The processional numbers highlighted by Sellers in the Osiris myth are360, 72, 30 and 12. Most of them are found in a section of the myth which provides us with biographical details of the various characters. These have been conveniently summarized by E. A. Wallis Budge, formerly keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum:
The goddess Nut, wife of the sun god Ra, was beloved by the god Geb. When Ra discovered the intrigue he cursed his wife and declared that she should not be delivered of a child in any month of any year. Then the god Thoth, who also loved Nut, played at tables with the moon and won from her five whole days. These he joined to the 360 days of which the year then consisted [emphasis added]. On first of these five days Osiris was brought forth; and at the moment of his birth a voice was heard to proclaim that the lord of creation was born.
Elsewhere the myth informs us that the 300-day year consists of ’12 months of 30 days each’.6 And in general, as Sellers observes, ‘phrases are used which prompt simple mental calculations and an attention to numbers’.
Thus far we have been provided with three of Sellers’s processional numbers: 360, 12 and 30. The fourth number, which occurs later in the text, is by far the most important. As we saw in Chapter Nine, the evil deity known as Set led a group of conspirators in a plot to kill Osiris. The number of these conspirators was 72.
With this last number in hand, suggests Sellers, we are now in a position to boot-up and set running an ancient computer programmed:
12 = the number of constellations in the zodiac;
30 = the number of degrees allocated along the ecliptic to each zodiacal constellation;
72 = the number of years required for the equinoctial sun to complete a processional shift of one degree along the ecliptic.
360 = the total number of degrees in the ecliptic;
72 x 30 = 2160 (the number of years required for the sun to complete a passage of 30 degrees along the ecliptic, i.e., to pass entirely through any one of the 12 zodiacal constellations).
2160 x 12 (or 360 x 72) = 25,920 (the number of years in one complete processional cycle or ‘Great Year’, and thus the total number of years required to bring about the ‘Great Return’).
Other figures and combinations of figures also emerge, for example:
36, the number of years required for the equinoctial sun to complete a processional shift of half a degree along the ecliptic;
4320 the number of years required for the equinoctial sun to complete a processional shift of 60 degrees (i.e., two zodiacal constellations).
These, Sellers believes, constitute the basic ingredients of a processional code which appears again and again, with eerie persistence, in ancient myths and sacred architecture. In common with much esoteric numerology, it is a code in which it is permissible to shift decimal points to left or right at will and to make use of almost any conceivable combinations, permutations, multiplications, divisions and fractions of the essential numbers (all of which relate precisely to the rate of precession of the equinoxes).
The pre-eminent number in the code is 72. To this is frequently added 36, making 108, and it is permissible to multiply 108 by 100 to get 10,800 or to divide it by 2 to get 54, which may then be multiplied by 10 and expressed as 540 (or as 54,000. or as 540,000, or as 5,400,000, and so on). Also highly significant is 2160 (the number of years required for the equinoctial point to transit one zodiacal constellation), which is sometimes multiplied by 10 and by factors often (to give 216,000, 2,160,000, and so on) and sometimes by 2 to give 4320, or 43,200, or 432,000, or 4,320,000, ad infinities.
Another excerpt from the "Fingerprints of the gods"