Seven: Symbol of Perfection, Effectiveness, Completeness
The number seven was apparently the Egyptian symbol of such ideas as perfection, effectiveness, and completeness.
- Examples
- Seven thousand barrels of red beer were used to trick Sekhmet out of killing.
- In her search for her husband’s pieces, the goddess Isis was guarded by seven scorpions.
- A legendary famine lasted seven years.
- The lowest amount that the Nile flooded to solve the famine was seven cubits. The highest was four times seven (28) cubits.
- A doomed prince found a tower seventy (ten times seven) cubits high with seventy (ten times seven) windows.
- Set tore the god Osiris’ body into fourteen pieces: seven each for the two regions of Upper and Lower Egypt.
- The Pool symbol, representing water, contains seven zigzag lines.
- The Gold symbol has seven spines on its underside.
Read more about this topic: Numbers In Egyptian Mythology
Famous quotes containing the words symbol and/or completeness:
“A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.”
—Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, ch. 1, University of North Carolina Press (1949)