The Aubrey Holes

Fifty-six is seven times eight and reduces to eleven and then two. Its most discussed occurrence is archaeological: the ring of fifty-six chalk pits at Stonehenge, named the Aubrey holes after the seventeenth-century antiquary John Aubrey who first noted them, dating to the earliest phase of the monument. The astronomer Fred Hoyle and others proposed that the fifty-six holes served as an eclipse-prediction device, markers moved around the ring to track the lunar and solar cycles, a hypothesis that is ingenious and much cited but remains unproven; the actual purpose of the holes is still unknown, though several held cremated remains.

Fifty-six falls outside the ten-to-fifty-two range of Cheiro's 1926 compound-number scheme, so this atlas reports no reading attributed to his book; Balliett's 1908 chart reduces it instead to two, by way of eleven, partnership and diplomacy in the standard modern keyword list, a reading with no bearing on the archaeological debate over the Aubrey holes and Fred Hoyle's eclipse-prediction hypothesis already described above. In chemistry, fifty-six is the atomic number of barium, an element whose name comes from the Greek barys, heavy, and whose compounds are used today as the radio-opaque barium meal patients swallow before an X-ray of the digestive tract, a modern medical use unconnected to the Neolithic monument discussed above.