666

666

W. C. WATT

Man does not measure Nature, but it him. J. B. Van Helmont ( 1 577- 1 644) -

Introduction

The number '666' is probably, of all numbers, the one most fraught with secret meaning. It first so occurs in the Book of Revelation, as the sign that identifies the malignant 'beast' that rose up 'out of the sea' (Revelation 13: 1), whom all must worship on pain of death (Revelation 13: 12, 15) and whose 'mark' they must bear or the 'number of his name' (Revelation 13: 17). The chapter concludes: Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.

(Revelation

13:18; this and all quotes from the King James Version)

Taking this and the rest of what is said about this 'beast' at face value, ever since Revelation the number '666' has generally been interpreted as symbolizing the Anti-Christ, a paragon of evil who will serve Satan during the Final Days of the planet. On this reading, in our time it was adopted as a sort of hieronym by Aleister Crowley, bon vivant and blasphemer of the early part of the century (as see for example Crowley 1972); and, duly popularized, it has figured in several recent horror movies devoted (sensu lato) to the Anti-Christ theme (e.g., The Omen, 1976). More broadly, it has entered popular superstition as an 'evil' number more to be avoided even than the number I 3: for instance, before moving into their California retirement home at 666 St. Cloud Street it appears that ex-President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan successfully peti­ tioned to have the address changed to 668 ( Time 133 (3), January 16, 1989: 76). 1 Even in its most specific Biblical meaning the number has received unimpeachable acknowledgment as the paramount 'mark of the Semiotica 77-4 ( 1 989) 369-392

0037- 1 998/89/0077-0369 $2.00 © Mouton de Gruyter

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beast', having in a number of American range states been registered as a cattlebrand. Why 666? Couldn't the 'beast' have been signified just as well by 333, or 999, or any other number? The answer is 'No', for three reasons: one owed to Biblical interpretation or hermeneutics; one drawn from·associ­ ated numerology and/or 'isopsephy'; and a new one resting on attributes of a certain old number system plus a fresh examination of the evidence. In the brief treatment that follows - a rare instance of parvum ex parvo - we will have a look at all three of these reasons, and will then show how the present study fits into the broader context of semiotics.

The first reason: From Biblical hermeneutics

The basic explanation most often supplied by modern Biblical scholarship for the special appropriateness of '666' as a sign of the Anti-Christ holds that '666' primarily encodes the name Nero, Roman Emperor from 54 to 68 A. D. The cryptic nature of apocalyptic writing means that this decipherment can never be said to be absolutely certain - in fact, since there are two 'beasts' mentioned in this chapter, there is even some ambiguity about which is the one whose identity is conveyed by '666' but few now doubt that it is correct, as far as it goes. (What I hope to show below is that there are residual problems, but that these have to do not with decoding '666' as 'Nero' of all people, but with explaining why 'Nero' was encoded as '666' of all numbers. ) As we have just seen, the author of Revelation- to whom we will refer as 'St. John' without trying to settle which St. John he was2 - tells us in an uncharacteristically straightforward fashion that the number stands for a man's name, and in other passages he appears to be casting rather broad hints to the effect that for him no one could serve better than Nero as the very personifica­ tion of evil. Certainly St. John had good reason for holding strong views on the matter, if we credit the tradition according to which it was at Nero's behest that he was put to the torture (he was plunged into burning oil - Robinson 1976: 223); moreover, '666' translates with little difficulty into a variant of Nero's name, in accordance with practices widespread at the time of the writing of Revelation. These two pieces of evidence are buttressed by three more: after blaming them for the firing of Rome Nero had become a relentless persecutor of the city's Christians (Robinson 1976: 231-236); more even than his imperial predecessors he had laid special stress on the cult of his own deification (and had had coins struck identifying him as the 'Savior of the World' - Mounce 1977: 250); and (amazingly enough) he had briefly, during the benign early part of his

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reign, been believed by a number of unchristianized Jews to be the awaited Messiah (Warmington 1977: 107-108). Small wonder that many Christians held him to be the very 'epitome of evil', to use Mounce's phrase (1977: 316), and regarded him with something like superstitious awe. This was o nly strengthened by his death under obscure circum­ stances (immured at his country villa with no alternative, he fell on his sword): for years afterward he was instead believed to have escaped to remote Parthia, beyond the borders o f the Empire, and to be plotting a sanguinary return; and later when this struck even the credulous as improbable he was thought, though dead, to have the power to come back from the grave (Mounce 1977: 252-253). 3 In particular, this was still widely credited during the reign of Domitian (A. D. 81-96), probably the period during which Revelation was written (Glasson 1965: 8 ; per contra; Robinson 1976: 236--2 53), It is probably to this belief (hence to Nero) that St. John is referring when he writes that '. . . they that dwell on the earth shall wonder .. . when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is' (Revelation 17:8 ). In the same vein he tells us that the beast has seven heads (Revelation 13 : 1 and 17:7), one of which has been 'wounded to death' and yet 'healed' (Revelation 13 :3); it seems reasonable to conclude that the seven heads represent the seven Emperors that had ruled up to the time of the writing of Revelation (ignoring three fly-by-nights whose reigns had been ended after only a few months), Nero of course being the head that had been 'wounded to death' but still lived (Mounce 1977: 252-253). Properly speaking, then, the 'beast' is probably best thought of as having the power and malignancy of the Roman Empire itself, as represented by all the Emperors taken together and in particular by their epitome, Nero. Another way of putting the same thing is to say that the 'beast' is meant to be identified, via the '666' cipher, as a sort of Nero raised to the nth degree. We have seen that Nero was ideally (if not uniquely) qualified to serve as Satan's henchdemon, so that if '666' encodes his name no name could be more appropriate. Let us turn now to the matter of this encoding. 'Nero' translates into a number because at the time of the writing of Revelation there was no name that did not translate into a number. All that was required for such a translation was that the name first be spelled in the Greek or Hebrew alphabets: in those alphabets all of the letters had standard numerical values, since the symbols that served as letters served also as numerals. (Our own Arabic - or more properly, Brahmi numerals lay about half a millennium in the future - Menninger 1958: 396.) Assigning numerical values to the letters made use of the fact that both the numbers and the letters had a set order: Alpha or aleph was assigned to serve also as 'I', beta or beth was assigned as '2', and so -­

