Analysing numbers in creation myths
The intuition
I am fascinated by lost civilisations. It started at university and it has stuck with me since. After reading about the Egyptians during the Pharaoh era or the Mayans in Mesoamerica, I realised that most of them consider the number 7 as the special number and the divine one.
Then I read a lot of creation stories from everywhere in the world, and I kept seeing the number 7. It felt like it was more present than other numbers.
For example, in Greek mythology there were 7 Pleiades, a group of celestial nymphs; there were 7 heads of the Hydra, a multi-headed serpent slain by Hercules; and there were 7 gates of Thebes. In the Bible, God created the world in 7 days. The Rig Veda (sacred text for Indu) is full of 7 and is the most sacred number in Hinduism. The list of civilisations that consider the number 7 special feels endless and is very diverse.
Let’s do a statistical analysis to check my intuition on the number 7.
The methodology
I am clearly a rational person and I like mathematics. An interesting study I had in mind would be to check if 7 is really more common in sacred texts and old creation myths than other numbers. Let’s check if the numbers in all these texts verify Benfords’ law.
What is Benford’s law ?
Benford’s law, also known as the law of first digits, is the finding that the first of the numbers found in series of records of the most varied sources do not display a uniform distribution, but rather, they’re arranged in such a way that the digit 1 is the most frequent, followed by 2, 3, and so in a successively decreasing manner down to 9.
It is illustrated in the figure below.
The study
Let’s study the 200 oldest creation myths first in a Github repo. In these creation myths, we can see the book of Genesis sacred for Christian and Jews written around -1400, the Rig Veda sacred for Hindus written around -1300, the Popol Vuh sacred for the Maya and other texts from all over the world.
Most of the collected creation myths don’t have a date and are said to come from immemorial time. The other ones were often written at least a thousand years ago. A time when most texts were actually sacred texts. A good amount of these texts were not written on paper but actually on walls or limestone tablets.
Here is the graph of the counts of each numbers 1–9 in creation myths:
BOOM ! It looks like the intuition is correct; the number 7 is indeed overrepresented in creation myths. Benford’s law is validated from 1 to 6, but then 7 is around three times more seen than 6.
Before making hypotheses on why 7 is special, let’s check the number distribution in a huge and diverse set of books.
The same study for various types of texts
To check that the number 7 is an anomaly only for creation myths, let’s do the same analysis on a huge number of books.
I took a collection of more than 17 000 books (6GB of texts in this Github repo) and run the same number analysis on it.
Benford’s law is completely validated this time. The anomaly of 7 is only for creation myths and sacred texts.
Conclusion
It took me forever to do these number analyses, but I am happy that my intuition was correct. The next step is to find out why we consider the number 7 divine.
SPOILER: The next article will deal with psychology, the limits of the human brain and astronomy (not astrology).
