With numbers you can do anything you like

Aglie’s maxim, “With numbers you can do anything you like,” names the ease with which numerical coincidences can be manufactured—and the danger of mistaking that manufacture for proof. He demonstrates the method through measurements of pyramids and a lottery kiosk, then complicates his skepticism by insisting that genuine correspondences exist throughout the universe. The phrase thus serves both as a warning against false precision and as a sign of the novel’s deeper tension between scientific demonstration and belief in hidden order.

A Pyramid of Manufactured Proof

Aglie tests a manuscript’s account of the Great Pyramid, which follows Piazzi Smyth in treating its dimensions as a storehouse of sacred measurements. The text rounds the base and height into whole numbers, converts the base into Egyptian cubits to obtain 366—the days in a leap year—and multiplies the height by a billion to approximate the Earth–Sun distance. It also derives 365 from the base divided by the width of a stone. The perimeter, divided by twice the height, is offered as a route to 3.14.

Aglie turns the apparent precision against itself. Using the exact dimensions rather than rounded figures, he says, produces 3.1417254, not pi; the small discrepancy matters because the calculation’s authority depends on its presentation as exact. He also recounts Flinders Petrie’s report that Smyth chipped at a granite wall in the royal antechamber to make his sums fit. The anecdote may be gossip, Aglie concedes, but it weakens the authority of measurements already shaped by a desired result.

The Kiosk as a Numerical Machine

At the window, Aglie points to a small wooden lottery kiosk and invites the others to measure it. Its counter length, 149 centimeters, becomes one hundred-billionth of the Earth–Sun distance; its rear height divided by the window width yields 3.14. The front height, expressed as nineteen decimeters, is made to recall the Greek lunar cycle. Adding the heights of the front and rear corners produces 732, associated with the victory at Poitiers. The counter’s 3.10-centimeter thickness and the cornice’s 8.8-centimeter width are then recast as the letters C and H, yielding C10H8, the formula for naphthalene.

The display’s force comes from the flexibility of the operations, not from any special property of the kiosk. Aglie admits that these measurements were made on another kiosk by Jean-Pierre Adam and assumes that lottery kiosks have broadly similar dimensions. He then shows how a desired historical date can dictate the arithmetic: to produce 1314, the year of Jacques de Molay’s execution, he multiplies the sacred number nine by 146, the date associated with Carthage’s destruction. Alternatively, dividing 1314 by 6.28 gives 209, which he connects to Attalus I’s entry into the anti-Macedonian League. The endpoint is selected first; calculation supplies a path to it.

Skepticism and the Hidden Correspondence

Aglie does not reject numerology altogether. He professes belief in a universe of numerical correspondences and in symbolism as a path to special knowledge. In his account, human works such as the pyramid and kiosk may unconsciously reproduce cosmic harmonies; the error lies in the tortuous method by which pyramid writers claim to discover a truth supposedly already known. His position preserves a distinction between the existence of correspondence and the validity of a particular demonstration.

That distinction also lets him dismiss ordinary technological explanations as inadequate. Electricity, radioactivity, and atomic energy are, he says, metaphors or substitutes for an ancestral force the initiate seeks; he names telluric currents as a possible term for it. Elsewhere, the Plan’s imagined doctrine turns those currents into a planetary system governed by celestial cycles and a discoverable command point, the Navel of the World. This is not offered as verified science: it belongs to the same esoteric structure that makes numerical correspondence an article of belief rather than an experimentally established conclusion.

From Method to Mental Habit

The maxim resonates beyond Aglie’s demonstration because Casaubon begins to apply the same hunger for hidden significance to the world around him. He catches himself marveling at a supposed correspondence between the Great Pyramid’s height and the Earth–Sun distance, and begins seeking a deeper story in houses, shop signs, clouds, and library engravings. The shift is not simply from disbelief to conviction: he describes himself as not believing, yet surrendering to the pattern-making impulse. Lia temporarily interrupts that drift, bringing him back to ordinary life and attention.

The numerical trick therefore becomes a model for the Plan’s broader interpretive machinery. A number can be detached from its measurement, transformed through convenient operations, and joined to a historical date, chemical formula, or cosmic claim; once the resulting links are treated as mutually confirming, coincidence acquires the appearance of necessity. The maxim exposes that process without resolving the novel’s remaining uncertainty about whether any deeper order exists. Its sharpest point is methodological: the ability to produce a pattern is not evidence that the pattern was there to be found.