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through the alphabet to '9'; then '10' through '90' were assigned the next letters in order; and finally '100' through '900' were assigned the last letters (since twenty-seven letters were required, both alphabets had to be augmented with one or more additional symbols, as see just below). Origination of these 'alephatic' numerals, as we could call them, is sometimes attributed to the late Assyrians of around the time of Sargon II (reigned 722-705), as see Cajori and Scholem (1928 : 18-19 and 1978: 337 respectively, speaking of 'Syrian' and 'Babylonian' numerals); but the invention can just as well (as by Menninger) be credited to the Greeks (Menninger 1969: 262), whose so-called 'Milesian' numerals were in use at about the same period (Guarducci 198 7: 8 6-87). Ballhom has nicely compiled the Greek and Hebrew numeral systems, together with their Samaritan and Syriac (late Aramaic) counterparts (1861). In any of these systems, any number from 1 through 999 was easily represented as a sequence of from one to three letters. For example, in the Greek system ('r) ('tau') stood for '300' (angle-brackets will flank material whose specific lettering is at issue), (o) ('omicron') stood for '70', and (F) 'digamma') stood for '6', so that the number we express in Arabic numerals as (376) was expressed as ('tOf) (='tof '). The Greek and Hebrew alephatic numeral systems appear together in Table 1. The Greek and the Hebrew 'alephnumeral' systems (to adopt the obvious abbrevia­ tion, roughly translating the German 'Psephoszahl' as in for instance Domseiff 1925: 106) are relevant to the present argument because both were likely to have been known to St. John. 4 On most accounts he was a converted Jew, hence spoke Hebrew and/or its close relative Aramaic, read and wrote Hebrew (Charles 1920: xxi; and v. Robinson 1976: 235, 297-298), and must have been familiar with the Hebrew alephnumerals; but at the same time he spent much of his life in the Greek-culture portion of the Roman Empire, spoke and wrote Greek (if none too well), and so was undoubtedly acquainted with the Greek alephnumerals also. Revela­ tion was written o r at least conceived on the Greek island of Patmos, in the Aegean (Revelation 1:9), and was written in Greek, albeit a Greek that was idiosyncratic (Laughlin 1902: 4, 22-23, et passim) or even 'pidgin' (Robinson 1976: 255). The number '666' appears in the Greek text as the Greek words 'el;cxK6crtO\ el;fiKOV't<X el;' (transliterated, 'hexakosioi hexe­ konta hex')- i. e. , as 'six hundred(s) [and] sixty six' (Marshall 1970: 996). If, then, St. John wanted to indicate to his readers that it was the Emperor Nero he wanted to name as chief vizier to the Evil One, but thought it politic to disguise the name by expressing it as its corresponding number (the sum of its letters' numerical values), he probably had his choice between two handy means of encoding the name in question. Taking the Greek alephnumerals first, the Latin name (Nero) or (Neron-) (nomina-

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373

Table I. The two alephatic numeral systems. The Greek alphabet and abecedarium (canonical list of the letters) were borrowed from the 'Phoenicians', cover-term for the Semitic nations in the area of present-day Lebanon and coastal Syria, and obviously the Greek and Hebrew alephnumerations are almost identical, differing only after Semitic ·�de', which Greek had lost before alephnumeration was introduced, causing the Greek/Hebrew correlation to slip a cog from that point to 'taw'f'tau'. After that point (300 for Greek, 400 for Hebrew) Greek could supply the five further letters it had added to the alphabet, plus (for 900) an extinct letter that at one time, having probably been borrowed from the Carians, had in eastern Ionia followed 'omega' as the local abecedarium's last letter (Jeffery 1 96 1 : 39, 327); Hebrew used the word-final allographs of five of its existing letters (in the Table, '-kaph' through ·-�ade'). GREEK LETTER

NAME

HEBREW LETTER

NAME

(l

alpha beta gamma delta epsilon digamma zeta eta theta

K ::1 l , i1 , T

aleph beth gimel daleth he waw zayin beth teth

I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

yod kaph lamed mem nun samek ayin pe �ade

10 20 30

� y I)

e F 1; TJ se

1(

A. ll

v

I;

0 1t

9

p cr<;

t

u


X ljl

(!.)

�

iota kappa lambda mu nu xi omicron pi qoppa rho sigma tau upsilon phi chi psi omega sam pi

n �

::::1

, �

l 0 37 D �

i'

, 111 l1

,

D

l '1 r

qoph resh shin taw -kaph -mem -nun -pe -�ade

NUMERICAL VALUE

40

50 60 70 80 90 1 00 200 300 400

500 600

700 800 900

tive singular or stem) translates quite straightforwardly from the Roman into the Greek alphabet as in Table 2a, the corresponding numerations yielding 50+ 5 + I 00 + 800 (+ 50, optional), summing to 955 or 1005 as shown. Transliterating (Nero(n)) into the Hebrew alphabet is compli-

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Table 2. Various alephnumerations of 'Nero(n) (Caesar)'. Note that Hebrew alephnumer­ als, as with Hebrew writing in general, are sinistrograde (right-to-left), with certain exceptions not presently relevant (Cajori 1 928: 2 1 ) . (I) N E p 50+5+ 100+800 = 955

(a)

N E p (I) v 50+5+ 100+800+50 = 1 005

'Nero' and 'Neron-' transliterated into Greek and numerated.

