I have been thinking about the personality of numbers. Until this moment, it never occurred to me that most people think of numbers only as tools for cataloguing quantity. But numbers have a distinctive life outside the bland universe of numerical convenience.
0 is female. Though nothing in her own right, she is pregnant with the possibility of other numbers.
1 is obviously male. He is uninteresting and blunt.
2 is female. This is especially obvious when she’s rendered in a seraph font, with slender curving neck. Demure. Sometimes coy.
3 is androgynous: two curves meeting in an angle. Neither one nor the other. Neither soft nor hard. Neither male nor female.
4 is hermaphrodite. An angle that receives a phallus across its own thigh. Though secure in itself, it is threatening to 1. That is why 14 and 41 are such uneasy figures.
5 is female, bright and cheerful. She is open and non-judgmental and gets on well with all the other numbers.
6 is female. She has a darker disposition than 5. She is precise and officious, not the easiest to relax with.
7 is male. He is the joker, the one who lightens the mood at a party. He is fast friends with 5 but it is 6 who brings out the best in him, and it is 7 who moderates 6’s intensity.
8 is androgynous, an indeterminate mix of curves and angles. But 8 is older and sterner than the other androgyne and so sometimes exudes a masculine aura.
9 is male, the oldest of the numbers, the leader. 9 has a paternal fondness for 2 and jealously protects her from 7’s advances.
Before you mix numbers (for example, by multiplying 18 and 23), check with them to be sure they’re in the mood to be mixed in that way. On an off day, 414 can be disastrous.