14

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.

Twelver Shia Islam venerates the Fourteen Infallibles, the Masumin: the Prophet Muhammad, his daughter Fatimah, and the twelve Imams, held to be preserved from sin and error. The Arabic script supplies another fourteen: of the twenty-eight letters, fourteen open certain surahs as the disconnected letters, the huruf muqattaat, and are known as the luminous letters, exactly half the alphabet. Beyond religion the number keeps its structural uses, fourteen lines make a sonnet, and fourteen pounds make a stone in British weight, but these are conventions rather than symbolism. The recurring thread is the doubled seven and the lunar half-month, which between them account for most of the number's traditional weight.

The digit four that fourteen contains carries its own weight in Chinese numerology, quite apart from any doubled seven: the word for four, si, is a near-homophone of si, to die, and the association is strong enough that buildings, hotel floors and hospital rooms across China and other Chinese-speaking regions routinely skip numbers containing it, fourteen included, in the same way many Western buildings skip a thirteenth floor. The avoidance is a documented modern building practice, not an ancient doctrine, and it sits entirely apart from the Egyptian, Christian and Islamic fourteens already described.