, 256 = 6+200+50

,

l

306 = 50+6+200+ 50

(b) 'Nero' and 'Neron-' transliterated into Hebrew and numerated. N E p (I) v 50+ 5+ 1 00 + 800+ 50 = 1 005 (c)

'Neron- Caesar' transliterated into Greek and numerated (total = 1 607).

,

0

i'

360 = 200+60 + 1 00 (d)

K cx t cr cx p o <; 20+ I+ 10+200+ 1 + 1 00 + 70 + 200 = 602

, 306 = 50+6+200+ 50

'Neron- Caesar' ('NRWN QSR') translated into Hebrew and numerated (tota/=666).

cated somewhat by the fact that in the latter there are no precise equivalents for (e) or (o), since it contained no true vowel-letters; but following the usual way of spelling the name in Hebrew, which ignores (e) and gives (o) as (,) ('waw'), we derive the possible spellings shown in Table 2b, the corresponding numerations yielding 50+ 200 + 6 (+ 50), which sums to 256 or 306. So all the sums of Tables 2a and 2b fall wide of 666; the name 'Nero', however translated and numerated, won't do the trick. Nero's full name at the time of his accession to the imperial throne was Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar (Warmington 1977: 59), suggesting that we numerate anew. 5 Transliterating (Neron) into Greek as before, but now also rendering (Caesar) (pronounced /kai sar/ in Classical Latin) as Greek (Kct.tcrct.poc;;) (for which see for instance Mark 12: 17), we again obtain a disobliging result, as shown in Table 2c; but if we now try the same thing in Hebrew, in the manner shown in Table 2d, we finally achieve a numeration whose sum is 666, just as desired.6 Admittedly, the Hebrew rendering of (Neron- Caesar) as the equivalent of (NRWN QSR) is a little arbitrary, since one vowel of 'Neron-' is transliterated (by 'W', 'waw'), while no vowel of 'Caesar' wins such treatment (Sanders 1918 : 97); but this transliteration of 'Caesar' has turned up in a Qumran document (Robinson 1976: 23 5, n.; Mounce 1977: 264, n.) and also the Talmud (Charles 1920: 367), and could thus presumably have presented

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375

itself to St. John as an alternative spelling. (Of course this does not explain why St. John chose that alternative over the others, as see below.) The fact that Nero computes to 666 only if numerated according to the Hebrew alephnumerals, while the reference to the 'number of the beast' occurs in a text written throughout in Greek, may leave the reader uneasy -a feeling which will perhaps not be altogether dispelled by the three rationales to be found in the literature. The first of these claims that Hebrew was chosen so as to hide from Roman authorities the fact that a Roman Emperor was being calumniated as the Anti-Christ (Barclay 1959: 296); this seems plausible enough until one reflects that any alephnumeric coding into any language whatever was likely to be broken only by the initiate, given the plethora of numbers that 'Nero' could be encoded as and of names that '666' could be decoded as. (In the event, St. John's reference to Nero was so cryptic that though he seems to be saying that decoding it will be duck soup for anyone with 'understanding', the riddle went unsolved until 183 1-Mounce 1977: 35.) The second holds that '666' had some sort of alternative or ante hoc significance as the fit sign of the Anti-Christ, and was therefore not just a by-product of the alephnumeration but its goal, the choice of Hebrew being a necessary prerequisite to that goal; while the third holds that 'Nero' was put into the Hebrew alephnumerals simply because it was with those that St. John was most familiar. We will deal· with the second rationale in the next section. As to the third, it has a certain initial appeal (though of course even so it could explain only St. John's choice of Hebrew for his alephnumeration, not his skewing the alephnumeration so as to obtain '666'). As noted above, St. John's native language is held to have been Hebrew or its close relative Aramaic, and the pattern of his errors in Greek has suggested to at least one commentator that he 'thought in Hebrew, if he did not actually first write in Hebrew' (Barclay 1959: 296). It is notoriously hard to perform numerical calculations in any but one's native language; and as a glance at Table l will confirm, it might be especially hard for someone familiar with the Hebrew alephnumerals to use the Greek ones, which are similar enough (in name and function, though not in form) to cause confusion. On the other hand, neither the alephnumeration itself nor the addition of the numbers thus obtained are difficult calculations, making this rationale for St. John's insistence on alephnumerating in Hebrew less appealing on second glance than on first. If there is a convincing explanation, it must lie elsewhere. Concluding this section, we note that owing to the extraordinary ambiguity of the '666' code, many solutions other than 'Nero' have been proposed over the years. On weak grounds, Pryse suggests (ii <j>pftv) (='the lower mind-1925: 25); more seriously, Barclay (1959: 295-296)

