Why the number 7 is overrepresented in sacred texts ?
In my previous article, I studied numbers 1–9 frequency on more than 200 creation myths and sacred texts from all over the world. The result is that the number 7 is overrepresented, while other numbers simply verify Benford’s law. But why so much 7 ?
It is very hard to argue that this anomaly is random. The number 7 is seen three times more than the number 6. The difference is too much to be a simple coincidence. Our brain must somehow make a connection between the number 7 and the divine world; let’s explore how.
1. The sky is at fault
As a kid, looking at the sky was a reminder of how vast the world is and how little I knew. The sky, with its seemingly infinite expense, is viewed by the brain as a representation of the infinite. We then easily make the connection between the infinite and the divine.
Our sky during the day might be different, but at night, we all have the same stars. We see the same sky at night that a Mayan king or an Egyptian pharaoh would have seen. The time it takes for a star in our sky to appear or to leave is far beyond the human experience. All we can do is study their movements.
The intuition here is that if we can find numbers in the sky, our brains would have linked them with the divine, no matter the time or epoch we found ourselves in. We are looking at the sky in search of divine realms. Myths almost always mentioned a sun god, a moon god, a kingdom on clouds, etc.
The classical planets
I remember being at school and memorising the 9 planets of the solar system. Two weeks after the test, the International Astronomical Union downgraded the status of Pluto to dwarf planet, making the total number of planets to only 8.
So there were 9 planets in our solar system until August 2009, then 8 after that. But none of that mattered for 99% of history because we did not have the technology to search for planets and study what they were made of. We could only see the sky through our eyes.
There are indeed 7 objects that can be seen, namely Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon. They are called the classical planets. Our ancestors, looking at what feels like the infiniteness of the sky, examined it to understand the world. Then, the human brain made the unconscious connection between infinite and divine, leading to the intertwining of astronomy and religion that we see everywhere in the world.
A man, no matter his origin or time, who tudied the sky would have quickly realised that there are 7 observable planets. It would have been one of his earliest discoveries. A bit later, he might also notice that it takes 7 days for the completion of each of the moon cycles: full, waning half, new, and waxing half.
The fact that one number is more easily found in the sky is due to the randomness of our world. Nonetheless, it’s things of that order that shape our brain. The 7 classical planets are the first piece of the puzzle to understand why we find so many 7s in sacred texts and creation myths.
2. The brain’s cognitive limit
In 1956, George Miller of Harvard University wrote what is today considered one of the classic papers in psychology, in which he demonstrated that most people can retain roughly 7 items of information in their short-term memory.
His paper, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information shows that the average person is able to remember a seven digit phone number if someone else says it only once. One more digit, and the majority of people are lost. Another important discovery presented in this paper is that we remember better when we chunk the data.
George Miller’s theory is supported by psychological research. Jacobs (1887) conducted an experiment using a digit span test, to examine the capacity of short-term memory for letters. Jacobs used a sample of 443 female students from the North London Collegiate School. Participants had to repeat back a string of letters in the same order, and the number of letters was gradually increased until the participants could no longer recall the sequence. Jacobs found that the student had an average span of 7.3 letters, which supports Miller’s theory.
By being the brain’s cognitive limit, we associate the number 7 with completeness. George Miller ended his genius research with the following ending:
“And finally, what about the magical number seven? What about the seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven daughters of Atlas in the Pleiades, the seven ages of man, the seven levels of hell, the seven primary colours, the seven notes of the musical scale, and the seven days of the week? What about the seven-point rating scale, the seven categories for absolute judgement, the seven objects in the span of attention, and the seven digits in the span of immediate memory? For the present I propose to withhold judgement. Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all these sevens, something just calling out for us to discover it. But I suspect that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence.”
Conclusion
In 1956, George Miller was the first to suggest there might be more to the number 7. Multiple studies then showed that numbers are indeed ingrained in our brain, numbers and ratios are linked to other senses in our brain from the day we are born. A good example of that is the golden number, which we see as more aesthetic than other numbers. It’s not so surprising that we find sense in 7.
TL;DR
The study of number frequency in creation myths is a strong signal that the human’s brain links the number 7 to the divine world.
