Robert Anton Wilson cites
William S. Burroughs as the first person to believe in the 23 enigma.
[1] Wilson, in an article in
Fortean Times, related the following
anecdote:
I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of
Naked Lunch,
Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.
[2]Burroughs wrote a
short story in 1967 titled "23 Skidoo." The phrase "
23 skidoo" was popular in the 1920s; it means "it's time to get out while the getting is good."
[3]
In literature
The 23 enigma can be seen in:
The text titled
Principia Discordia claims that "All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5"
[4]—this is referred to as the
Law of Fives. The 23 enigma is regarded as a
corollary of the Law of Fives because 2 + 3 = 5.
In these works, 23 is considered lucky, unlucky, sinister, strange, sacred to the goddess
Eris, or sacred to the unholy gods of the
Cthulhu Mythos.
As with most
numerological claims, the 23 enigma can be viewed as an example of
apophenia,
selection bias, and
confirmation bias. In interviews, Wilson acknowledged the self-fulfilling nature of the 23 enigma, implying that the real value of the Law of Fives and the 23 enigma is in their demonstration of the mind's ability to perceive "truth" in nearly anything.
When you start looking for something you tend to find it. This wouldn't be like
Simon Newcomb, the great astronomer, who wrote a mathematical proof that heavier than air flight was impossible and published it a day before the Wright brothers took off. I'm talking about people who found a pattern in nature and wrote several scientific articles and got it accepted by a large part of the scientific community before it was generally agreed that there was no such pattern, it was all just selective perception."
[5]In the
Illuminatus! Trilogy, Wilson expresses the same view, saying that one can find numerological significance in anything, provided that one has "sufficient cleverness."