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lists a number of Greek names and phrases suggested by early exegetes: for instance, ( tet'tcxv ) (sic) and (CXJ..I.VO� cxouco� ) (sic;= 'Titan' and 'evil lamb'), plus many others, also in Greek, of later date. Among these are not a few issuing from the Roman Catholic and Protestant camps during the sectarian disputes of the early modern era, the Catholic ones tending to show that the 'beast' is this or that Protestant heresiarch (for example, Martin Luther), while the Protestant ones prove that the 'beast' is none other than the Pope. In fact, since Revelation is by its very nature prophetic, there is no reason why '666' cannot refer to a figure coming long after its own period - to Napoleon, for example (Barclay 1959: 296), or ex-President Nixon;7 and the reader will doubtless find on repairing to Table I that, suitably worked over, his own name will serve the beast as well as any other. It can therefore come as no great surprise that most modern commentators are notably undogmatic when urging the merits of their favored interpretation 'Nero': Mounce, for example, even while defending that solution, expresses doubts (1977: 264-265 ). But we have already taken note of a far uglier fly in the preceding ointment: given the observed difficulties (or opportunities) of transliterat­ ing from one alphabet into another, and given the observed freedom to choose among a person's names and among competing spellings, clearly '666' is no more inevitably the numeration of 'Nero' than 'Nero' is inevitably the !iteration of '666'. Otherwise put, why didn't St. John alephnumerate 'Nero(n) Caesar' in the usual manner and let the chips fall where they might? We have noted that Revelation was written in Greek but that the '666' cipher demands that Nero's name be transliterated (together with 'Caesar') into Hebrew, wrenched a little in the process (Charles 1920: 3 67), and then alephnumerated according to the Hebrew values, all this despite the fact that two perfectly good and far more direct alephnumerations according to the Greek values were possible. As shown in Table I, these sum to 'I005 ' and 'I607', for the Greek equivalents of 'Neron-' and 'Neron- Caesar'. 'I005 ' was perhaps to be eschewed because it had figured in a famous graffito (as see n. I5 below), but nothing of this kind is known of '1607'. So our question can be reduced to this: why choose an out-of-the-way Hebrew transliteration to obtain '666' when 'I607' would have served just as well; in what respect is the former more significant or just more salient than the latter? Such a significance or salience might attach either to '666' as a number, irrespective of how it was expressed (e.g., indifferently as Brahmi-Arabic (666) or as Roman (DCLXVI), or alternatively to '666' as a particular sequence of numerals (e.g., expressed as (DCLXVI) but not as (666). Let us examine these possibilities in turn.

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The second and third reasons: From numerology and isopsephy

Numerology

As has been remarked elsewhere, every number is interesting in its own way, 8 and certainly '666' is no exception. Of course expressed in the modern Brahmi-Arabic numeral system, in the form (666), the number is immediately suggestive in a number of ways- for instance, it is the sum of Il l , 222, and 333, which given the Christian concern with the Trinity can easily be made to seem significant - but for the moment let us concern ourselves solely with what we could call 'absolute numerological' properties, with attributes that the number '666' has irrespective of how it is written. For instance, is 666 the square or cube or square or cube root of some other number of high salience in its own right? (It isn't.) Nor does it have this sort of superficial interest in any other conventional way, so far as I can see. Delving into its possible Biblical or historical significance, however, it does turn out to have a couple of interesting numerological attributes after all. Chiefly, these seem to involve its arithmetic status considered as the first in a series of three 'triangular' numbers, where the triangular number of n (also known as the 'trigon', 'theosophical value', or simply 'secret value' - Abellio and Hirsch 1984: 3 1) is equal to I+ 2+ 3+ ...+ n (in other words, a triangular is a sort of a summative factorial). For 666 is the triangular of 36, which in turn is the triangular of 8 (Dornseiff 1925: 106), a number of very special immediate significance because it appears elsewhere (in Revelation 17: 1 1) in connection with the Anti-Christ (Mounce 1977: 264). Of course one might think that on the same reasoning the triangular of the triangular of the triangular would code the beast still more perspicuously, or (especially given the compara­ tive difficulty of the calculations) that the number '36' itself would code the beast just as well; but then '36' doesn't lend itself to an easy encoding of the name 'Nero'. (Conceivably, 36 was also barred from signifying the epitome of evil because it is the square of 6, which as the smallest number equal to the sum of its proper divisors less than itself is the smallest 'perfect number', a concept known since Euclid- Hodge 1976: 1663).9 There is also the fact that 666= 500+ 166, both of which numbers have interpretations in cabalistic tradition that might be pertinent to the arcane significance of '666' (Abellio and Hirsch 1984: 3 1), the difficulty being that almost anything is 'pertinent' in this tradition.1° Finally, turning to possible historical interpretations, 666 has been variously interpreted as one or another date or period of years, for example as the number of years Islamic power would last, on which reasoning Pope Innocent III called in 12 13 for a new crusade secure in the conviction that Islam was done for

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(Barclay 1959: 295). But none of these Biblical or historical interpreta­ tions are at all persuasive. We now come to the issue of what we could call 'scriptorial numero­ logy'-that is, the use of encodings and decodings that depend on the particular numeral system in which a number such as '666' is written; that depend, for example, on the fact that '666' is written with three sixes in the Brahmi-Arabic system but as <xi;F) in the Greek alephnumerics. We have already noted that in the Greek text as it has come down to us the number does not appear written in numerals of any kind, because it is expressed in words ('hexakosioi hexekonta hex'): but of course this scarcely precludes St. John's having had in mind a specific way of writing '666' in one of the numeral systems familiar to him. First of all, to make the obvious explicit, contrary to popular modem folk belief the significance of '666' for St. John cannot have had anything to do with the number's expression as three 6's, much less with any suggestions inherent in t�e form (or kinesthetics) of those 6's as written. This is so because, unless his prophetic powers gave him foreknowledge of future numeral systems, St. John could not have had this way of writing the number '666' available to him, since the only system in which it can be written that way is the Brahmi-Arabic numeral system, whose invention (as noted above) lay far in the futureY For St. John, the number must have been expressed in one or more of these three numeral systems: the Greek and similar Hebrew alephnumerals of Table 1, and the Roman numerals of Table 3. (There is a remote possibility that he was also acquainted with a fourth system, the Greek 'Herodian' numerals, a Roman-like system which had fallen into disuse about a century before his time [Menninger 1969: 268], but this does not seem to be worth further consideration.) So if St. John wanted to encode 'Nero' and at the same time to have as Nero's cipher a number that was already laden with significance (or at least special salience), he would have had to choose among the three ways of writing '666' that appear in Table 4. What attributes of these expressions might have struck St. John (and perhaps his fellow alephnumerologists) as having significance or salience beyond the ordinary? Of course it is impossible for us to know, doubtless impertinent even to guess; but on the other hand I now wish to suggest Table 3. The Roman letter-numerals. Well after the 'fall' of the Western Empire, ' 1 ,000' became (M); ' 1 0,000' and ' 100,000' were variously written. v

