Countries With the Most Interesting National Anthems — The Numerology of Official Song

A national anthem is the song a country sings to itself about itself. It is the numerological character expressed in music and — usually — words. And the choices different countries have made about what their anthem says reveal, with unusual directness, what they consider essential about being who they are.

Spain: The 11 anthem with no words

La Marcha Real (The Royal March) — Spain's national anthem — has no official lyrics. It is one of only four national anthems in the world without words (alongside Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and San Marino).

Spain has had lyrics at various points in its history (under Franco, there were specific words; various attempts to establish new official lyrics have all failed because Catalonia, the Basque Country and other regions reject lyrics that emphasise a specifically Castilian Spanish national identity).

Spain's 5 life path and its deep internal regional diversity have made agreeing on words — on what exactly Spain is saying about itself — politically impossible. The anthem without words is, paradoxically, the most honest expression of the 5 nation's defining characteristic: the multiple identities that cannot agree on a single articulation.

The wordless anthem says: we share this music, this rhythm, this moment of being Spanish — but what being Spanish means, we cannot agree.

South Africa: The 9 anthem of two peoples becoming one

"Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika" ("God Bless Africa") was composed in 1897 by Enoch Sontonga, a Xhosa teacher in Johannesburg, and became the anthem of the African National Congress and the liberation movement against Apartheid.

After 1994, South Africa adopted an anthem that combines "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika" with "Die Stem van Suid-Afrika" ("The Call of South Africa") — the previous Apartheid-era anthem. The current anthem moves between five languages (Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans, English) in its five stanzas.

This is the 9 completion expressed as song: the anthem that contains both the liberation movement and the settler culture, that requires singers to move between languages, that insists on the unity of what had been savagely divided. South Africa's anthem is the hardest anthem in the world to sing if you only speak one language — and that difficulty is the 9's truth: completion requires holding everything together, not choosing.

France: The 11 anthem that begins with blood

La Marseillaise is one of the world's most recognisable anthems — and one of the most violent. The first verse begins with a call to arms against the "impure blood" of the enemy, and the refrain invites citizens to "water our furrows" with that blood.

This is the 11 Master Visionary nation at its most extreme: the vision of freedom and human rights (established in the same revolutionary period) coexisting with the violent urgency of the revolutionary moment. The Marseillaise was written in 1792 in a single night by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, a military officer, as a call to war — and it carries that urgency in every performance.

France's anthem is the 11 in its full complexity: the highest vision (liberty, equality, fraternity) and the violence that was required to establish it existing in the same text, sung together as a unity.

New Zealand: The 11 anthem in two languages

New Zealand's anthem "God Defend New Zealand" is officially performed in both English and Māori — typically with the first verse in Māori (*E Ihowā Atua*) and the second in English. This bilingual anthem is the 11 vision of biculturalism enacted in the most public possible form: the national song insisting, every time it is sung, that New Zealand belongs to two peoples.

Nepal: The 9 anthem for a new republic

Nepal adopted its current anthem in 2007 when the country abolished its monarchy and became a federal democratic republic — ending 240 years of the Shah dynasty. The new anthem, "Made of Hundreds of Flowers," was chosen through a nationwide competition and explicitly celebrates Nepal's diversity: "Spreading from the Mechi River to the Mahakali River."

Nepal's 7 life path combined with the 9 energy of completing the monarchical cycle and beginning the republican one produced an anthem that is simultaneously a farewell (to monarchy, to the old identity) and a greeting (to the new, diverse, democratic Nepal).

The pattern: Numbers and anthemic character

11 nations (France, New Zealand): Anthems of vision — the song that articulates what the nation aspires to become

9 nations (South Africa): Anthems of completion — the song that holds together what was divided, that insists on the unity of the full cycle

5 nations (Spain): Anthems of irreducible complexity — the song that cannot be reduced to a single articulation

6 nations: Anthems of community — the song about the people together rather than the nation's abstract ideals

1 nations: Anthems of primacy — the song that establishes the founding, the original claim, the first moment of being

The anthem is the number sung aloud. What does your country say about itself when it opens its mouth to sing?

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