Arthur Koestler's contribution to The Challenge of Chance: A Mass Experiment in Telepathy and Its Unexpected Outcome
Principia Discordia
The text titled Principia Discordia claims that "All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5"—this is referred to as the Law of Fives. The 23 enigma is regarded as a corollary of the Law of Fives because 2 + 3 = 5. In these works, 23 is considered lucky, unlucky, sinister, strange, sacred to the goddess Eris, or sacred to the unholy gods of the Cthulhu Mythos. The 23 enigma can be viewed as an example of apophenia, selection bias, and confirmation bias. In interviews, Wilson acknowledged the self-fulfilling nature of the 23 enigma, implying that the real value of the Law of Fives and the 23 enigma is in their demonstration of the mind's ability to perceive "truth" in nearly anything. In the Illuminatus! Trilogy, Wilson expresses the same view, saying that one can find numerological significance in anything, provided that one has "sufficient cleverness."
Music and art duo The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu named themselves after the fictional conspiratorial group "The Justified Ancients of Mummu" from Illuminatus!; the number 23 is a recurring theme in the duo's work. Perhaps most infamously, as the K Foundation they burnt one million pounds on 23 August 1994 and subsequently agreed not to publicly discuss the burning for a period of 23 years. 23 years to the day after the burning they returned to launch a novel and discuss why they had burnt the money. The 2007 filmThe Number 23, starring Jim Carrey, is the story of a man who becomes obsessed with the number 23 while reading a book of the same title that seems to be about his life. Industrial music groupThrobbing Gristle recounted in great detail the meeting of Burroughs and Captain Clark and the significance of the number 23 in the ballad "The Old Man Smiled." In the Stargate Universeseason 1 episode 14, titled “Human”, an imagined Dr. Daniel Jackson refers to the 23 Enigma in conversation with Dr. Nicholas Rush. The number 23 is also referenced in the episode as one half of the number of chromosomes in a human cell – 46, a number which appears frequently in the episode.
