Thursday 19 April 2012

"Seven is a particularly special number" begins with S.


Seven is a particularly special number, especially to me. Even though fifteen is my lucky number, I've always seen seven as a particularly magical one :)          It seems and Angie Sage, the author of the Septimus Heap books, agrees with me, having Septimus' father the seventh son of seven boys and the same for Septimus himself.                                                                                         And then I began to think...is seven a universally magical number? Or is it just a coincidence that people tend to find seven magical?












Just think of the importance of the number seven in our society.
We have seven:
- Wonders of the World
- Ages of Man
- Deadly Sins
- Heavenly Virtues
- Days of the week
- Colours of the rainbow
- Seven Harry Potter books :)
             and many more.


George Miller (some scientist) observed that most people can consciously only deal with out 7 bits of information in their mind at one time.

In the earliest civilisations, man considered all celestial bodies as deities and, as far as they were concerned, there were seven such bodies. It was believed that they not only influenced human affairs and personalities, but also supernatural things such as luck and fate.
Later, more 'heavenly bodies' were discovered, but by that time, civilisations were committed to the seven Gods.
The Egyptians had 7 Gods
The Parsees had seven Angels
The Persians had seven sacred horses
and Islam teaches seven articles of faith
in Japan there are 7 Gods

In Gambling, 777 is a winning line on a slot machine
Being dealth three 7's in blackjack is a winner
The opposite sides of a six-sided die always add up to seven

The moon changes phase every seven days
There are seven continents in the world
There are even seven musical notes of the diatonic scale:
 Do, re, mi, far, so, la, ti

So yeah, as we can see, seven is a very important number. And this may well influence part of my novel.
It influenced JK with 7 books and 7 years at Hogwarts and Angie Sage with 7 brothers so could influence me too!

I found this particularly freaky picture, that I just had to post:

5 comments:

  1. Hello, M! This is an informative post! And going back to the religion/gods thing, the Christian God is said to have rested on the 7th day after creating everything. It's so interesting how much 7 pops up in so many aspects of various cultures!

    Have a great week and happy A to Z!!

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    1. You too! I would say, have a great 7 day week, but 4 days of the week have already wizzed by.
      I always held an interest in old superstitions, though I do not believe them myself, because they all come from some old, interesting story that most of us have forgotten.
      :)
      M. x

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  2. Don't forget the movie "Se7en"!

    And that hand. Oh how that hand frightens me.

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    1. It's kinda creepy isn't it.. makes me think of what humans will look like in 1000 years :S :S

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  3. Love the picture! I have thought about this numbers significance before... still don't know why the number came to be such an influence in so many different cultures, though.

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