nine-pointed star

Playing with symbols, anyone, sooner or later, faces the numbers. I fighted this back many times just to avoid getting too mathematical :-P

In a restricted meaning it is used for symbolizing religion.
It represents the fundamental universal cosmic laws. It is the sign of perfection, and splendour -Bahá' (بهاء)- in the bahá'í faith, where the nine-pointed star is the most spread as an emblem.
This image looks like a bahá'í star made of fire, light and darkness.

But in my preferred cosmology, the norse one (inherited from the reading of Borges), there are nine circles of existance: Asgard; Vanaheimr; Midgard, our mortal plane; Muspell; Niflhei; Alfheim; Svartálfheim; Nidavellir; and Jotunheim. All of them connected by the Yggdrassl. As norse mythology involves a strong element of duality, I thought the image with this light-dark halves.
The reference to the nine rings spawned from Draupnir (originally described in the Skírnismál, Sturluson's codex regius) took me to remember this big favourite one of mine:

Up to the moment of the yellow sunset,
how many times will I have cast my eyes on
the sinewy-bodied tiger of Bengal
to-ing and fro-ing on its paced-out path
behind the labyrinthine iron bars,
never suspecting them to be a prison.
Afterwards, other tigers will appear:
the blazing tiger of Blake, burning bright;
and after that will come the other golds --
the amorous gold shower disguising Zeus,
the gold ring which, on every ninth night,
gives light to nine rings more, and these, nine more,
and there is never an end.
All the other overwhelming colors,
in company with the years, kept leaving me,
and now alone remains
the amorphous light, the inextricable shadow
and the gold of the beginning.
O sunsets, O tigers, O wonders
of myth and epic,
O gold more dear to me, gold of your hair,
which these hands long to touch.

Jorge Luis Borges, "The gold of the tigers", Alastair Reid's translation.