5

X 10

L 50

C 1 00

D 500

(I) 1 ,000

((I)) 1 0,000

(((I))) 100,000

666 Table 4.

379

'666' in all three numeral systems.

Greek alephnumeric: Hebrew alephnumeric Roman numeral

X�F

,00 DC LXVI

that as written in at least one of the systems, the Roman, the number '666' is very salient and is easily invested with special significance. As written in any of these three archaic systems the number '666' is derived from summing the values of the constituent numerals, but with the Roman numeration there is this striking difference: (DCLXVI) contains all of the Roman letter-numerals that were current in St. John's time; what's more, it contains them all in reverse order. (It omits (M), the 'Roman' numeral for ' 1000', but that numeral was never in fact used by the Romans [Menninger 1969: 281] and so could not have been known to St. John.)12 Thus the number (DCLXVI) has at the very least the sort of salience that the reverse order of all the Arabic numerals has for us: (987654321). The reversal itself has perhaps no additional significance, since it is an essential part of how '666' is written in the Roman numerals, and in fact the only order in which all the Roman letter-numerals can be written in numerical sequence is the reverse or decreasing order, since when written in forward or increasing order, as (IVXLCD), they spell only nonsense. However, a mind used to placing special interpretation on the alephnumeral values of names, values depending on the simple fact that letters are in use as numerals, would scarcely balk at reading significance into the reversal in question; to such a mind it might leap from the page. Especially since the significance I have in mind is easily viewed as having a direct association with another sequential metaphor put to good use in Revelation namely, the expression 'Alpha and Omega', which of course gains its force from naming the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet (in forward order), suggesting all of the letters of the Greek abecedarium and therefore an all-encompassing span: metaphorically, all creation and all time. That is, (DCLXVI) mirrors in the Roman numerals the special significance St. John had already given to the Greek letters. It thus conforms to a prominent feature of the general structure of Revelation, but especially of the Chapter in which '666' occurs: namely, a parallelism in which evil is portrayed as not just the antithesis but the 'parody' (Mounce 1977: 259) of good. The phrase 'Alpha and Omega' is used to characterize both Christ (Revelation 22:13) and God (Revelation I :8 and 21 :6), and is clearly equivalent to characterizing Christ and God as being the beginning and the end and the first and the last. In fact precisely those -

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two expressions also occur in Revelation; the former said of God in Revelation 1:8 and 2 1:6, and the latter, echoing an Old Testament expression (Isaiah 44:6 and 48: 12), said of Christ in Revelation 1:17 and 2:8. Both phrases together are said of Christ in Revelation 22: 13. So the argument is as follows: just as alpha and omega were the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet and could thus serve as an immediately­ apprehensible metaphor for a sort of all-encompassing Good, so perhaps (I) and (D), for John the first and last letter-numerals of the Roman numeral system, might have struck him as serving as the appropriate antithesis of alpha and omega and therefore, arrayed with all the other Roman letter-numerals in reverse sequence, as the perfect symbol for the Anti-Christ, the 'parody' of good, the reversal of the firsts and lasts and beginnings and ends. 13 In addition, of course, encoding 'Nero' so as to read '666', a number of outstanding salience only when expressed in Roman numerals, might have been meant to offer an additional hint that the 'beast' was Roman.14

Isopsephy

We now pause for a brief but pleasurable digression. When St. John coded 'Nero' as '666' he was profiting from a long tradition and widespread practice: for all during the centuries for which the alephnu­ meral systems were in active use, scholars and other idlers toyed with them wholesale, numerating names, !iterating numbers, and taking all sorts of texts to be cryptic references to other passages identically numerated. Often they combined these calculations with numerological ones like those considered just above to derive even more complicated and arcane decodings. The fact that every letter was also a numeral and that therefore every name could be coded as the sum (or other function) of its numbers was not lost even on lovers writing their mistresses' names on walls, as witness a famous graffito from Pompeii, 'I love her whose number is 545' (Barclay 1959: 295; Mounce 1977: 263). For another example, one of the most popular amulets worn in the period in question bore the name ABPASAI: (in Roman letters 'ABRAXAS'), whose alephnumerals sum to 365, which is both the number of days in the year and also the sum of the alephnumerals of the Greek form of the god Mithra's name ('Meithras') (Barclay 1959: 295). For a third example, Nero himself was the butt of a joke depending on this sort of code, as Suetonius reports (Barclay 1959: 295). 15 And finally, for a fourth exam­ ple (and the oldest known to me), Sargon II of Babylonia (727-707 B.C.) had it said of him in an inscription that he had made the wall of

