The story of 3 and 9

Every civilization that tried to describe a whole life kept landing on the same two numbers.

NynLyf has nine tiles and a list of three. That was not a design trend. It is one of the oldest ideas people have had about how to hold a life in your head. Here is where it comes from, and why it still works.

Nine means all of it

Egypt

Egyptians wrote "many" with three strokes. Three was how you said plural. So nine, three threes, was the plural of plurals. It meant everything. The nine gods of Heliopolis, called the Ennead, stood for the whole of creation. When Egyptians wanted to say "every enemy we have," they drew nine bows.

The cat is in the story too. In the Book of the Dead, the sun god Ra takes the form of the Great Cat at Heliopolis, the city of the nine, and defeats the serpent of chaos every night so the sun can come up. Then the sun is born again at dawn. Every day is a new life.

China

The Lo Shu square is a three by three grid holding the numbers one through nine. Every row, column, and diagonal adds to fifteen. Feng shui lays that grid over a home as the bagua, a map of nine life areas: wealth, reputation, love, family, health, creativity, knowledge, career, and helpers. People have been looking at life as nine squares for a very long time. Nine was also the emperor's number, because the word for nine sounds like the word for long-lasting.

Greece and the North

The Greeks had nine Muses, one for every art a person could practice. The Norse world tree held nine worlds, and Odin hung on it for nine nights to earn wisdom.

Three means complete

Pythagoras

The Pythagoreans called three the first complete number, because it is the first with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Aristotle passed it along: the whole, and everything in it, is defined by three.

Rome

Omne trium perfectum.
Everything that comes in threes is complete.

The Hebrew tradition

"A threefold cord is not quickly broken," says Ecclesiastes. In Jewish law, something done three times becomes established. Once is an event. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is real.

Everywhere else

Three wishes. Three acts. Three little pigs. Faiths from India to Ireland arranged the divine in threes. Every storyteller, preacher, and comedian learns the same rule: say three things, because people remember three things.

The math agrees

Nine is three times three. Multiply nine by anything, add up the digits of the answer, and you land back on nine. 9 × 7 is 63, and 6 + 3 is 9. 9 × 58 is 522, and 5 + 2 + 2 is 9. It always comes home.

Why it still works

Modern memory research says a person can hold about three to five things in mind at once. Not ten. Not a project board with forty cards. That is why a to-do list of thirty items makes you feel worse and a list of three gets done.

And nine is about as many areas as a life really has. We tested it on a monk, a nineteen-year-old, and a widow. All three have all nine. Nobody needs a tenth.

Three rows of three. Who you are, who you're with, and what you stand on. The colors are old too: malachite, lapis, amethyst, carnelian, gold, turquoise. The stones Egyptians buried with the people they loved.

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