If Nine Was One

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My interest was piqued this afternoon by a post on Medium regarding the number nine. Now the content on Medium varies from the rigorous to the fantastical, depending on how the algorithm interprets the direction in which you want to go based on your reading habits. The stuff I get back I try and filter before actually reading a post, to at least partially game the system as much in my favour as possible, and avoiding the more hysterical crap that can appear in your inbox if you're not careful. What interested me was not the old arithmetical party game of multiplying any number by nine and adding the digits of the product together sequentially until the number is reduced to a single digit and - ta-da! - revealing the number nine; intriguing though that particular numerical phenomenon happens to be.

Rather, the author of the post relates that her birth year similarly reduced by addition of individual digits similarly results in a result of nine, both in the Gregorian calendar we use today in the west, and also in the solar [Hijri] Persian calendar. What she didn't note was that the Persian calendar year doesn't scale directly to the Gregorian, and one needs to take into account one's birth month to arrive at the correct Persian calendar year [+-1]. As the post was about the author's obsessing on the number nine being a constant and recurring numerological phenomenon in her life, this one small detail, if ignored, might just upset her particular OCD apple cart. I assume however that she is probably Iranian and well aware of this fact, though.

I was intrigued enough, though, to apply the same reductive process to my year of birth, 1954, and see what transpired. The resultant number turned out be one, which I thought pretty neat: a nicety in the old sense of the word:- 1+9+5+4 = 19 => 1+9 = 10 => 1+0 = 1 . I then thought, OK, what about the Persian calendar comparison? Well, I was born in the second half of of 1954, and the Persian calendar year for that particular year and the month of October was 1333, which reduces thus: 1+3+3+3 = 10 => 1+0 = 1! Result! What this means in the greater scheme of things I've absolutely no idea, but it's a nice titbit of synchronicity, nevertheless...

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