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Khorsabad 16,283 cubits long to correspond with the alephnumeric value of his name (Scholem . 1978: 337). The activity of numerating and !iterating was known in general, at least in its serious guise, as 'isopsephy', or among the Hebrews as 'gematria' (apparently derived from the Greek word for 'geometry'). As gematria it became the very backbone of the cabalistic lore that developed among European Jews after the diaspora, a lore which, indeed, is still a living tradition in some circles (Scholem 1978: 84-86). Outside the tradition of cabala it continues to the present day in degenerate forms, to judge from advertisements in the Sunday supple­ ments, generally under the misnomer of 'numerology' .16 In other words, the isopsephic codings of St. John's '666' reviewed above were by no means an isolated phenomenon, and it is quite conceivable that an additional ante hoc significance for '666' is to be found elsewhere in the general Hebrew practice of gematria or in the traditions of isopsephy. The difficulty of pursuing such a line of inquiry, however, has already been shown above, where we saw that many different names could be read as !iterations of the number '666', just as many different numbers could be derived as numerations of the name 'Nero' in its various forms. This holds in spades when one considers the three different numeral systems current in the Roman world at the time of the writing of Revelation. To take a fresh example, a special kind of Roman alephnumeric reading assigns numerical value in words spelled in the Roman alphabet just to the letters that are used also as Roman numerals (i.e., 'I, V, X, L, C, D'), summing those values to obtain the name's 'secret value'. Barclay gives as an example of this kind of reading 'VICARIUS GENERALIS DEI IN TERRIS' (one of the Pope's titles), whose contained Roman numerals- V, I, C, I, V, L, I, D, I, I, and I­ numerate respectively as 5, 1, 100, 1, 5, 50, 1, 500, l, 1, and l , summing with a sweet inevitability to 666 ( 1959: 296). Clearly, almost anything is possible in such a system: when a player can load and throw his own dice, he can choose his number beforehand. For this reason, considering that in the 'reverse Roman' solution offered above we have already found for '666' what seems to be an adequate ante hoc salience and significance, reaching for ever-more-obscure isopsephic readings seems profitless.

So why '666'?

We have arrived at the following conclusions: (i) The primary significance of '666' is that it is a numeration of a form of the name of the Emperor Nero. (ii) But this explanation is quite inadequate. 'Nero' could have been

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coded in any number of ways, several of them superior to or at least more natural than '666'. Nor can '666' have been the result of accident or caprice, since St. John seems to have gone out of his way to use a Hebrew alephnumeration in a text otherwise Greek, and a peculiar Hebrew alephnumeration at that. To show why '666' was selected, a secondary significance must be found. (iii) That secondary significance arguably lies in the nature of '666' when written in the Roman numerals (i.e., as (DCLXVI)): for when so written the number, besides being unusually salient, offers itself as a striking antithesis to 'Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the Beginning and the End'.

On '666' as sign and 'Nero' as object

On being brought together, the foregoing description of the meaning of '666' and the Peircean triadic framework prove mutually clarifying. The meaning of '666' is clarified because the way in which its constituent meanings are interrelated is nicely foregrounded, and the Peircean triadic framework is clarified because '666' supplies a sterling illustration of the workings and benefits of Peirce's relatively neglected notion of the 'interpretant'. In particular, it supplies an illustration of what Peirce meant in saying that the interpretant is often a 'more developed sign', as in the well-known definition: A sign stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It ... creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. (CP 2.228)

As is probably obvious without further exposition, the arcane or crypto­ semiotic meanings of '666' offer a superb example of Peirce's notion of a series of ever-more-developed Interpretants progressing inward like a nested set of Chinese boxes from a first superficial understanding toward some unknowable (in fact, unreachable) ultimate knowledge. Let's close with a brief look at this example. We have seen that first of all '666' is a sign whose object (as for the Reagans) is 'evil', and that this is so because in the Reagans' minds (taking the Reagans as representative of the 'idealized signifex') '666' has for its object the Anti-Christ, who is the very personification of evil. In triadic terms, the sign {666} signifies {evil} [= has 'evil' for its object] because it 'creates in the mind of ' somebody the 'more developed sign' which is this: {'666' signifies the Anti-Christ, who is evil personified,

666

383

therefore '666' signifies evil}. Let 'cr ('sigma') stand for 'signifies' and let '�' stand for 'because' ['is implied by']; then this interpretant is easily expressed as the proposition {(666 cr evil) � ([666 Anti-Christ] & [Anti­ Christ is evil])}. We leave for future development of a 'semiotic calculus' the specification of the general rule- on the lines of 'If A signifies B and some attribute "e" ["evil"] is predicated of B then Aalso signifies B's "e"' - under which from '666 signifies the Anti-Christ' & 'the attribute "evil" is predicated of the Anti-Christ' we obtain, as just above, 'therefore 666 signifies the attribute "evil'". Notice that, much as Peirce specified must be the case (CP 2.274), this interpretant can be said to have essentially the same relation to the original object {evil} as the original sign {666} did­ it too signifies {evil} - because it contains precisely that relation as a constituent proposition, its consequent. 17 (That is, the aletheutic relation just discussed can be counted as constituting preservation of the Peircean sign/object relation.) Reverting for easier e�position to the usual triangles, and expanding slightly, we represent this first interpretant as '11', as in the first two lines of Figure 1. The second tiiangle, of course (lines two and {666}

A /� {12} = {(666 cr A-C)+-([666 cr NERO] & [(NERO cr A-q)} {666 cr A-C}

{evil}---{ltl = {(666 cr evil)+-([666 cr A-q & [A-C is evil])}

--

{Nero cr A-C}

1\

---

{14} = {(Nero cr A-C+-(Nero was a flagrant parricide, persecuted Christians, tortured St. John) & . . . . } .

Figure I .

