NUMEROLOGY AND PROBABILITY IN DANTE

R ic h a r d J . P e g is

In a recent article on the occasion of the Dante Centennial, Professor C.

Singleton1 has employed an argument based on numerology to support several
conclusions regarding the interpretation of the Divine Comedy. The technique
used in the argument involves the counting of lines in the individual cantos and
looking for patterns involving symmetry or connections with the numbers 3, 7
or 10. When such patterns are found it is assumed that Dante intended them
to be there. “For we have certainly to face the fact that the poet had to have
the plan of that design in mind from the first canto to the last and never lose
sight of it; for might it not fall out, simply happen, in part and quite acciden­
tally, somewhere in the hundred canto lengths, and thus obscure the clear out­
line of it at the center?”23
It has been suggested by Professor E. Gilson8 that if an author never specifi­
cally admits the use of a numerical symbolism which is later found in his work,
we should consider the possibility that it is totally unintentional. The purpose
of this paper is to show that probability theory is well suited for determining
the likelihood that a given pattern would have arisen accidentally. The analysis
is geared to Professor Singleton’s patterns, though the extension to any other
well defined pattern is quite simple.
The basic contention of numerology seems to be that certain numbers are of
special significance whenever they occur. Usually the numbers 3, 7 and 10 are
given the most emphasis, though for larger numbers like 235, the sum of the
digits is taken and the ‘significant’ number 10 is found. We use this example
because, if we look at it further, we note that the sum of the first and last
digits is 7 and the middle digit is 3, so all of the ‘significant’ numbers mentioned
above are involved in one way or another. This analysis suggests that, given
almost any number with several digits, we have a good chance of being able
to operate on it in such a way as to bring any arbitrary set of ‘significant
numbers’ into play. This in turn suggests the possibility of a scientifc approach
to the interpretation of suspected numerological significance.
If a number, say 235, is given by a writer who is not available for questioning,
there is no mathematical answer to the question, “Did he think that the fact that
the sum of the digits is 10 is significant?” The only way to answer the question
is to find out from the historical record whether or not the writer ever said he

1 C. S. Singleton, “The Poet’s Number at the Center" Modem Language Notes 80, 1, 1-10.
2 Ibid. 9-10.
3 The suggestion was made in a private letter of May 1, 1966. "Since numerical symbolism
can neither be proved nor disproved, is not the comparison with the result of a mere calculus of
probability the only objective ground for an answer ?” I would like to express my appreciation to
Professor Gilson for bringing the idea to my attention and suggesting this paper.
 N U M E R O L O G Y AND P R O B A B IL IT Y IN DANTE 371

thought it was significant. No amount of analysis of the number itself will shed
light on the man’s past state of mind. However, when we suspect that a certain
number or number pattern was deliberate on the part of its author we can
evaluate the probability that it could have happened by chance. If this prob­
ability is extremely low, then we can say it is likely that the author produced
the pattern deliberately. But if it is not extremely low, then we have to concede
that the pattern could very well have happened by chance.
A very simple example of this probabilistic argument is found in the case of
a fairly rigid poetic form such as the sonnet. If a new poem by an otherwise
unknown author is discovered, and it happens to be composed of fourteen lines
with the rhyme scheme abbaabbacdecde, we would not hesitate to call it a
sonnet and even to assume that the otherwise unknown author must have had
contact with the form. The probability against it is microscopic, though it
has to be conceded that the situation could have arisen where this form was
unwittingly followed. Thus the science of probability gives us a yardstick
whereby we can measure the likelihood that a seemingly contrived occurrence
was in fact purely accidental. Such measurement can neither confirm nor deny
an author’s intention, but when the probability of accident is more than negligible
it refutes the kind of argument which says, ’’This pattern occurred; ergo the
author intended it to occur."
Let us return to the case of Professor Singleton’s application of the classical
numerological argument to the interpretation of Dante. We find that he has
counted the lengths of the cantos of the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Para-
diso. and was happy upon the discovery that at the center of the Purgatorio,
cantos 14 through 20 have a symetric configuration of lengths, namely
151, 145, 145, 139, 145, 145, 151.
We are not concerned here with the inferences which Professor Singleton makes
about the structure of the poem as a result of the number patterns. We are
concerned with his tacit assumption that because the pattern is there the poet
must have intended it to be there. We propose to show that the odds are
fairly good that the symmetric seven happened by chance. In fact, another
symmetric seven actually did occur in cantos 3 through 9 of the Purgatorio,
namely
145, 139, 136, 151, 136, 139, 145.
Relationships between these numbers and Numerology would not be hard to
invent.
There are several ways to investigate the probability of occurrence of a
symmetric seven in the Divine Comedy. The way that is conceptually the
simplest is straightforward case-counting. From the Table of Canto Lengths in
Professor Singleton’s paper we derive a table of the frequency of occurrence of
each length. Such a table is given below for the Purgatorio:
Length Frequency
133 2
136 5
139 5
142 2
372 R . J . P E G IS

