Numbers
48
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Forty-eight is highly composite, with ten divisors, and equals 16 x 3. Ptolemy's Almagest, written at Alexandria in the second century, catalogues forty-eight constellations, and that list was the standard sky of Western astronomy for fourteen hundred years until southern voyages and later invention added to it. The modern International Astronomical Union set of eighty-eight still contains all forty-eight of Ptolemy's. Its independent symbolic tradition is thin. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 3.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin Period Origin PeriodThe arithmological reading of the first numbers, one as source, two as division, four as justice, seven as virgin, ten as completion, reaches us through Platonic and Neopythagorean writers of the centuries after Plato. Burkert's finding is that it cannot be traced to Pythagoras himself, whose activity was religious rather than mathematical: the doctrines were credited backwards to him. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Origin PeriodThe system that gives a number a personality, and a person a number, was assembled in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century out of New Thought material. Balliett's The Philosophy of Numbers appeared in 1908; the chart positions, pinnacles and cycles were added by her successors over the next fifty years. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Place of OriginThe Greek world, and above all the Greek cities of southern Italy where the Pythagorean societies were established; the arithmological literature itself is later and largely eastern Mediterranean. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Place of OriginThe United States, and specifically the New Thought circuit of the north-eastern seaboard; Balliett worked from Atlantic City. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Attributed Author / CompilerAttributed by the tradition to Pythagoras. Burkert's study is the standard demonstration that the number-doctrines carrying his name are the work of later hands, and that almost nothing in them can be shown to go back to the sixth century BCE. The attribution is recorded because it is what the tradition says, not because it holds. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Attributed Author / CompilerMrs. L. Dow Balliett, who published the first version of the modern system in 1908 and to whom Dudley devotes a chapter. What later authors added, the pinnacles, the challenges, the cycles, the personal year, is theirs, and this atlas's own numerology-position entries cite four different authors between 1908 and 1965 for what is presented as one system. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Origin of the NamePythagorean numerology is a twentieth-century label. The system it names has no demonstrable descent from Pythagoras, from the Pythagorean societies, or from the ancient arithmological literature; the letter-value chart it rests on was drawn up in the United States after 1900. The name borrows a pedigree, the oldest move in the subject. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemThe modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 4 + 8 = 12, then 1 + 2 = 3. Whatever the system says of 48 it therefore says of 3, because it holds no separate doctrine for the higher numbers. The stated exceptions are 11, 22 and 33, which it leaves unreduced and calls master numbers. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe Babylonian Talmud states in tractate Megillah that forty eight prophets and seven prophetesses prophesied to Israel, a fixed count that later rabbinic tradition works to name in full. The figure covers only those recognized as having spoken specifically for Israel's own benefit, not every figure the Hebrew Bible calls a prophet. 3Tradition: Rabbinic Judaism (Babylonian Talmud) Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseNumerology has been sold since Balliett as a basis for decisions: which name to take, which date to marry on, which house number to buy. Dudley's survey of what numerologists sell is the standard critical account and its finding is blunt, numbers have power over minds, not over events. These entries record what the tradition says, not advice. 1 Learn More
The Prophets and the Levitical Cities
Forty-eight is sixteen times three and reduces to twelve and then three. Jewish tradition fixes two notable counts at forty-eight. The Talmud, in the tractate Megillah, states that forty-eight prophets and seven prophetesses prophesied to Israel, a reckoning that became the standard rabbinic count of the prophetic line. And the law of Numbers assigns the Levites, who received no tribal territory of their own, forty-eight cities scattered among the other tribes, six of them cities of refuge, so that the priestly tribe was distributed across the land rather than settled in one place. The number thus marks two complete institutional sets in the religious ordering of Israel, the prophets and the Levitical towns.
Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers assigns forty-eight the reading already given to thirty, neither fortunate nor unfortunate on its own, its strength depending on the company it keeps in a chart; the two numbers share a digital root of three, and Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved the pairing, an ambivalent modern reading that has no bearing on the number's firm institutional role in the Talmud's count of the prophets and the Levites' forty-eight cities already described above.
What the Systems Assign
As a multiple of twelve, forty-eight inherits some of twelve's sense of an ordered and complete arrangement, four full twelves, and it divides with the same convenience that made twelve and twenty-four useful for measure. Reduced to three, it is read in modern numerology as a number of expression and growth, though this reductive reading is thin beside the concrete traditional counts. The durable significance of forty-eight is the two Jewish enumerations, the forty-eight prophets and the forty-eight cities of the Levites, each a fixed and complete set within the structure of Israel.
As a multiple of twelve, forty-eight also inherits a share of twelve's reputation for orderly completeness in the arithmological reading Walter Burkert's study of the Pythagorean tradition traces to Neopythagorean writers of the centuries after Plato rather than to Pythagoras himself; that older, structural sense of forty-eight as four complete twelves sits closer to the number's Jewish institutional counts than Cheiro's ambivalent twentieth-century compound reading does. In chemistry, forty-eight is the atomic number of cadmium, a toxic heavy metal whose chief modern industrial use, in rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries, has no connection to either the Jewish institutional counts or the numerological reading given above.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
The modern numerological system assigns this number a meaning, which is why the atlas records it as a subject in its own right, though this does not endorse what the discipline says about it. This link shows only that the discipline works with this particular number; the readings of the number itself belong to whichever tradition holds them.
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