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Nine is equally two-faced. Christ died at the 9th hour, and Macbeth's Weird Sisters chant eerily, "Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine/ And thrice again, to make up nine." Yet the Egyptians were devoted to the Enneads (a triple triad). The legends of northern Europe revolve around 9 bards, 9 dragons, 9 stones in a circle. We all know of Dante's 9 circles of Hell, but few, perhaps, remember that they were merely the inversion of the 9 he associated with Heaven. In the Middle Ages, indeed, 9 was "first and foremost the angelic number." Milton divided his Nativity ode into 3 sections of 9 stanzas * each; one 16th century church in Venice has, quite consciously, a nave 9 paces wide and 27 paces long.
All this, you may say, is mere antique superstition. Yet many lives, even today, still hang in the balance of numbers. The bustling contemporary city of Kyoto, in Japan, is divided into 9 auspicious sections. In Beijing, within an old man's memory, the Emperor would ascend the Altar of Heaven -- a perfect circle inside a perfect square -- and, his 9 grades of mandarins performing a 9-fold bowing before him, survey a world of 9s. "From the center of the topmost tier nine rings of paving-stones radiated out in concentric multiples of nine," explains author Colin Thubron, "and fanned down into the lower terraces, nine rows to each, in ever-expanding manifolds of nine." To this day, the 37 million citizens of Burma are ruled not only by the shadow dictator Ne Win, but by his favorite number, 9. A devotee of golf (no coincidence), Win governs his life by 9s -- he took 45 people with him on a trip to America; he overthrew an upstart civilian government on the 18th day of the 9th month; he gave his party the 9th, 18th and 27th slots on electoral ballots. Yet he finally overstepped the mark when, four years ago, he decided on a whim to replace all 25-, 35- and 75-kyat bank notes with 45- and 90-kyat notes -- thus, at a stroke, rendering half the currency in Burma worthless and many Burmese citizens, who kept their savings at home, penniless. "The number nine is not just lucky," a Western diplomat told the New Yorker. "It is a powerful number, which has to be conquered. Otherwise, it's a danger to you."
Does any of this have any bearing on us? Even Goethe might not too readily say, "Nein." For this, let us remember, is a palindromic year, the first since 1881; and those still alive 11 years from now will be the first for a millennium -- since 1001, in fact -- to experience two palindromic years. Anyone who doubts the power of the number 9 need only talk to someone who was 39, or 49, last night, and is 40, or 50, today. In short, 9 is no 9-day wonder; it is, for many, "the number of heaven itself." So this week, as we go about noting the date 9/9, let us spare a thought for the number that will be keeping us close company for 9 more years at least. And ponder the reverberations of Emerson's pregnant epigraph to nature, "The rounded world is fair to see/ Nine times folded in mystery."