Superficial layers of the interpretation of '666' (much simplified).

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three of the figure), is a rather simple representation of the triadic relation enjoyed by 11 in its function as a sign in its own right- still following Peirce's original formulation - its object (the first proposition of its antecedent) being compactly representable as {666 A-C} and its interpre­ tant 12 being the 'more developed sign' that asserts, in something like plain English, {(666. signifies the Anti-Christ)} because ([666 signifies Nero] and [Nero signifies the Anti-Christ])}. For completeness, 11 when functioning as a sign in its own right should be stated to have a second object (as some signs do - Peirce, CP 2.230) - namely, the second proposition of its antecedent, 'the Anti-Christ is evil'; but the 'more developed' interpretant involves theological complexities perhaps best left to theologians to state. Likewise, for completeness, some specification should be added to the effect that Nero and the Anti-Christ are more than merely evil; each is in his own way the epitome or even apotheosis of evil. Note that, again, the interpretant has essentially the same relation to its object that its sign (apex of its triangle) has, because like its sign it includes the object as one of its constituent propositions, on the truth of which the truth of the whole depends. Clearly this process continues, and though its representation in the usual triangular notation becomes bulky at about this point, looking at these relations from the triadic perspective is still clarifying, for even as the expressions become more long-winded the Peircean viewpoint permits (in fact, forces) the stating of the relations among those expressions ordinarily the source of most of their obscurity, surely- in a form that makes them pellucid, thus justifying semiotics as a hermeneutic tool. Thus, for example, when serving as a sign in its own right 12 has for its first object {666 cr NERO}, and this new sign relation has for its new interpretant 13, which is on the order of {(666 cr NERO) because (666 [(50+200+6+50) + ( 100+60+200)]) & (NERO [when appropriately numerated] [(50+200+6+50) + ( 100+60+200)])}. (For complete­ ness, two additional minor premises must be added, to the effect that 'if A and B are equal to a third thing then they are equal to each other' and 'if A and B are equal to each other then A may signify B'.) What's more, 12 when functioning as a sign has also a second object, {Nero cr Anti­ Christ}, which new sign-relation has a new interpretant, 14, on the order of {(Nero cr Anti-Christ) because (Nero was a flagrant parricide, pro­ claimed his divinity, was briefly thought the Messiah, persecuted Chris­ tians including St. John himself, and so on; all of those things are evil; the Anti-Christ is evil; if two things share an [important] attribute then one may signify the other- a reduced case of 'if A and B are equal' as just above- and so on)}. And then 13 and 14 function as signs in their own right; for example, some interpretant (call it 15) must begin the interpreta=

=

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385

tion of 'evil': evil in what respect, and to whom? To all of this a new set of sign-relations must be added to capture the fact that '666' signifies Nero better than the many other numerical signs that signify him, by virtue of the special merits we have pointed out above having to do with the posited salience and significance of (DCLXVI). That is, symbolizing 'better than' (or 'more fitly than' or whatever) as '>', we need a way of specifying the notion that {(666 cr Nero) & (for every X such that X cr Nero, [(X not 666) -+ ([666 cr Nero] > [X cr Nero])])}, or the like. (For completeness, 'X' must be specified to be of the same type of sign [namely, an alephnumeral] as '666'.) The reader initially disposed to reject the addition of '>' to the Peircean framework might on reflection indulge it, for without it we would be unable to state why '666' is the [canonical] 'mark of the beast' instead of some other of the many signs that, as we've seen, serve in many respects just as well. And adding '>' will also prove availing when stating such notions as 'Nero is the apotheosis of evil'. This seems to be about what is useful to say about '666'. I should like to add in closing, however, that to my mind there is nothing fundamentally distinctive about 'sacral semiotics' as laid out in the foregoing treatment, in particular about the 'more developed interpretations' of Figure I. What is distinctive about '666' and in general about cryptic signs, as contrasted with the signs of ordinary life and discourse, is only this: cryptic signs like those of Revelation make no sense on the surface and so obviously require interpretation to be understood at all, while ordinary signs seem to make sense on the surface. But then on renewed thought it is seen that below those surfaces lurk unplumbable depths, just as with '666'. As a rough analogy, one may take an ordinary (if rococo) sentence18 like 'The soldiers who want such medals will get the kind of medals that such soldiers deserve'. A sentence like this contains in expressions like 'such' and 'the kind of' grammatical devices called 'anaphors', which for their interpretation obviously depend on their being identified with some other expression in the discourse (their 'antece­ dents'), thus making interpretation of the sentence as a whole dependent on that anaphoric identification. For example, what does 'such medals' mean; how are we to interpret that expression in the sentence at hand? The interpretation is supplied univocally by the sentence itself: 'such medals'= 'the kind of medals that such soldiers deserve'. So the sentence as properly filled out, the anaphor being replaced by its antecedent, would read, 'The soldiers who want the kind of medals that such soldiers deserve, will get the kind of medals that such soldiers deserve'; or more colloquially, 'The soldiers who want the kind of medals that such soldiers deserve, will get them'. All very well; but what does 'such soldiers' mean in this 'more developed' interpretation? Clearly, it means 'the soldiers

