The Answer is 42

Ancient Egyptians believed Ma’at (pro­nounced Muh-ah), the Goddess of Balance and Order, to be the child of the Sun God, Ra, born after he rose from the waters of chaos to cre­ate the world.

The 42 Laws of Ma’at are a set of divine edicts tran­scribed around 2925 BCE, writ­ten as a guide towards liv­ing an ordered, bal­anced life. Printed in hiero­glyph­ics on a scroll, Ma’at’s Laws were dis­cov­ered in 1888 in Luxor, Egypt. 

The Egyptians revered the con­nec­tion between the mun­dane and the sacred. Some of Ma’at’s Laws seem fair­ly easy to fol­low (I have not slain men or women, I have not com­mit­ted rob­bery with vio­lence, I have not com­mit­ted adul­tery). Others fill me with dread (I have not closed my ears to truth, I have not made any­one cry, I have not cursed any­one in thought, word, or deed). I’m fair­ly cer­tain that by Ma’at’s stan­dards, most of us would be denied entrance into the Island of the Blessed. 

It was thought that Anubis, the jack­al-head­ed Egyptian God of the Underworld, will weigh our heart against Ma’at’s ostrich feath­er when we die. If our heart knew most­ly com­pas­sion, grace, and grat­i­tude, then the scales bal­ance, and we shall be grant­ed ever­last­ing life in the Fields of Hetep and Iaru. If our heart is too heavy with regret, anger, and unre­solved sor­row, the scale will tip down­ward and our heart thrown into a dark abyss for all eter­ni­ty (in fact, if you were impor­tant enough to be mum­mi­fied, the heart was like­ly the only organ that was placed back into your body to be buried with you).

I recent­ly re-read the 1979 sci­ence-fic­tion clas­sic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. In it, the super­com­put­er Deep Thought is asked the mean­ing of life, the uni­verse, and every­thing. The final answer to this ulti­mate ques­tion, accord­ing to Deep Thought? 42.

In my Master’s pro­gram for Library Science, I had to learn ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), the basic com­put­er code lan­guage. In it, every let­ter, num­ber, and char­ac­ter on a key­board is assigned an inte­ger between 1 and 127. For exam­ple, cap­i­tal A is 65, and low­er­case a is 97. Guess what 42 is? The asterisk.*

Because Adams was a tech­nol­o­gy nerd, I thought this meant he was say­ing that the answer to any­thing is what­ev­er you make it. You see, an aster­isk is a wild­card char­ac­ter. It is occa­sion­al­ly used to sig­ni­fy addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion, like a foot­note. More often though, an aster­isk is used as an omis­sion, like to spell f#ck or to hide a typed pass­word. It’s a place­hold­er for some­thing else. So 42, in code, means what­ev­er the read­er men­tal­ly fills it in with. 

But reread­ing The Hitchhiker’s Guide now, I keep com­ing back to Ma’at and her 42 rules for life. Even if it was an unin­tend­ed coin­ci­dence on Adams’s part, I am enam­ored with the idea that humans should strive for more bal­ance and har­mo­ny. Ma’at per­son­i­fied the Noble Ideal, the col­lec­tive divine attrib­ut­es of truth, bal­ance, order, light­ness, har­mo­ny, and lov­ing-kind­ness, plac­ing the moral respon­si­bil­i­ty of order on each of our shoulders. 

Ma’at isn’t a ran­dom num­ber. It’s an ide­al; the con­sum­mate life we should all strive for, bring­ing light­ness and har­mo­ny to our hearts, our com­mu­ni­ty, and our world. 

*Be sure to Google the mean­ing of life, the uni­verse, and every­thing. Also, ask Siri and Alexa mul­ti­ple times.