Thirteenth

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Thirteen.

It is Friday the thirteenth. On the radio, we hear that there will, statistically, be fewer accidents on this day than on other Fridays with the same weather conditions. Conclusion: people are more careful or people stay at home.

Another example: you are planning your wedding, but everything has been booked already. Only Friday the thirteenth is still available. You book a holiday: there is no chair 13 in the plane, there is no room 13 in the hotel and not even a 13th floor. Peculiar, how persistent an old superstition continues on both sides of the ocean even into the 21st century. It must be something that goes very deeply. What would be its origin?

TWELVE

The number twelve is a quite different story. Throughout history, society and culture have been familiar with it. There were twelve gods on Mount Olympus, we know the twelve labors of Hercules, and the twelve tables in the epic of Gilgamesh. There were twelve tribes of Israel, twelve sons of Jacob, the twelve precious stones of the high priest and Jesus had twelve apostles. Orthodox Christianity knows the twelve holy nights, adopted from the mid-winter time of the Germanic peoples, during which time seemingly stops for a while, until the birth of Christ is celebrated on the thirteenth night. The Book of Revelations speaks of a city with twelve gates and a tree with twelve fruits. The Round Table of King Arthur had twelve knights, and the jury system knows twelve members of the jury. There are twelve signs of the zodiac, fairy tales speak of twelve princes, brothers, fairies, etc.

And the human body has twelve pairs of cranial nerves.

PRIME NUMBERS

Twelve is a so-called 'rich number'. It can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6, the sum of the divisors being greater than the number itself. Such 'rich numbers' are rare. They express a fullness: they contain all possibilities that exist. It is like a cornucopia. The whole of the twelve is waiting to be fulfilled. If no new situation arises, we can only fall back on what is old and familiar. This twelve, as a quality, expresses a desire for liberation from the cycle of spatiality. And the thirteen, a prime number (= indivisible), brings this liberation and leads the twelve to a New Reality: the world of unification with what is Higher. The number 13 contains the "1" as its deeper essence This "1" liberates the twelve from its cycle and grants it the spiral upward course.

Earthly space and time, within which the human being walks his path of life, gains his experiences, and within which the human being is imprisoned, is expressed by twelve. Twelve is the fullness of positive as well as negative.

In the book, The World Brotherhood of the Rosycross, we can read in a text by Rudolf Steiner that in the 13th century, the Brotherhood of the Rosycross consisted of a college of twelve men, who had assimilated the sum total of the spiritual wisdom of ancient times. The 13th, Christian Rosycross, was like a new birth of the twelve streams of wisdom.

Hermes Trismegistus ascertains that the natural human being is, independent from his ordinary behavior, dominated by twelve fundamental vices. He calls them ignorance, grief and sorrow, intemperance, desire, injustice, greed, deceit, envy, guile, anger, thoughtlessness, malice. They stem from the twelve elements of the zodiac, the twelve primordial forces of this nature.  These primordial forces have become what the Gospel of Pistis Sophia  calls 'the twelve aeons'. We may derive from this that the human being is not only imprisoned in space and time, but is also in the grip of these twelve aeons, as in boundless grief. Just look around you.

End Part One

From "Thirteenth" - Pentagram - the Journal of the International School of the Golden Rosycross, Vol. 34, 2012, number 4

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