666: Some Clues about the Number of the Beast
I have resisted writing this for quite some time, mainly because each time I try I am overwhelmed with the sense of having done it before. Eventually I discovered (remembered?) that I did indeed, during at least one past life, spend many hours in cloistered libraries examining the numerology of biblical scripture. So, I do not want to do that again! However, as it has been many centuries, I suppose it will not hurt to revisit the topic, just this once! 😊
Now, one of the things that drove many people to ask me to write about this subject has been the surge in sightings of the number 666.
My general attitude is that there are no conspiracies but there are also no coincidences, that there is not a secret agenda at work as such, it is simply that nefarious acts are occurring right before your eyes because that is the nature of politics. Politics is not merely noble public service that has been sullied by a few bad eggs. No, big money and special interests have destroyed the entire system which is now collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Politics is broken and corrupt in every possible way you imagine (and a load more than you cannot). So, I offer the above video simply as a collection of the 666 phenomena. Make up your own mind.
The point though is that the number 666 has long been a magnet for both insights and projections. For some, the Book of Revelation tells of the eternal battle between good and evil, and the emergence of what people like Edgar Cayce called Christ Consciousness, the pattern of a perfect person, from which we all fall well short, but toward which we all must aim. Others believe that the Book of Revelation tells of the evolution that is possible in every human when they successfully awaken their seven chakras. Others say it is a historical narrative, telling of something that has already happened, while others say it is a prophecy of what is yet to come. In all cases the number 666 is deemed to relate to the Antichrist, the one who deceives the world and brings forth Armageddon.
The subject of much debate since Day One, the Book of Revelation has swung in and out of popularity as conditions in society have varied. It seems that when a civilisation expands and grows with people free to enjoy the fruits of their labour, so the imagery of the Book is deemed absurd and fantastical. But when things become more chaotic, like now, so the words of the Book seem more prescient. It is hard to for a logical mind to penetrate but I do suggest that everyone, at least once in their life, reads it.
666 in the Bible
The Book of Revelation has exerted a tremendous influence on our culture, being the source of many of our ideas about the end of the world. Every movie where the hero-saves-the-world-at-the-last-minute-from hoards-of-monsters-or-aliens is really, at heart, just another reboot of the Book of Revelation, and millions of words have been written about it, with all the best kind of scholars and worst kind of crazies trying to decipher what on earth it is all about.
The Book of Revelation, it is said, was written by one of Jesus’s disciples John (as in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), during his stay on the Greek Island of Patmos in the first century AD. Its pages record a series of intense visions of the end of the world.
Now, the whole Bible is shot through with opportunities for number mysticism, but the Book of Revelation really is Peak Numerology, a tale featuring 24 elders, 7 churches, 7 bowls, 7 seals, 7 trumpets, 7 lampstands, 7 plagues, 4 horsemen, 144,000 saved souls, 1 scarlet women, and 2 beasts, one with 7 heads, 10 horns and 10 crowns. All this is related across 22 chapters, with the most famous passage being Chapter 13, verse 18, which in the King James translation goes like this
“Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is a number of a man; and his number is six hundred, threescore and six.”
So, there it is, the Beast who will devour our world is a man, identified by the number 666.
(If you are so inclined you can also examine the subtle differences between translations using online resources like this, which can either be extremely interesting or rather pointless, depending on your point of view. And another fly in the ointment is that the oldest manuscript fragments of Revelation that we have, from around 225-275AD, reveal the number as 616, not 666! Arrgghh!!
But, reality check time! Endless hours, days, weeks, months, years or maybe lifetimes can be spent (wasted?) trying to find out whether 666 or 616 is the real Number of the Beast. I am more interested in why 666 has taken such a hold of our imagination and what message it might contain. And part of the answer is that the Book of Revelation is not the only place where 666 crops up. It occurs twice times in the Old Testament, each time referring to King Solomons immense wealth,
“Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred threescore and six talents of gold” (1 Kings 10:14, and 2 Chronicles 9:13)
Does this tell us something about the Beast’s love of wealth and power? Does that give us a clue as to the identity of the Beast?
The Beast as one Man
Many writers, including Samuel Pepys and Nostradamus have, over the centuries, taken a stab at identifying the Antichrist, and the finger has been pointed at everyone from the Roman Emperor Nero to Muhammad, Napoleon, Hitler, Saddam Hussein and beyond. The strongest case is against the Emperor Nero (who killed his own mother and fiddled whilst his city burned) whose name in the original Greek – Neron Caesar – when translated into Hebrew, adds up to 666. (If you take the number as 616, Nero is still the prime suspect because his name, calculated in Latin, rather than Greek, sums to 616).
