Why The Number 7 Is Considered Good Luck

Maybe it’s reasonable to assume that the number seven is considered lucky because it’s linked to a variety of historically, textually, and culturally auspicious sources. The Greek myth about the Pleiades constellation (seen above), or “seven sisters,” recounts how Zeus transformed the daughters of Atlas — the Titan who supports Earth on his shoulders — into stars to protect them from being raped. But this tale goes back much farther than Classical Athens some 2,500 years ago. Versions of it show up in various societies, such as Native American, Asian, and African, indicating that some original version existed before those peoples split. According to The Conversation, this puts the tale at about 100,000 years old.

As mentioned, we’ve also got the much more recent Biblical stories about God making the world in seven days, or Jesus performing seven miracles on the Sabbath, or seven churches described in Revelation. In Islam, hajj pilgrims in Mecca walk around the Kabba seven times. Hinduism describes seven steps along the path to enlightenment. Then there are cutesy factoids like the visible light spectrum containing seven visible colors, and the seven modes of diatonic music scales having seven unique tones each.

However, readers ought to be aware of the ultra-obvious and well-known human tendency to draw meaningful connections between even the most spurious and illogical points, defined by psychologists as apophenia. True to apophenia, believers will likely say that seven’s lucky properties inspired our stories of its power — not the other way around.