Thirteen, the Sacred Number

THE number thirteen was at one time regarded with dislike and with fear that came little short of abhorrence. One of my earliest recollections is that of being invited by my grandmother to sit down for a few minutes with a dinner party of mature persons, I being then of the age of seven years and hitherto rigidly excluded from all such festivities; the reason was simply that the fourteenth guest had failed to arrive, and on no account must thirteen persons sit down to a table. Had I not been available, my grandmother would have flouted all social differences and asked the butler or the maid to sit down with the guests, rather than face the awful consequences that might have flowed from there being thirteen in the party.

On inquiry I found that thirteen was an unlucky number, to be avoided in all such connections as days of the month, room numbers in hotels, lottery tickets, and so forth. There was, however, one curious exception: there was no bad luck about accepting one extra of any kind of commodity habitually sold by the dozen, and my grandmother always demanded what she called a ‘ baker’s dozen ’ — though I should have thought it rather a baker’s client’s dozen — of buns, muffins, collar studs, and blue pills, and also occasionally, I think, of eggs. I never could make out what became of the curse on these occasions, but neither she nor anybody else of my acquaintance ever refused the additional bun.

It is curious to one brought up in this antique and rather charming superstition to find that thirteen is now fast becoming a Sacred Number. For in North America thirteen is actually being made the mystic basis of the real religion of the age. It is the key number of everything that falls under the head of Education. The educationists worship it; it is the Number of their Golden Calf; they never do anything except in thirteens and multiples of thirteen.

Every university course is in thirteen — or twenty-six, or thirty-nine — lectures. Every university textbook is in thirteen, or x times thirteen, chapters. Any subject that cannot be taught in multiples of thirteen is incontinently cast out of the curriculum; it is not knowledge; it cannot be taught at all. I have a friend who has written a book, a very good book, a textbook, on Differential Calculus. When he had written eleven chapters he found that he had said everything that he wanted to say about calculus, so he stopped. He wanted to send his textbook out into the academic world with eleven chapters and no more. But his publishers knew better. They insisted that he must add two more chapters, even if he had nothing further to say about calculus whatever. So he added two chapters on the Police Power in the United States Constitution; and his book is now regarded as the best thing of its kind in existence, and is used by one hundred and seventy-eight colleges.

This startling rehabilitation of the number thirteen has thus far taken place only in the United States, if we except some slight extension of the process into Canada; and it has been suggested to me that a clue to it may be found in the fact that there were Thirteen Original States in the American Union, and in the associated fact that there are thirteen bars in the American flag. It is, of course, conceivable that these things helped to prepare the way for a more favorable consideration of the ill-omened number by the American mind, but I doubt if they were the immediate cause of its sanctification.

The real beginnings of the thirteen cult occurred, I am confident, when certain American educationists conceived the idea that the academic year ought to be divided into ‘semesters’ rather than into the ‘terms’ which prevail in Europe and which seem to have some connection with the major feasts of the Western Christian Church. A semester is half of an academic year; and an academic year in the United States has settled down into twenty-six weeks of lectures, six weeks or so of examinations, registrations, celebrations, and graduations, and twenty weeks of vacations. Half of an academic year is therefore thirteen weeks of solid instruction, plus some trimmings which need not be taken into account. Hence thirteen has become the basic unit of everything in the academic time system. So many periods of thirteen weeks each make a Bachelor of Arts; so many more periods make a Master; so many more yet make a Doctor of Philosophy, with the aid of a typewritten manuscript which may possibly be read by thirteen people. Thirteen is the essential number in the magic formula by which an undergraduate becomes a Bachelor, a Bachelor a Master, and a Master a Doctor. Obviously it has some supernatural efficacy, something like the laying on of hands.

I do not know whether the sacredness of thirteen will in time spread to Western Europe and the other countries in which modern civilization is rampant, or not. It depends entirely on the attitude of the educational authorities. Oxford and Cambridge seem to be deeply attached to the idea of Michaelmas and Easter terms, notwithstanding the circumstance that at least one of the feasts on which these antiquated divisions are based is continually wandering all over the spring months, and its exact location in any year cannot be determined without the aid of a Book of Common Prayer, a slide rule, a set of logarithms, and a horoscope. This cannot surely go on forever, and when the Easter term disappears it will presumably be replaced by the American semester, which has proved its superior efficiency by the fact that it turns out more university graduates in a decade than the British terms do in a century. Even Europe must eventually learn that you can’t get anywhere without standardization, and that in education the standards come in thirteens.

Except in Russia. There they have upset the whole thirteen business by putting far too many weeks in a year. The Soviet week is five days, the Soviet year is seventy-three weeks, with a sort of dies non every leap year. The Soviet sacred number — which in time will doubtless come to be named after the late Comrade Lenin — will have to be either five or seventy-three. I presume it will turn out to be five, a number which is already associated with Sovietism not only through the five-day week but also through the Five-Year Plan — which you will notice does not cease to be the Five-Year Plan because it is intended to execute it in four years.

True, the number five is already slightly consecrated to another sort of worship; it is revered, if I am not misinformed, by members of the Masonic Order as having some connection with their founder or patron, King Solomon. I should for that reason have expected the Russians to fall back on seventy-three, which is also a prime number — at least I have tried dividing it by all sorts of things without success — and which has the advantage of being considerably larger than any other sacred number that I know of, and therefore appropriate to a large country with large ideas. However, I have not noticed the Russians doing anything about seventythree, and they have certainly done a lot about five, from which I conclude that perhaps it is possible for a number to be too large to be sacred, even in Russia.

After all, there is something peculiarly suitable to the Soviet rïgime in the number five. It is probably the most efficient of all our numbers, next to ten, which itself is merely five multiplied by two. It is the number of the hand, and not only of the human hand, but of the hand of cards in poker, that most efficient of all means for effecting a redistribution of the ownership of valuables. It may well become the characteristic number of Russia, not for any mystic properties, but in virtue of its businesslike qualities. The hammer, the sickle, and the number five. Why, now that I come to think of it, the very contour of the figure itself is that of a sickle with the blade downward. The thing is getting serious. If these ratiocinations of mine are correct, the good old Anglo-Saxon and bourgeois game of fives may have to be abandoned by all loyal Americans, as savoring too much of Communism and a disregard for international debts.

But the Russians will never have any use for thirteen, and it can go on being the sacred number of Bourgeois Learning.

BERNARD K. SANDWELL