Length Frequency
145 9
148 2
151 3
154 4
157 0
160 1
We now count up two totals M and N which are defined as follows:
M = the total number of arrangements of 33 cantos with the given
distribution of lengths and having at least one symmetric seven;
N — the total number of arrangements of 33 cantos with the given
distribution of lengths.
The probability of occurrence of a symmetric seven given the distribution of
lengths is then the ratio M/N. The counting is extremely tedious since the
number of arrangements is very large With the aid of an IBM 1620 computer
we obtained the following values:
M = 73826117779244935104000
N = 1442479266970848933120000
The probability M /N is thus approximately .051 or about 5%. What this
means is that of all possible arrangements of a collection of cantos with the
same distribution of lengths that Dante used, 5°/o would contain at least one
symmetric seven. Let us put this in terms of a judgment of the contrived or
random character of the situation. If we were presented with a large collection
of such cases and stated categorically that they were all contrived, then we
should not only be mistaken in judgment about 5 times in each 100 cases, but
we should be always wrong for having spoken categorically. The situation
may be compared with a street intersection where 5%, or 1 in 20 pedestrians
is hit by an automobile. By no stretch of the imagination could a traffic
engineer use these data to advise us that the intersection was safe.
The above analysis introduces an element of doubt into the declaration that
the number pattern had to be deliberate. However, the argument is open to
the objection that it assumes the specific frequency distribution given in our
table. A more general argument would assume no more than a probability
distribution for the actual canto lengths used by the poet. Such a distribution
must take into account the facts that the average canto length in the Purgatorio
is 145 lines and that cantos vastly different from this in length are unlikely.
The overall structure of the poem requires further that if the canto length
differs from 145 then it does so by a multiple of 3. We shall set up a model
which takes the above features into account but is otherwise strictly proba­
bilistic. What model we use is unimportant, for we are merely investigating
what would have happened if the poet had acted randomly in this regard.
We choose a binomial distribution, in which the model consists of tossing a
coin 10 times and letting X be the number of heads. Then we assign to a given
canto 145 + 3 (X-5) lines and repeat the whole experiment for the next
canto. Since the commonest outcome is X = 5, the commonest length will be
145, and the others will cluster about it. This distribution correlates quite well
 N U M E R O L O G Y A N D P R O B A B IL IT Y IN D A N T E 373

with the observed frequencies, since from it we can calculate mathematically

a probability of 252/1024 for the occurrence of the length 145, and in fact
this length occurs 9 times among the 33 cantos of the Purgatorio. Both ratios
are approximately 1/4.
Based on this distribution, the probability of occurrence of at least one
symmetric seven in the 33 cantos of the Purgatorio works out to 13.8°/o, and
the probability of finding at least one in the whole Divine Comedy works out
to 36.2°/o. The details of the mathematics are beside the point here.4 We must
conclude that while the mind of Dante cannot be known through twentieth-
century mathematical analysis and computation, the pattern of the symmetric
seven as described by Professor Singleton would have been likely even if the
poet had resorted to coin tossing to determine the lengths of the cantos.

,
St. John Fisher College Rochester, New York

4 The mathematical calculations for the approach by frequency distributions and a summary
of the tabulation for the approach by case counting are available from the author. For a sound but
fairly non-technical account of the methods used in such calculations the reader is referred to the
chapters on combinations and probability in a text on finite mathematics such as Kattsoff and
Simone, Finite Mathematics (New York, 1965).