On Oct. 9, Yoko Ono, in honor of what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday, will light his Peace Tower in Iceland and perform a memorial concert.
The number 9 always had profound significance for John, especially after first meeting Yoko at a London art gallery on Nov. 9, 1966. His second wife was a serious student of the occult and of Cheiro, the father of modern numerolog.
Like John, she identified herself as a Number 9 person, the sum of the numbers of her own birthday on the 18th (of February 1933).
Cheiro stated that 9 represented creative, universal consciousness. He characterized Number 9 personalities as fiercely independent, energetic, strong-willed and domineering, often subject to great struggles in youth, but great success later on.
The number played uncannily in the lives of John and Yoko. Due to many previous miscarriages, plus John’s low sperm count, doctors told Yoko she had little chance of conceiving: but she delivered Sean by Caesarian on Oct. 9, 1975. She subscribed to the Asian superstition that a child born on his father’s birthday would inherit his soul.
Yoko had suffered three earlier miscarriages. The second occurred on Oct. 9, 1969, on John’s 29th birthday.
After their marriage that year, John had immersed himself in numerology. With Yoko’s guidance, and that of her many astrologers, he governed his latter life according to her numbers. In one of his last interviews, he told Playboy magazine: “She’s the teacher and I’m the pupil. She’s taught me everything I f---ing know.”
He had written the famous “Revolution 9,” “#9 Dream” and “One After 909.” By 1978, the former Beatle told his tarot reader, John Green, “The big plan is that I do nothing for the next four years. Mother [Yoko] says that everything I do is doomed to failure until the year 1982. That year, according to the numbers, I’ll conquer the world again.”
In “Dakota Days,” Green writes of Lennon’s dedicated mystical practices – his meditation, his psychic training, his cleansing fasts, his vows of silence, his Tarot study. His card was the 9th, The Hermit, representing contemplation and introspection.
Green, who did daily readings for Lennon, predicted that 1980 (1 + 9 + 8 +0 = 18 / 1 + 8 = 9) would be a big year for him. On his Oct. 9 birthday that year, he released the single “Starting Over” from his new album with Yoko, Double Fantasy. “Let's take a chance and fly away somewhere alone,” he sang. “It's like we both are falling in love again. It'll be just like starting over, starting over.”
But, two months later, he was gunned down in front of his Dakota apartment building by a demented former fan, Mark David Chapman. The fateful date was Dec. 8. But, as his first wife, Cynthia, pointed out in her own biography, it was the 9th in the place of his birth -- Britain.