However, times move on and currently everyone’s favourite Antichrist is Bill Gates. But whatever you think about him the numerology is pretty shaky. It goes like this:
It is Bill Gates 3 because he is really Bill Gates III (the third), and B=66 because the only way to make it work is by using the ASCII alphabet where A=65, B=66… Z=89. See, I told you it was shaky.
But perhaps the Beast is another Bill, namely Billie Eilish?
Trouble is we then have to use an obscure system of English Gematria, where A=6, B=12, C=18… Z=156. Then it goes like this:
Does it feel like we are reaching here? It should.
Anyway, to return to the more popular pastime of criminalising politicians you can look at the 40th President of the United States (1980-1988), Ronald Reagan, whose individual names each had six letters.
RONALD WILSON REAGAN
6 6 6
This, of course, proves that Reagan was the Antichrist. And further evidence of the malfeasance of Republicans can be found when we realise that Jared Kushner (husband to Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka) at one time apparently owned 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan (which has, perhaps wisely, subsequently been renamed as 660 Fifth Avenue). We can take another step toward indicting Republicans by seeing that FOX (as in Fox News, provider of staple right-wing fare) contains the 6th (6), the 15th (6) and 24th (6) letters of the alphabet.
But if you take the year of the 2020 US Presidential election, divided by the number of the Beast
2020 / 666 = 3.0330
And then remove the decimal point and notice that Joe Biden had the campaign donation slogan, Text 30330 for Biden. Now of course, this proves that Joe Biden is in fact the Antichrist.
Or maybe, just maybe, this problem of the Antichrist and the responsibility for the end of the world is bigger than just one man, woman, party or television station?
The Beast as the Modern World
In the Secret Destiny of the British and Their Isles I identified the prevalence of the number 6 in the history and development of three key institutions: the BBC, the British Labour Party and the European Union. Through performing hundreds of numerological calculations on the people and key dates of these institutions I found a much greater appearance of the number 6 than of any other number. For example, the key dates in the careers of Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, the most successful Labour Prime Ministers, were heavily marked by the appearance of the number 6, in ways that never happened to any Conservative Prime Minister. This number 6 appears in the key dates of the history of these three institutions far, far more than it would by chance. So now we can see, of course, that the Antichrist must be the BBC-Labour Party-EU axis which has so dominated British cultural and political life, and which often moves (or at least it did until 2020) together in lock-step.
Or perhaps the Beast is more abstract even than that, and can in fact be attributed to the Modern World as a whole? Consider the dates upon which the planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered:
Uranus was discovered on 13th March 1787 (13+3+1781 = 1797 = 24 = 6)
Neptune was discovered on 23rd September 1846 (23+9+1846 = 1878 = 24 = 6)
Pluto was discovered on 18th October 1930 (18+2+1930 = 1950 = 15 = 6)
Further ‘evidence’ of the corruption of our Modern World becomes visible when we see that Apple sold their first pre-assembled computer, the Apple-1, in 1976 for $666.66. Formal justification for this was later given by one of the founders, Steve Wozniak, that it was nothing more than a marketing gimmick and an opportunity for him as a mathematician to geek out over some repetitive digits. However, when you examine the Apple logo, with the bite taken out of it, and Steve Jobs’ definite counter cultural leanings then maybe it is not all so innocent as it seems? We do have a perfectly normal explanation for this though, that the bite out of the Apple is akin to a byte (a term in computer science), because Jobs had previously worked in an orchard, and they simply wanted to make clear that the graphic was not a cherry. Convinced? Me neither.
Then we have another strange fact that the standard (Monte Carlo style) Roulette Wheel, with the numbers 1 to 36 in black and red, alongside a 0 in green, all add to 666. Perhaps Las Vegas, or your everyday online casino app is a work of the Beast? That one I can get on board with.
Finally, you have Coronavirus, the effects of which some believe will continue way into 2023, and which itself, those people say, is the work of the Antichrist.
2021 + 2022 + 2023 = 6066 (drop the zero and you are good to go)
CORONA (6 letters)
C (3) + O (15) + R (18) + O (15) + N (14) + A (1) = 66
That argument is backed up by our old friend, the obscure English Gematria, used to analyse the word vaccination.
