THE POWER OF FIVE
“The material world beyond our minds is made from the Five Elements and perception of it comes in through Ears, Eyes, Tongue, Nose and Hands, known as the Five Ports of Knowledge, without which we would be locked within the purblind prison of our skulls, unable to use the Five Senses, viz. Hearing, Sight, Taste, Smell and Touch… the significance of Five is manifest in the Five Wounds of Christ, the Five Pillars of Islam, the Five Poisons of Cathay, the Quincunx, etc… In ‘apotropaic’ magic (that which practises to ‘ward off ’ evil) there is no more widespread periapt1 or sigil2 than the five-fingered hand, the Mano Pantea which the Ancient Egyptians knew as Hand of the All-Goddess. It is a symbol so powerful that it has been adopted by all subsequent societies, so that what was once the ‘Hand of Aphrodite’ to the Ancient Greeks was the ‘Hand of Tanit’ to the Phoenicians, and is to this day the ‘Hand of Miriam’ for the Jews, the ‘Kef Miryam’ or the ‘Hand of the Virgin Mary’ to Levantine Christians and the Khamsa or ‘Hand of Fatima’ to the Mussulman… As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in The Garden of Cyrus (or The Quincunciall, Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered, 1658): ‘To enlarge this contemplation unto all the mysteries accomodable unto this number, were inexcusable Pythagorisme, yet cannot omit the ancient conceit of FIVE surnamed the number of JUSTICE…’ It is thus not surprising that The Oversight with its interest in preserving equity between the natural and the supranatural has traditionally organised itself by interlocking cabals of Five, known as Hands…
… The Rule of Five is the foundation stone on which The Oversight is built: every year, on the fifth day of the fifth month a Hand of five members must sit round a table and contain the Wildfire. If five are not found, then The Oversight is disbanded for its own protection and the remaining few disperse and travel the wider country until they each find five new recruits to take up the challenge again.
This is done because the weight of The Oversight’s obligations are judged too heavy for less than a single Hand, and a weakened Oversight is deemed worse than none, as it gives the illusion of safety and vigilance where none is possible. This has happened at least twice in its long history, and consequences of a suspended Oversight have scarred the city and the outlying country so badly that it took more than a century in each case to return things to equilibrium.
One given reason for the rump of The Oversight dispersing to the four corners of the country is to make it harder for their enemies to find the weakened remnant unprotected in one place… in the past the secrets and powerful objects normally protected by them are said to have been dropped into the Thames where salt water meets fresh, so as to always be covered by running water, and thus stay safe until a resurgent Oversight returns to reclaim them. At the Great Fire of London it is said the secrets were not put in the river in time, and that indecision led to the conflagration that followed…”
Extract from The Great and Hidden History of the World by the Rabbi Dr Hayyim Samuel Falk