The erotic glyph

By Daniel Browning

In the Western tradition, numerologically speaking, the number five represents freedom and movement. Those ruled by this birth number might climb mountains or move them, by sheer force of will. There is a symmetry in the number’s glyph - its sinuous lines and baroque curve is suggestive even slightly erotic. I see a man, a bulging dominant, grown fat on the excesses of late capitalism - a Silicon Valley merchant buying and selling Bitcoin and internet real estate. His wealth is immaterial. Anatomically, we humans are prone to the charm of this number; we are trained to count to five on our hands and are said to reach a level of personal independence after the planet’s fifth journey around the sun. It is with our five senses we perceive the world - through five sensory organs, if we have unlimited use of them. According to Chinese philosophy, five elements constitute every non-living thing in the natural world. The Greeks hypothesised that the mysterious fifth element - αἰθήρ or æther - bound the other four (fire, water, earth and air). The cult of Pythagoras worshipped numbers and found in the number a simple but elegant mathematical truth; the union of odd and even, the sum of two and three. If the number five were a building, it would harmonise curve and line.