The Number 13: Ingmar Bergman & The Seventh Seal
“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our Woe
With loss of Eden.”
– Paradise Lost, I, l. 1
John Milton (13 expression)
The Expulsion from Eden, 17th century Artist unknown
Like 14, 16, and 19, the other numbers of karma, 13 relates to original sin and the fall of man. All 13s have a subconscious memory of Eden and feel the separation from God most keenly. 13’s job in life is to give us insights into the human condition.
With the fall of Adam, the cycle of death and rebirth began. Cold winters, the need to work for a living, to obtain food and shelter, to cope with disease and hardship; to face sorrow, suffering, and death; to survive in body, yet triumph in spirit — all these matters come under the province of 13.
However, it’s hard for many 13s to accept the fact that pain and sorrow are part of the human condition. Some 13s succumb to either negativity or escapism, while others do their part to alleviate pain and suffering and to provide us with insights about how the principles of 13 operate in this world.
All 13s have karma in connection with work and a preoccupation with death and the meaning of life. 13s must forego fantasy and deal with the real world, the only possible world for human beings to achieve the ideal by confronting the real. In the mystery of 13, we have the mystery of Incarnation, why man in fact must undergo the cycle of death and rebirth.
Ingmar Bergman and The Seventh Seal
Antonius Block and Death playing chess – from the trailer of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, 1957.
Not all 13s, though, see death as a welcome beginning to a spiritual existence. Take for example Antonius Block (13 letters in his name) who is the knight who returns from the Crusades to a 14th century Sweden that has been visited by the Black Plague in film maker Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. As he approaches home, Death, appropriately dressed in a hooded black cape, appears to the knight and tells him it is his time. The knight is not afraid of dying, but is afraid of what comes after. He offers Death a bargain: they will play chess for the knight’s soul. The game continues during the entire film.
In one of the best scenes in The Seventh Seal, the knight and his squire visit a church. The knight decides to make his confession to what he thinks is a priest behind the bars. We learn that he seeks answers about life, death, and the existence of God. He pours his heart out, only to find that the priest was actually Death disguised as a monk. Death has ruthlessly tricked him.
There is an especially moving exchange during the confession scene between Death and the knight:
Death: “What are you waiting for?”
Knight: “Knowledge.”
Death: “You want a guarantee.”
Knight: “Call it what you will. . . . What will become of us, who want to believe but cannot? And what of those, who neither will nor can believe? I want knowledge. Not belief. Not surmise. But knowledge. I want God to put out His hand, show His face, speak to me.”
As reviewer Andrew Chan notes in 1999-2001 Film Written Magazine, “The Seventh Seal doesn’t dictate to us that God does not exist. It never discusses that. It is about our weariness of God’s distance, not about God’s existence.” It is about our separation from God.
Throughout this film, God remains silent. Ingmar Bergman, too, remains silent, as he does not provide us with answers, only questions. Yet these are the questions that define the human condition.
With 13 as his life path number, Ingmar Bergman (7 14 1918 = 7 + 5 + 1 = 13) in this film and others has asked the right questions, even if that means that each and every one of us in our own way must find in God’s absence a sign of his presence. The knight in this film could not apprehend God through the use of his intellect. Perhaps, there is another way.
Themocracy
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