Numbers in Circe

From what I’ve seen so far, Circe seems to continue roughly the same patterns of number usage as the rest of Ulysses. The overwhelming majority of instances are related to money, which here takes a darker turn due to the fact that in many cases the monetary amounts in question are tied to prostitution.

One of the more interesting things I found is that apparently the line “sixtyseven is a bitch” on line 371 is a reference to Giordano Bruno, a sixteenth-century Italian heretical astronomer/polymath. There’s even a whole academic paper about this one line. In short, Bruno apparently outlined a table of 150 numbered syllables, and number 67 is the sound “ME,” name “Circe,” and has the power “Fascinatrix.”

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