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who want such medals', so that the still more developed interpretation should read: 'The soldiers who want the kind of medals that the soldiers who want such medals deserve, will get them.' This new sentence states what the first 'rococo' sentence really means. But what does 'such medals' mean in this new sentence? Obviously, 'the kind of medals that such soldiers deserve', so that a yet more developed interpretation of our original 'rococo' sentence must be: 'The soldiers who want the kind of medals that the soldiers who want the kind of medals that such soldiers deserve deserve, will get them'. Next 'development': 'The soldiers who want the kind of medals that the soldiers who want the kind of medals that the soldiers who want such medals deserve deserve, will get them'. and then: 'The soldiers who want the kind of medals that the soldiers who want the kind of medals that the soldiers who want the kind of medals that such soldiers deserve deserve deserve, will get them'. And what sort of soldiers are those? On first reading our 'rococo' sentence seemed comprehensible, but it turned out otherwise. If we take Peirce seriously, all sentences must be like this, especially those in which interpretants are ever-more-'developed': we skate nimbly over the thin ice of initial understanding, then pick at the surface to gain a little depth, whereupon we find ourselves staring into a chasm of incomprehension. In everyday life do we try to avoid this, to stop at some predetermined point of interpretive satiety? Based on Rosch's work, most informed observers now believe that our quotidian processing of conceptual categories is mainly performed at a 'prototypi­ cal' level (Lakoff 1987: 39-55); but whether we also mainly perform at any consistently identifiable semantic level has yet to be investigated. In fact, since it is obvious that we halt the interpretation of any sign at a very early stage and shunt the internal interpreter off onto a new task, and since at present there is no logical explanation for this process, we might just as well say that it is controlled by a homunculus. Call him 'Peirce's Demon'. Thus, in the end, '666' leads us back to where we started.

Notes

I.

2.

If 666 hadn't had such fearsome connotations it might have been looked on quite favorably, one would think, considering the number of letters in each of the ex­ President's names (Ronald Wilson Reagan). I'm indebted to Catherine Watt for this observation; as who is not? Commentators are divided over the question of whether the author of Revelation, often referred to as 'St. John the Divine' ( = 'St. John the Seer'), was the same person as St. John the Apostle. For extended discussion see Robinson ( 1 976: 254-3 1 1); for a summary see Mounce ( 1 977: 25-3 1).

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Sanders once argued ( 1 9 1 8: 97-98) that verse 1 3: 1 8 of Revelation was not written by any St. John, but originated as a later hand's 'marginal gloss' on 1 3: 1 7 . This view has not won wide acceptance. 3. The belief that Nero would return from a far region to which he had removed himself, or even from death itself- the cult of 'Nero Redivivus' (e.g., Robinson 1 976: 245-246, 250; Mounce 1 977: 252-253), obviously altered by St. John to suit his own purposes (Chamberlin and Feldman 1 96 1 : 1 1 88)- was certainly aided by the appearance in Parthia of at least two pseudo-Neros in the period following his death (Sanders 1 9 1 8: 98); but of course it is but one among many instances of similar superstitions pertaining to fallen leaders, to which beliefs as a group I may perhaps be permitted to give the na�e 'Dux Redux'. Other well-known examples are King Arthur (fl. c. 500?); Frederick Barbarossa (c. l 1 25- 1 1 90); King Sebastian of Portugal ( 1 557- 1 578); Adolf Hitler ( 1 889- 1 945); John F. Kennedy ( 1 9 1 7- 1 963); James Dean ( 1 93 1 - 1 955); and Elvis Presley ( 1 935- 1 977). The last four are periodically reported in the national tabloids to have been spotted in Argentina and/or at the nearest burger-stand. Belief in the return of a vanished religious figure, perhaps originating as a belief in the future return of a dead king, was a notable feature of the ancient Egyptian religion, among others (Frazer 1 935: 3-23, 1 58-200). As is well known, belief that the Final Days will soon be ushered in by the appearance and rule of the Anti-Christ is common among present-day fundamentalist Christians, as it has been for a century and more; a good account of this belief and attendant eschatology is provided by T. P. Weber ( 1 987, passim). It is a viewpoint that lends itself readily to paranoia: the story headed 'Suspect saw stab victim as Antichrist' (The Outlook [Santa Monica, California], February 24, 1 989, p. I) is noteworthy only because this 'Antichrist' was a woman. On the other hand, the belief that Nero is the Anti-Christ seems to have faded. Were they indeed still alive in Argentina and Parthia respectively, Hitler would as of this writing be 99, and Nero a vigorous 1,95 1 . 4. St. John might also have known the Samaritan and Syriac (late Aramaic) systems (Ballhorn 1 86 1 : 1 5, 1 7), but I know of no circumstantial evidence that he did, and since these are in all relevant essentials identical to the Hebrew system it would make little difference if he had. 5. His birthname had been Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus; it was changed upon his adoption by his mother's third husband, her uncle the Emperor Claudius I. Nero thus took precedence for the imperial succession over the younger Britannicus, Claudius' son by an earlier wife, Messalina. Appointed Britannicus' protector, Nero later married Claudius' daughter Octavia, which further smoothed his way to the throne. After his mother had poisoned Claudius, in A.D. 54, which resulted in Nero's elevation to the purple, he profited from her example and did away with his adoptive brother Britannicus (55), his mother (59), and his wife (62). 6. Without the final (n) of 'Neron' the same computation yields '61 6', which may be telling because '6 1 6' turns up in some very old traditions as an alternative (Charles 1 920: 367; Robinson 1 976: 235, n.) or simply incorrect (Barclay 1 959: 295) spelling of the number of the beast. Though this error might be telling in a very different sense, since after all it may have come about not because 'Neron-' was mistakenly alephnumerated as 'Nero', but because 'Neron-' was correctly alephnumerated (as '666') and then '666' was mistakenly altered to '6 1 6'. This might have happened in either Greek or Hebrew alephnumeral systems, since both the Hebrew and the Greek expressions for '666' become '6 1 6' just by changing the middle alephnumeral from '60' to ' 10', i.e. (0) to (") or <�> to (t). