Fourteen is two sevens, and it tends to inherit the completeness of seven doubled. Plutarch reports that Set cut the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces, which Isis then gathered, a dismemberment whose count some later writers linked to the fourteen days of the waning moon. The lunar fortnight is in fact the clearest natural fourteen: the Indian calendar divides each month into two pakshas of about fourteen tithis, the waxing and the waning halves, meeting at full and new moon. In Christian devotion the Stations of the Cross were fixed at fourteen, and the Gospel of Matthew arranges its genealogy of Jesus into three deliberate spans of fourteen generations, stating the scheme openly at 1:17, an ordering achieved by selective omission, and so a theological construction rather than a census.
Balliett's 1908 chart and its later elaborators read fourteen, like every number ending in four, through its digital root of five, a figure of change and restless freedom in the standard modern keyword list; Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers, working instead with his own compound-number scheme, groups fourteen with certain of the so-called command numbers alongside twenty-three, sharing a reputation among practitioners of that tradition for sudden reversal of fortune, a reading distinct from, and considerably less developed than, the Osiris and Matthew associations already given above.