The Beast as More Than One Man
But maybe this is a fool’s game, trying to pin the label of the Beast on any single person, time or thing? Maybe we are all to blame, all the time, especially given the fact that the chemical element Carbon has 6 protons, 6 neutrons and 6 electrons. And humans are of course carbon-based life forms. So are Extinction Rebellion right after all? That it is carbon, but specifically carbon in human form, which is the problem. 666 is the number of the Beast, and the Beast is mankind itself. This seems plausible to me.
Dating the End of the World
The number 666 may also enable us to date the end of the world to the year 2037. In fact, there are five dates during that year (if written in the form DD/MM/YY) that multiply together to give 666.
18th Jan 2037 = 18 x 1 x 37 = 666
9th February 2037 = 9 x 2 x 37 = 666
6th March 2037 = 6 x 3 x 37 = 666
3rd June 2037 = 3 x 6 x 37 = 666
2nd September 2037 = 2 x 9 x 37 = 666
Wow. Seems convincing, But hang, on, before you get too excited (or depressed) do bear in mind that every century will have five such dates, because, for example the sum 18 x 1 x 37 = 666 applies to every year ending in 37; 2037, 1937, 1837, 1737 and so on. Dammit! This 666 work is treacherous stuff!
Some Maths
This business is treacherous because there are interesting mathematical reasons why, despite all the hoopla surrounding it, 666 may not really be that special at all. This is due to something called the Law of Small Numbers, which states that there are not enough small numbers for the many duties that they are asked to perform. This law claims that there are, in fact, as many 665’s and 667’s in circulation as there are 666, it is just that we do not value them, look for them or notice them. At first this seems silly, but we need to know all points of view, so we had better investigate.
Imagine how small numbers (like 666, which in maths is classed as small) are each like grains of sand on a vast beach of all the possible numbers. What is the largest number in existence? The question cannot be answered, because as soon as you identify the largest possible number you can always add 1 to make an even larger number. This tells us that there are an impossibly large amount of numbers in existence, and 99.9999999999999999 % of them are bigger than 666. This means that small numbers like 666 are given a lot to do and it is why we see 666 so much. Another way of saying this is that if you take say 10 billion balls (representing say 10 billion different things) and put them at random into a small number of boxes, say 10 boxes, then you are guaranteed to get quite a lot of balls in each box. Hence every small number is bound to be associated with many things.
But, you may be pleased to hear, hope is not lost for this mathematical argument misses the point, ignoring the fact that there is, in truth, no such thing as randomness, merely a distribution that we do not understand. This is not a trivial point. Randomness is a scientific / mathematical way of describing why certain things happen in certain ways at certain places and times. But both science and maths deliberately ignore phenomena they cannot measure. In fact they often say that if it cannot be measured it does not exist. But this is baloney, because it is these unknown phenomena which determine the order of events, which we, with our limited awareness, call random. Analysis of the Number of the Beast is not the realm of Science or Maths. It is the realm of God.
What Does This All Boil Down To?
This is super important - at the end of the day numerology is a mystical practice, not a scientific one. And therefore, all attempts to ‘prove’ anything using numerology are doomed to fail, because the rules of ‘proof’ and ‘evidence’ are deliberately set up so as to exclude the answers you need. Said another way there is no argument you can make, using numerology, that any materialist scientist will ever listen to. The Law of Small Numbers gives debunkers and fact-checkers carte blanche to ignore whatever numerological insights you may arrive at. But this is ok, because we should instead treat numerology – just like astrology and tarot – as a key. By itself that key might be ornate and interesting or shoddy and dirty, it could be a curiosity, something used every day, or it could be a museum piece. Whatever. The key only becomes something of value when it is inserted into a lock. That lock is God, for if it is to make any sense numerology must be orientated upwards away from the petty concerns and curiosities of humans who are almost always dominated by their Body-Mind-Feelings (their 6 protons, neutrons and electrons). When inserted into the ‘God lock’ and turned carefully the door opens, revealing the bright light of truth and informing us of many wondrous things. When used in this way numerology can elevate you to a level of understanding that fact-checkers and debunkers cannot even imagine. But without God, any investigation of 666 will tie you up in knots, weaving fantastical tales which will leave you scratching your head none the wiser.
The way to make sense of 666, and any other mystical mystery, is not therefore to spend endless hours performing calculations or casting charts, which at best will only ever be bridges to the truth, never the truth itself. The real value of numerology is to enable knowledge of self, which can lead, over time, to the purification and improvement of self. Then, and only then do the mysteries of 666 reveal themselves.
