122. The Week: Holy Numbers
The history of the week is also a meandering one. Its origins go back to a number cult. Many nations have a habit of looking upon some one number as specially lucky, desirable, holy, or perhaps unfortunate; at any rate endowed with peculiar virtue or power. Three and seven at once rise to mind, with thirteen as unfortunate. But the particular numbers considered mystic are very diverse. Few American Indian tribes, for instance, had any feeling about seven,[21] and still fewer about three. The latter, in fact, would have seemed to almost all of them imperfect and insignificant. Nearly all the Americans who were conscious of any preferential custom exalted four; and the remaining tribes, those of the North Pacific Coast, were addicted to five. The Africans were without any feeling for seven, except where they had come under Islamic or other foreign influences. The Australians and Pacific islanders also have not concerned themselves with seven, and the same seems to be true of those remoter peoples of northern Asia which remained until recently beyond the range of the irradiation of higher civilization.
This reduces the area in which seven is thought to have sacred power to a single continuous tract comprising Europe, the culturally advanced portions of Asia and the East Indies, and such parts of Africa as have come under Eur-Asiatic influence. It is significant that seven was devoid of special significance in ancient Egypt. This circumscribed distribution suggests diffusion from a single originating center. Where this may have been, there is no direct evidence to show, but there are indications that it lay in Babylonia. Here mathematics, astrology, and divination flourished at an early time. Since the art of foretelling the issue of events from examination of a victim’s liver spread from Babylonia to Italy on one side and to Borneo on the other, it is the more likely that the equally ancient attribution of mystic virtue to seven may have undergone the same diffusion. In fact, the two practices may have traveled as part of a “complex.” The Greeks and Hebrews are virtually out of question as originators because they were already thinking in terms of seven at a time when they were only receiving culture elements from Babylonia without giving anything in return.