27

Twenty-seven is three cubed, three multiplied by itself three times, and the tradition treats it as three raised to solidity and fullness. In Plato's Timaeus the world-soul is compounded according to two geometric series, one doubling and one tripling, one, two, four, eight and one, three, nine, twenty-seven, so that twenty-seven closes the second series and stands at the far edge of the cosmic proportions. Indian astronomy divides the ecliptic into twenty-seven nakshatras, the lunar mansions through which the moon passes in its roughly twenty-seven-day sidereal circuit, and these mansions govern much of Hindu astrology and the timing of ritual. The near-match between the count and the moon's period is not accidental: the nakshatras are a way of naming where the moon sleeps each night.

Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers names twenty-seven the Sceptre and reads it as a promise of authority, power and command, reward arriving from the productive intellect where the creative faculties have already sown good seed, one of the more fully worked-out and consistently positive readings in his whole compound-number scheme; Florence Campbell's 1931 Your Days Are Numbered and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved the Sceptre reading, which sits comfortably beside the number's already-described status as the cube of three and the closing term of Plato's cosmic proportions.

The Christian New Testament is traditionally counted as twenty-seven books, a canon settled in the fourth century, so that the number marks the completeness of the second Testament as thirty-nine does the first. Buddhist and Hindu rosaries frequently use twenty-seven beads, a quarter of the hundred and eight, precisely because twenty-seven divides that sacred count and because it echoes the lunar mansions. As the cube of three, twenty-seven reduces to nine, the number of completion, so numerological readings treat it as a heightened or three-dimensional nine. Its firmest associations, though, are the twenty-seven nakshatras of the Indian sky and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, one astronomical and one canonical, each a complete set in its own domain.

A wholly modern and unrelated association has attached itself to twenty-seven since the late twentieth century, the so-called 27 Club, the observation that several prominent musicians, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse among them, died at that age; the pattern was named and popularised in the press after Cobain's death in 1994, and statisticians who have examined mortality among musicians generally find no elevated risk specifically at twenty-seven once the wider excess mortality of the profession is accounted for.