The number appears in one of the most striking passages of Genesis, where Abraham bargains with God over the fate of Sodom, asking whether the city will be spared for fifty righteous men and then, step by step, lowering the number, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, ten, in a dialogue on the arithmetic of mercy. Forty-five is the second figure in that descent, the fifty less five. As a triangular number, the sum of the first nine integers, forty-five also has the tidy structure that number-mystics prize, and its reduction to nine ties it to completion. Its firmest traditional content, though, is the gematria of Adam and the Lurianic Name of forty-five.
Florence Campbell's 1931 Your Days Are Numbered and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved Cheiro's Sceptre reading for forty-five without alteration, one of several cases in this family of articles where a number's deep Kabbalistic weight, the gematria of Adam, the Lurianic expansion of the Name, and its comparatively thin twentieth-century American reading, borrowed wholesale from a lower number, sit side by side with no awareness of one another in either source. Forty-five is also a Kaprekar number: squared, it gives two thousand and twenty-five, which splits into twenty and twenty-five, and the two parts sum back to forty-five itself, a self-referential property shared by only a handful of numbers.