Twenty-Three in Body and History

Two factual twenty-threes are often folded into the number's modern lore. Human beings carry twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, and each parent contributes twenty-three, a genuine fact of biology that post-dates any traditional numerology by millennia and so cannot have informed it. Suetonius reports that Julius Caesar was struck twenty-three times by the conspirators, though the physician Antistius judged only one wound fatal; the figure is frequently cited by enthusiasts of the twenty-three enigma. Neither has any bearing on ancient number symbolism, and their appeal lies precisely in the retrospective pattern-making the enigma was invented to illustrate. Stripped of the modern accretions, twenty-three remains a number whose one durable religious tie is to the shepherd psalm.

The twenty-three enigma's appeal to coincidence-seekers is itself a documented case study in a real cognitive bias, apophenia, the tendency to perceive meaningful pattern in random or unconnected data, a term coined by the psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in 1958 in an unrelated clinical context and later adopted by writers on the enigma to name exactly the mechanism Robert Anton Wilson was making fun of; the chromosome count and the Caesar wound count noted above are two of the enigma's favourite raw material for the same demonstration.