Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Eight years of sorting
Rick Rubin spent eight years on The Creative Act, which started as 1,400 pages of ideas. After years of failed and successful experiments, the pages took shape as 63 handwritten areas of thought. Once every idea was sorted in, the count climbed into the low 80s.
The call for 78
The book was done at 83 or 84 sections, and everyone was happy. Then Rubin called Neil, a writer and friend who had helped from the beginning, and asked for 78, the number of cards in a tarot deck. He wanted the count to point at something else in the world, the way 108 or 144 might. Neil called him insane and urged him to be happy it was good and be done.
The morning count
The next day, in Italy, his assistant Dylan put the sections in order. Each one had been written as its own essay, so they were easy to shuffle and count. Dylan reported something strange: there were 78 sections. Rubin insisted there had been 83 the day before, and Dylan insisted there were no others. Nobody could explain it, and nobody had touched anything.
Why does a tarot deck have 78 cards?
A tarot deck splits into 22 Major Arcana cards and 56 Minor Arcana cards, and the minor ones come in four suits of 14. The cards began in fifteenth-century northern Italy as a game called tarocchi, played with a trump suit. The occult uses came much later, after the French writer Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed in 1781 that tarot held ancient Egyptian wisdom. Scholars have found no support for that Egyptian claim.
Why do some numbers feel sacred?
The number 108 shows up in Hindu and Buddhist practice, where prayer bead strands called malas usually hold 108 beads. Different traditions give different explanations, and one mathematical observation is that 108 equals 1 to the first power, times 2 squared, times 3 cubed. Other numbers pick up meaning the same way, through repeated use in a tradition until the count itself carries weight. Dante's Divine Comedy is built around three, with 100 cantos made of one opening canto plus three sections of 33.
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