The Christian New Testament is traditionally counted as twenty-seven books, a canon settled in the fourth century, so that the number marks the completeness of the second Testament as thirty-nine does the first. Buddhist and Hindu rosaries frequently use twenty-seven beads, a quarter of the hundred and eight, precisely because twenty-seven divides that sacred count and because it echoes the lunar mansions. As the cube of three, twenty-seven reduces to nine, the number of completion, so numerological readings treat it as a heightened or three-dimensional nine. Its firmest associations, though, are the twenty-seven nakshatras of the Indian sky and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, one astronomical and one canonical, each a complete set in its own domain.
A wholly modern and unrelated association has attached itself to twenty-seven since the late twentieth century, the so-called 27 Club, the observation that several prominent musicians, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse among them, died at that age; the pattern was named and popularised in the press after Cobain's death in 1994, and statisticians who have examined mortality among musicians generally find no elevated risk specifically at twenty-seven once the wider excess mortality of the profession is accounted for.