A Square and a Quarter

Twenty-five is five squared and a quarter of a hundred, and much of its use is that of a convenient rounded milestone: the silver jubilee marks twenty-five years, a quarter-century. In the Hebrew calendar the twenty-fifth of Kislev begins Hanukkah, the eight-day festival of the rededication of the Temple, and Christian tradition placed the Nativity on the twenty-fifth of December, a date fixed in the fourth-century West and variously explained as a calculation from the supposed date of the conception or as the taking-over of an existing midwinter observance. As five multiplied by itself, twenty-five reads in numerological terms as an intensified five, the number of the senses and of change, though the tradition attaching to it is thin compared with the sacred milestones themselves.

Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers reads twenty-five as a figure of success won through steady effort rather than through fortunate timing, a reading that sharpens rather than contradicts the reduced seven this article already describes; Florence Campbell's 1931 Your Days Are Numbered and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both carried Cheiro's compound reading forward largely unchanged, one of several cases in the chart where the 1926 book's wording persisted through the later mid-century elaborations with little revision.