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42

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Origin 1908 to 1965

Forty-two is 2 x 3 x 7. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead the deceased addresses forty-two assessors in the hall of judgement, denying one offence to each, in what is usually called the negative confession and appears as spell 125; the count is the canonical one, though ordering and even the number of declarations vary between papyri. Revelation gives forty-two months twice, at 11:2 and 13:5. Matthew 1:17 announces the genealogy of Jesus as three sets of fourteen, though the names as listed yield forty-one, since Jechoniah is counted twice. Its modern fame as the answer to life, the universe and everything is Douglas Adams in 1979, who said the choice was arbitrary. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 6.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1908 to 1965 1
Origin Period
500 BCE to 300 CE 2
Origin Period
The 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 Period
The 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 Origin
The 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 Origin
The 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 / Compiler
Attributed 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 / Compiler
Mrs. 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 Name
Pythagorean 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 System
The modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 4 + 2 = 6. Whatever the system says of 42 it therefore says of 6, 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 Source
In the judgement scene of the Book of the Dead the deceased makes a declaration of innocence before a bench of assessors, conventionally counted as forty-two, denying a separate offence to each. The number of assessors and of denials varies between manuscripts, so the count is a convention of the tradition rather than a fixed doctrine. 3Tradition: Ancient Egyptian funerary literature
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Largely abandoned as a comparative category 1
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Numerology 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 Forty-Two Assessors

Spell 125 of the Egyptian Book of the Dead describes the judgement of the dead in the Hall of Two Truths. The heart is weighed against the feather of Maat, and the deceased addresses a bench of forty-two assessors, each named, each associated with a place, and each answered with the denial of one specific offence. The declarations are conventionally called the negative confession, and they are declarations of innocence rather than confessions of anything: I have not stolen, I have not killed, I have not diverted the flood water, I have not made anyone weep.

The list is one of the most substantial ethical documents to survive from the ancient world, and it is worth reading for what it prohibits, a good deal of it concerns irrigation, weights and measures, and the treatment of temple property, which is to say the ordinary conduct of an agricultural society, alongside the crimes any tradition names.

Two qualifications matter. The count of forty-two is the canonical one, and the earliest examples date to the Eighteenth Dynasty, but real papyri vary: the ordering differs, the pairing of a particular deity with a particular offence differs, and the number of declarations is not identical in every surviving copy. Forty-two is the idealised figure.

The explanation usually offered, that the forty-two assessors correspond to the forty-two nomes, the provinces of Egypt, is a modern scholarly conjecture and not something any Egyptian text says. Forty-two nomes, twenty-two in Upper Egypt and twenty in Lower, is the system that prevailed for most of pharaonic history, but the number varied across periods, and the connection to the assessors is an inference presented far too often as an attested fact.

Forty-Two Elsewhere, Including the Joke

Revelation uses forty-two months twice, at 11:2 for the trampling of the holy city and at 13:5 for the authority given to the beast. The same period appears in the book in two other forms, 1,260 days at 11:3 and 12:6, and a time, times and half a time at 12:14, and all three are three and a half years, half of seven. The half-seven is the point: an interrupted completeness, a period of trial that is by construction not allowed to run its full course. The figure is borrowed from Daniel 7:25 and 12:7.

Matthew 1:17 announces the genealogy of Jesus as three sets of fourteen generations, from Abraham to David, David to the exile, and the exile to the Messiah. Forty-two is the stated schema. The names as actually listed yield forty-one, because Jechoniah closes the second set and opens the third and is counted once in the text; Matthew also omits three Judahite kings who appear in 1 Chronicles. The arrangement is deliberate, fourteen is the gematria of David's name in Hebrew, and the arithmetic is subordinate to the design. Anyone quoting the forty-two generations should know that the list does not deliver them.

The number's modern fame is unrelated to any of this. In Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, broadcast from 1978 and published in 1979, forty-two is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, delivered by a computer that has been thinking for seven and a half million years. Adams was asked repeatedly why he chose it and consistently said it was arbitrary: a small, ordinary, unassuming number. The elaborate explanations that circulate were all constructed afterwards by readers, which is precisely the behaviour the joke was about.

In the Texts
Book of the Dead, Spell 125, the Negative Confession, declarations 1-5 (Budge)The Book of the Dead: the Papyrus of Anijudgment of the dead

Ani saith: "Hail, thou whose strides are long, who comest forth from Annu, I have not done iniquity." "Hail, thou who art embraced by flame, who comest forth from Kheraba, I have not robbed with violence." "Hail, Fentiu, who comest forth from Khemennu, I have not stolen." "Hail, Devourer of the Shade, who comest forth from Qernet, I have done no murder; I have done no harm." "Hail, Nehau, who comest forth from Re-stau, I have not defrauded offerings."

The forty-two assessors and their forty-two declarations.

The Book of the Dead: the Papyrus of Ani. translated by E. A. Wallis Budge.

About This Passage

Book of the Dead, Spell 125, the Negative Confession, declarations 6-11 (Budge)The Book of the Dead: the Papyrus of Anijudgment of the dead

"Hail, god in the form of two lions, who comest forth from heaven, I have not minished oblations." "Hail, thou whose eyes are of fire, who comest forth from Saut, I have not plundered the god." "Hail, thou Flame, which comest and goest, I have spoken no lies." "Hail, Crusher of bones, who comest forth from Suten-henen, I have not snatched away food." "Hail, thou who shootest forth the Flame, who comest forth from Het-Ptah-ka, I have not caused pain." "Hail, Qerer, who comest forth from Amentet, I have not committed fornication."

The Book of the Dead: the Papyrus of Ani. translated by E. A. Wallis Budge.

About This Passage

Cross-Tradition Connections

Disciplines That Use This

Numerology, Disciplines

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.

Source Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras WroughtUnderwood Dudley

Passages on This

Book of the Dead, Spell 125, the Negative Confession, declarations 1-5 (Budge), Passages

The forty-two assessors and their forty-two declarations.

Book of the Dead, Spell 125, the Negative Confession, declarations 6-11 (Budge), Passages
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997View the Source
2. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1962View the Source
3. The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead
Raymond O. Faulkner (translator); Carol Andrews (editor), British Museum Press, 1985View the Source
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt
Donald B. Redford (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2001the 42 assessors of MaatView the Source
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