mc gee] the beginning of ma them a tics 673
and finds expression in twenty-five-fold collectives in India and China, and in a rather frequent organization of Tibetan tribes into twenty-five septs or formal social units. Eminently conspicuous in Europe and America is the mystical number forty-nine, espe- cially when expressed as seven X seven ; for, in the belief of a large element of European population, the seventh son of a seventh son needs no training to fit himself for medical craft, while scan- ners of advertising columns of American newspapers may daily read anew that the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter is a predestined seeress.
Few of the larger mystical numbers have survived the shock of occidental contact ; but they abound in the Orient. The coincidental-augmental sixty-one prevails in Tibet, where Sven Hedin found a lama, one out of sixty-one of coordinate rank, who professed survival for sixty-one millenniums, through a suc- cession of exoteric deaths and esoteric reincarnations at uniform periods of sixty-one years ; ' and this odd value is explained by the designation of the sixty-first figure in the Mongolian hexa- gram— "The Right Way" or " In the Middle " '—which at the same time connects the Book of Changes with the nearly world- wide Cult of the Quarters and its mystical Middle. The numbers sixty-three and sixty-five are also mystical in Chinese philosophy, though their potency would seem to be dwarfed by the mechani- cal-arithmetical structure of the octonal square to which they have been adjusted evidently during recent centuries. Among the Hindu more or less mystical numbers abound, and many of these are found on analysis to correspond with conventional alba- cabalic augmentals and coincidentals ; while the Buddhistic rituals and series of aphorisms often run in measures of fives, with an initial or final supernumerary — the feature being apparently fixed by a mnemonic finger-count superposed on the almacabalic sys- tem, much as the octonal count is superposed on the mystical figures in the Chinese hexagram.
1 Through Asia, by Sven Hedin, 1899, vol. II, p. 1132.
- Chinese Philosophy, op. cit. , p. 12.
�� �
