Properties of the number 9

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Symbolism

• Number of the patience, the meditation.

• Number of the harmony, it represents the inspiration and the perfection of the ideas.

• It is the expression of "the power of the Holy Spirit", according to Etchegoyen.

• Symbolize the plenitude of talents, the reward of the tests.

• Symbol of the creation and the life as a rhythm and development.

• As a product of 3 x 3, it is the expression of the perfection, the symbol of the virile power, in addition to be associated to the couple.

• Nine is the number of the one who accomplishes the divine will. According to the Cabal, it is also the number of the achievement.

• The freemasons have made it the eternal number of human immortality.

• Being the last simple number, it is the number of finalization or finition; it is therefore the most complex, that marks the full lighting up of the numerical series.

• This number was considered as sacred in Egypt and in Greece.

• Number of the man, as a numeral symbol of his gestation (nine months).

• Number symbolizing the nocturnal and terrestrial things, for the Aztecs.

• Number of the hierarchy, represented by nine choruses of the Angels.

• Represent the three divine manifestations in the three plans: world of the spirit, world of the soul, world of the matter, which gives a triple manifestations of Trinity (3 x 3).

• Symbol of the multitude, and according to Parmenide, it concerns the absolute things and it is the symbol of the totality of the human being.

• A favorable number, associate to the eternity.

Bible

• Nailed on the cross, Jesus Christ expires at the ninth hour.

• Jesus appears nine times to his disciples and apostles after his resurrection.

• The nine spiritual gifts of God enumerated by saint Paul: wisdom, knowledge, faith, gift of healing, to operate miracles, prophecy, distinguishing spirits, to speak in different kinds of tongues and the gift to interpret them. (1 Co 12,4-11) Saint Paul enumerates also nine fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Ga 5,22)

• Jesus Ben Sira says in the Ecclesiastic: There are nine things I can think of which strike me as happy, and a tenth which is now on my tongue. (Si 25,7)

• The bed of Og, king of Bashan, incarnation of the devil, had nine cubits long. (Dt 3,11)

• Hoshea, son of Elah, became king of Israel in Samaria, and reigned for nine years. (2 K 17,1)

General

• The practice of the nine first Fridays and Saturdays of the month, asked by Jesus: the first one being to honor his Sacred Heart and the second as a veneration for his Mother. Saturday is indeed dedicated to the Virgin Mary to commemorate her sorrows and her pain, between the death of Jesus and his resurrection, painful moment which lasted the whole day without to have the vision of his Son.

• The nine Choruses of the Angels:

  1. Seraphes, angels of love and light;
  2. Cherubs, angels of wisdom and intelligence;
  3. Thrones, angels of force and life;
  4. Dominations, angels of liberty;
  5. Principalities, angels of eternity and memory;
  6. Powers, angels of holiness;
  7. Vertues, angels of humility;
  8. Archangels, having for attribute the justice;
  9. Ordinary angels, to which we attribute the innocence.



• The nine days of retreat and prayers in a novena are sources of divine graces.

• In the revelations received by Mary Jane of United States, the Lord says that there are nine degrees of prayers. The four firsts are the vocal prayer, the meditation, the affective prayer and the innate comtemplation. The last five are the types of the mystical prayer: the innate comtemplation, the quiet prayer, the prayer of union, the prayer of union in conformity, and the most mystical is the prayer of transforming union.

• Jacques Paquette refers, in his book "Apocalypse: prophecies of the end of times", to nine kingdoms associating the 4th to the Roman empire 19 centuries ago, the Revelation of John speaks about it in the chapter 2 verse 40. The ninth universal empire, called also thousand years reign, corresponds to the New Jerusalem of the Revelation.

• God spread many extraordinary graces on the Virgin Mary the nine days before the Annunciation, according to visions of Mary Agreda.

• After the death of a Pope, we celebrate masses for the rest of his soul during nine days, with nine absolutions.

• 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.

• Anniversary of marriage: weddings of pottery or crockery.

Occurrence

• The number 9 is used 50 times in the Bible.

• Numbers 150, 30000 and 100000 are used 9 times in the Bible.

• The number 9 is used three times in the Koran. (Koran XVII,103; XVIII,24 and XXVII,49)

• The verb to praise is used 9 times in the NT, including 7 times in the Gospel of Luke. By 9 times the Bible refers to the Law of the Lord as to a book in Chronicle Books. The word Master-of-all is used 9 times in the Bible.

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Last modification: December 19, 1998

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