The Number Twelve

Twelve is the number of a complete, well-ordered whole. Where ten counts on the fingers, twelve counts the year. The moon goes through its phases about twelve and a third times while the sun returns to its starting point, and many ancient peoples built calendars of twelve months, correcting the gap from time to time. From the year, twelve spread to the sky, to the gods, to the tribes of a nation and to the followers of a teacher.

In the Hebrew Bible the people of Israel descend from the twelve sons of the patriarch Jacob, whose new name was Israel. Each son becomes the ancestor of a tribe. Twelve then shapes the worship of ancient Israel: the high priest wears a breastplate set with twelve precious stones, each carved with the name of a tribe, and twelve loaves, the showbread, are laid out each week before God. The actual lists of tribes vary, because the priestly tribe of Levi had no territory and the descendants of Joseph were counted as two tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh. The number twelve stays fixed even when the names change, which shows how much it mattered as a symbol.

Christianity took up the same pattern. In the Gospels Jesus chooses twelve apostles, and he promises them that they will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Scholars widely read the number as a deliberate sign: a new or restored Israel gathered around Jesus. When Judas Iscariot is gone, the Book of Acts tells how the remaining eleven chose Matthias by lot to make up the twelve again. The Book of Revelation describes the heavenly Jerusalem with twelve gates bearing the names of the tribes and twelve foundations bearing the names of the apostles, and its 144,000 servants of God are twelve times twelve thousand.

In Islam, twelve is first the number of the months. The Qur’an says that “the number of months with God is twelve”, and the Islamic calendar is purely lunar, with twelve months and no added month, so its festivals move through the seasons. For Twelver Shi‘a Muslims, the majority in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Bahrain, twelve also defines the line of rightful leaders after the Prophet. The imams begin with ‘Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, and continue through his sons Hasan and Husayn and their descendants. The twelfth, Muhammad al-Mahdi, is believed to have entered a hidden state, the occultation, in the 9th century and to be alive still, awaiting his return.

The twelve signs of the zodiac come from Mesopotamia. Babylonian astronomers tracked the sun, moon and planets against the stars and, by about the 5th century BCE, divided the band of sky they travel through into twelve equal parts of thirty degrees, each named after a constellation. Greek astronomers adopted the system after Alexander the Great, and from the Greeks it passed to Rome, to India and to the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds. The signs are still used in astrology today, although the constellations no longer line up with the dates first assigned to them, because the earth’s axis slowly shifts.

The Greeks also spoke of “the twelve gods”, the Olympians who lived on Mount Olympus. An altar of the Twelve Gods stood in the marketplace of Athens. But the lists of names vary, with gods such as Dionysus, Hestia or Heracles moving in and out, which again suggests that the number came first and the membership second.

In India, twelve sacred places of Shiva, the jyotirlingas, draw pilgrims from across the country. Tradition holds that at each one Shiva appeared as a column of light. They include Somnath on the coast of Gujarat, Mahakaleshwar in Ujjain, Kedarnath high in the Himalayas, Kashi Vishwanath in Varanasi and Rameswaram in the far south. Some of the twelve are claimed by more than one temple. Buddhism, born in the same land, describes the chain of cause and effect that keeps beings in the cycle of rebirth as twelve links, beginning with ignorance and ending with old age and death; in Tibetan art they encircle the Wheel of Life.

In China, years, months and the hours of the day were counted with twelve Earthly Branches, each matched with an animal: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. The cycle was linked to the planet Jupiter, which takes almost twelve years to circle the sun. A popular folk tale explains the order of the animals through a race, but the cycle itself is far older than the story.

Twelve is still all around us. Clocks show twelve hours, years have twelve months, and many people know their zodiac sign or their animal year. Lunar New Year celebrations across East Asia open each year with its animal. Christian churches mark the twelve days of Christmas between Christmas Day and Epiphany, and Shi‘a Muslims mark the birthdays and deaths of the imams through the year. Pilgrims still try to visit all twelve jyotirlingas in a lifetime.

Historians see twelve as a number made sacred first by the sky and then by usefulness. The moon and sun suggested twelve months, the number’s many divisors made it convenient for counting, and religious traditions then used it as a frame for completeness: twelve tribes for a whole people, twelve apostles for a renewed one, twelve imams for a complete line of guidance. The belief that the number itself shapes fate belongs to astrology, not to history.