The Twenty-One Forms of Tara

Tibetan Buddhism venerates Tara in twenty-one forms, praised in the widely recited hymn known as the Praises to the Twenty-One Taras, each verse invoking a different aspect and colour of the bodhisattva of compassionate action. The set is a fixture of daily practice across the Himalayan traditions and is among the clearest religious uses of the number. In Christian devotion the number is less fixed but appears in counts of days, Daniel fasts twenty-one days before his vision in Daniel 10, and in the arithmetic of three weeks. Between the twenty-one Taras, the World card and the coming-of-age, the number's associations converge on the idea of a completed and blessed whole, three times over the sacred seven.

Balliett's 1908 chart reduces twenty-one to three, self-expression and sociability in the standard modern keyword list; Florence Campbell's 1931 Your Days Are Numbered and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both kept that root reading alongside Cheiro's 1926 compound title, so a name or birth date totalling twenty-one is read in the American system on two levels at once, the compound World and the reduced three, a doubled reading Cheiro's own book is generally credited with popularising across the chart's two-digit numbers.