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.