23 and Me (original) (raw)

When I wrote about recurring numbers in the works of certain authors eleven years ago, I received a comment about how twenty-three was significant in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. I hadn’t yet read the book at that point, but I now have, and it does have quite a bit on that particular number. I had wanted to make this post on the twenty-third of the month, but I wasn’t feeling up to it yesterday, so you’re getting it on the twenty-fourth. Apparently modern obsession with the number started with William S. Burroughs, who told a story about how he met a certain Captain Clark in 1960, who had been running a ferry route between Spain and Morocco for twenty-three years without an accident, but died later that day. That evening, he heard about the crash of a Flight 23, which also had a Captain Clark as pilot. This second accident does not appear to be corroborated by flight records, but maybe the details have been altered somewhat in the telling. Regardless, Burroughs began noting all other occurrences of this number
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The Principia Discordia, published in 1963, also points to the importance of twenty-three as a corollary of the Law of Fives, since two and three add up to five.

Illuminatus was heavily influenced by both Burroughs and Discordianism, but one of the characters also points out that these coincidences could easily happen with a whole lot of other numbers as well. And there was a Jim Carrey movie in 2007 where he was obsessed with the number, which wasn’t even the first film of the sort, as there was a German one just called 23 released in 1998. Other stuff I’ve found includes that there were twenty-three grand masters in the Knights Templar (a group also associated with how the number thirteen came to be regarded as unlucky), Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times (at least according to one source), Bishop James Ussher determined that the world had been created on 23 October 4004 BCE (also the birthday of “Weird Al” Yankovic and Eric Shanower, although obviously not in the same year), the main characters in The Big Lebowski always bowled in Lane 23, it was Michael Jordan’s uniform number, humans receive twenty-three chromosomes from each parent (hence the name of the DNA testing company), and Psalm 23 is incredibly popular. The Posies’ second album is called Dear 23, which I believe has something to do with how at least one of the band’s members romanticized being twenty-three years old.
I guess it would have been Jon Auer, as Ken Stringfellow was only twenty-two during the recording of the album, or maybe it was looking toward the future a bit.

And there’s the American expression “twenty-three skidoo,” most popular in the 1940s and 50s, but dating back considerably earlier. Apparently “twenty-three” and “skidoo” were both already existing expressions for leaving, and “skidoo” might be a variant on “skedaddle,” but . One popular theory is that it has to do with people watching women’s skirts blow up from the high winds around the Flatiron Building on 23rd Street in Manhattan.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Sidney Carlton is the twenty-third in a series of people executed by guillotine, with a theatrical version titled The Only Way calling attention to the speaking of that number. Another anecdote relates to there being a maximum of twenty-three horses in English races at a particular time. Both phrases appeared in George M. Cohan’s musical Little Johnny Jones, but not together. The play was about a jockey, which strengthens the possible connection to horse racing. Hexagram 23 in I Ching means stripping away, which is sort of like leaving, but I’m pretty sure that’s a coincidence. I understand Aleister Crowley named the twenty-third chapter of The Book of Lies “Skidoo.”

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