56

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.

Beyond the Aubrey holes, fifty-six has little traditional weight; the older symbolic systems, which developed seven and eight richly, did not much develop their product. Modern numerology reduces it to eleven, so some schemes credit it with the intuitive charge of that master number before its resolution to two. The responsible summary is that fifty-six is remembered chiefly for a prehistoric ring of pits whose meaning archaeology has not settled, and that the eclipse hypothesis, however elegant, is a modern conjecture rather than an established fact.

The digit six within fifty-six carries a favourable near-homophone in Chinese numerology, liu sounding close to both liu, flow, and liu, smooth or slick, part of why six is generally read as an auspicious digit in Chinese numbering; the association is entirely modern and linguistic and has no bearing on the far older, unresolved archaeological question of what the fifty-six Aubrey holes at Stonehenge were actually built to do. Mathematically, fifty-six is a binomial coefficient of some elegance: it is the number of ways to choose three items from a set of eight, eight choose three, a figure combinatorics uses constantly and one with no connection to either the Aubrey holes or Chinese numerology. Combinatorial counts of this kind underpin odds calculations in card games and lotteries alike, a thoroughly modern application of a number this atlas otherwise treats as symbolically undeveloped.