three. Medieval writers then treated the number as meaningful in itself, the perfect age at which, some theologians argued, all the dead would be raised. Historians are more cautious: most date Jesus’ birth to around 6–4 BCE and his death to around 30–33 CE, which would make him somewhat older.

The traditional age soon found its way into prayer. The prayer rope of Eastern Orthodox monks, a cord of woollen knots used to repeat the Jesus Prayer, often has thirty-three knots, one for each year of Christ’s life, though ropes of fifty or a hundred are also common. In the West, the Camaldolese monks of Italy spread a chaplet of thirty-three Our Fathers in the sixteenth century for the same reason. These objects show how a number first reached by adding up scattered verses could become something held in the hand every day.

In Islam the number belongs to daily devotion. Hadith collections report that the Prophet recommended praising God after prayer with three short phrases, each said thirty-three times, followed by a closing declaration to make a hundred. That practice explains the shape of the misbaha or tasbih, the Muslim prayer-bead string: either 33 beads, gone round three times, or 99 beads, which also recall the ninety-nine Names of God. Larger markers usually divide a 99-bead string into thirds.

In Japan, thirty-three belongs to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion known in India as Avalokiteshvara. The Lotus Sutra describes the many forms the bodhisattva takes to save beings, and East Asian tradition counted them as thirty-three. From the Middle Ages, pilgrims walked circuits of thirty-three Kannon temples. The Saigoku route around Kyoto, Nara and Osaka is the oldest; the Bando route in eastern Japan and the Chichibu route, with thirty-four temples, were later joined to it to make a hundred sites. In Kyoto the temple hall known as Sanjusangen-do takes its name from the thirty-three bays between its pillars.

Judaism has a smaller but real thirty-three: Lag BaOmer, the thirty-third day of the seven-week count between Passover and Shavuot, is a day of bonfires and celebration that interrupts a period of semi-mourning. Its name is simply the number written in Hebrew letters.

The most deliberate use of the number came from Dante. His Divine Comedy, finished around 1320, has an opening canto followed by thirty-three cantos for each realm of the afterlife, a hundred in all, written in interlocking three-line stanzas. For Dante and his readers, threes and their multiples pointed to the Trinity, and the structure of the poem was itself a kind of prayer.

Modern uses mostly borrow the prestige of these older ones. The best known is Freemasonry. Ordinary Masonic lodges confer only three degrees, but several additional rites grew up in the eighteenth century. One of them, the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, was organised under a Supreme Council founded in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1801 and arranged its ceremonies in thirty-three degrees. The thirty-third is honorary, given for service to the Rite. Masonic writers have linked the number to the age of Jesus or to older symbolism, but the documents do not show why it was chosen, and it carries no authority over the rest of Freemasonry.

Thirty-three has also become a favourite of twentieth-century numerology, which calls it a “master number”, and of conspiracy theories that see hidden meaning wherever it appears. These ideas are recent and have no basis in the traditions above. What the history does show is simpler and more interesting: a number with no natural origin can still become sacred when generations of readers, singers and pilgrims keep returning to the texts that contain it.