Sacred Number

There was an ancient art lying behind the creation of sacred texts, known to academics who study such things but very little known to a wider audience. This art is found to exist in the Bible, Homer's classics, Islam, and most literature arriving in written form by the early historical period.

Just as today we talk about the secret codes of the renaissance and their use in secret societies, the inner knowledge of the structure of a great work appears to have been a specialist skill that helped present the story in a powerful way - the power being that by controlling the structure of a work, its integrity could be assured in its transmission and its content could have inner relationships.

The technique has been called Ring Composition, because the sequence has a circular structure where beginning and end meet at "the latch" whilst at the furthest point from beginning and end, the epitomy of the story is revealed at "the turn", at which the story begins to return to whatever was at the beginning, to reach the end.

There are quite a lot of articles and analyses on the web concerned with the ring composition of old texts and the work of Mary Douglas, the anthropologist (1921-2007) who died last May, provides a number of examples from the Bible and other works, notably within her book Thinking in Circles. 

By way of this introduction I thought that my book, Sacred Number, might contain an interesting structure presented as a ring composition. This in spite of the fact that I did not consciously engage in the technique when writing it. It remains a possibility though that inner structural rules might apply if and when you feel that a composition was arrived at that had some objective validity.

You might like to play with the idea of ring composition yourself. Or you may just find the following ring analysis of  Sacred Number interesting and more revealing than a back cover synopsis, an index, the introduction, and so on - all the usual mechanisms for trying to provide an overview or summary. One is struck however by the fact that this is essentially a visual medium and that it can reveal relationships, of polarity for example, but does not explain them. Perhaps this was also a technique of deeper thinking?