The Number 9

9th September 2009...09/09/09...Today's date...What an interesting number...It has been more than 1 week since the last time I post an entry...So, on this memorable day, I decide to look for some interesting facts regarding the number 9...Have a look at it...

• Nine was the name of the sacred mountain of the Sun, for the ancient Egyptians.

• Some peoples believed that the Sky was divided into nine celestial levels. It was the case for the Buddhists and also for the last worshippers of Mithra.

• The nine plains of the Chinese sky. The hall of the imperial throne was separated by nine gates from the rest of the palace and the book of Annals, named Chou-king, exposes the "Sublime Science" in nine rules. Also the Chinese prostrated 9 times in front of their emperor.

• There was nine gates which separated the sacred enclosure (the holy of Holies) of some religious traditions, from the rest of the space, this one considered profane.

• Deucalion, the Greek Noah, sails during 9 days on the vessel which he has built on the command of the gods.

• For Hesiode, the Earth was separated from the Heaven by a distance of nine days and nine nights, and from the hell also by nine days and nights.

• The nine levels of the hell of Dante.

• The nine nodes of the bamboo for the Taoists.

• The nine notches of the birch-axis of the world at the Siberian tribes.

• The nine openings of the man for Islam.

• The nine stages that should traverse the souls of Aztecs to reach the eternal rest. They counted also nine underground worlds.

• The nine was the key number of teaching for the materialistic Hindu philosophers in the Vaiceshika school.

• It is the period of years when the voice of God is heard by a person if this person did not understand yet one of his lessons of life.

• The 9 girls of Belenos of the druidism: Ogia - virginity, Glania - purity, Karantia - charity, Uxellia - nobleness, Viriona - truth, Aventia - honesty, Dagia - goodness, Lania - plenitude, and Lovania - joy.

• The nine is often found in the superstitions, such as for example, nine salt grains means the bad fate. And if someone wants to get marry in the year will jump nine times over a fire of the saint John or will jump over nine different fires. The tradition wants that the drowned returns to the surface of the water after nine days.

• The magic square using the first nine numbers is associated to the planet Saturn and has for sum 15. Sometimes, it is also called the "square of Solomon".

                    4 9 2
                    3 5 7
                    8 1 6
  

• In the Greeks mythology: the nine nights of love of Zeus; the nine days and nine nights that Leto suffers when she gives birth; the nine girls of Zeus and Mnemosyne, named Muses, who governed the liberal arts: Clio, Calliope, Melpomene, Thala, Euterpe, Erato, Terpsichore, Polymna and Urana; the nine days of ansciety of the Ceres-Demeter goddess who went around the world in search of her daughter Persephone kidnaped by Hephaistos, the dark god of Hells; the tradition wants that Minos, in his cavern, spent nine years to receive the Jupiter laws; a legend says also that Minos had, every nine years, a meeting with Jupiter, after what it was possible for him to prophesy.

• Every nine years Athens sent, in the island of Crete, seven young men and seven young girls to be sacrificed there to the Minotaure.

• There is nine "Dharmas", books constituting the Nepal Bible.

• Orphism defines nine symbolic aspects of the universe divided into 3 triads: the night, the sky and the time; the ether, the light and the stars; the sun, the moon and the nature.

• The 9 was the sacred monogram of the Moon goddess, "Bolon Tiku" of the Mayas.

• The "Jin-Hoang" of the "Kieou-teou" divide the earth in nine parts, and nine brothers of the same name share the empire of the world.

• In the Brahminism, Vichnou incarnates in nine avatars to sacrifice himself for the salvation of men.

• In the biodynamic agriculture, the complete cycle for the preparation of the compost lasts nine months.

• The language includes, grammatically, nine parts: the verb, the noun, the adjective, the participle, the conjunction, the article, the pronoun, the preposition and the adverb - interjection apart.

• The nine planets discovered in our solar system, are in the order starting from Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Recently a tenth planet was discovery beyond Pluto.

• R. Allendy speaks about the curious arithmetical properties of the nine which gives it a very particular character because of the use of our decimal notation system. In another numerical notation system they would cease to exist: the difference between an unspecified number and the number formed by the inversion of its digits is always a multiple of 9 - example: between 26 and 62, the difference is 36, multiple of 9; the multiples of 9 are always composed of digits where the sum (once reduced) is equal to 9; the product 123456789 x 9 gives 9 times the digit 1 in the answer (1111111101). Concerning this last property, Elisabeth Haich mentiones the next calculations:

         0 x 9 + 1 = 1
         1 x 9 + 2 = 11
         12 x 9 + 3 = 111
         123 x 9 + 4 = 1111
         1234 x 9 + 5 = 11111
         12345 x 9 + 6 = 111111
         123456 x 9 + 7 = 1111111
         1234567 x 9 + 8 = 11111111
         12345678 x 9 + 9 = 111111111
         123456789 x 9 + 10 = 1111111111
  

• The Trojan War lasted nine years.

These are just a some of the facts that I've found through google...Why don't you search some other facts on this number.