Fifty-four is half of a hundred and eight, the great dharmic count, and reduces to nine. In Hindu and Buddhist practice the half-mala of fifty-four beads is a common alternative to the full string, one circuit of it counted twice completing the hundred and eight. In Judaism fifty-four is the number of weekly Torah portions, the parashot, into which the Five Books are divided for the annual reading cycle; in ordinary years, which have fewer than fifty-four sabbaths, certain adjacent portions are combined so that the whole Torah is read once each year and completed at the festival of Simchat Torah.
Fifty-four, like fifty-three, falls outside the ten-to-fifty-two range of Cheiro's original 1926 compound-number scheme, so this atlas gives it no Cheiro-attributed reading; Balliett's 1908 chart reduces it instead to nine, completion and humanitarian breadth in the standard modern keyword list, a root that sits well beside the number's already-described role as half of the completing hundred and eight and as the full count of the annual Torah-reading cycle. In chemistry, fifty-four is the atomic number of xenon, one of the noble gases, whose name comes from the Greek xenos, stranger, since it occurs so rarely in the atmosphere; xenon ion engines are used today to propel some spacecraft on long interplanetary missions.