Numbers
43
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Forty-three is the fourteenth prime and forms a twin pair with 41. It is the sum of the consecutive primes 11, 13 and 19. Its traditional symbolic use is genuinely thin, and honest reporting means saying so rather than manufacturing a correspondence: in scripture it occurs only inside census and genealogy totals, where it is a count and nothing more. In digit-reduction numerology, a system given its modern form in the early twentieth century, it reduces to 7.
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) 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 Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemThe modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 4 + 3 = 7. Whatever the system says of 43 it therefore says of 7, 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 SourceSourced to the subject's own accountIn number theory forty-three is the fourteenth prime and, with forty-one, forms a twin prime pair, two primes differing by two. It carries no religious or scriptural significance recorded in any tradition this atlas has surveyed; the interest in it, where any is recorded, is mathematical rather than symbolic. 3 Learn More
A Prime Without Lore
Forty-three is prime and reduces to seven. It is one of the clearest cases in which candour is the only honest treatment: the number carries no traditional religious symbolism worth reporting. The older systems developed the small numbers, the notable primes and the round figures, and passed over most of the integers in the forties, forty-three among them. What can be said is structural, it is prime, it is the sum of the first three odd primes, three, five, seven and others in various arrangements beloved of recreational mathematics, but none of this amounts to lore.
Where the older symbolic systems left forty-three undeveloped, Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers gives it one of the most severely negative readings in his whole compound-number scheme, a distinct description in its own right rather than a pointer to a lower number: symbolised by revolution, upheaval, strife and failure, and judged an unfortunate sign wherever it appears in calculations relating to future events, a caution his book states without softening. In chemistry, forty-three is the atomic number of technetium, notable as the lightest element with no stable isotopes at all; every form of technetium is radioactive, and it was the first element ever produced artificially rather than found in nature, isolated in 1937 by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segre.
What the Systems Assign
The one system that assigns forty-three any meaning is modern numerology, which reduces it to seven and reads it, like all numbers resolving to seven, as a call to analysis, solitude and inner enquiry, the seven approached through a four of order and a three of expression. This reading is a property of the twentieth-century name-and-date system rather than of any older tradition, and it applies the same handful of digit-meanings to every number that shares a root. Forty-three is best described plainly as a number without significant symbolic history.
Florence Campbell's 1931 Your Days Are Numbered and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved Cheiro's cautionary compound reading of forty-three largely unaltered, one of the relatively few entries in the whole ten-to-fifty-two scheme where all three later writers kept a wholly original 1926 description rather than either revising it or pointing the number back to one already defined elsewhere in the chart. Forty-three forms a twin prime pair with forty-one, the two differing by exactly two, one of the countless such pairs recreational number theory has catalogued without ever settling whether infinitely many exist, the twin prime conjecture remaining unproved to this day.
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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