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.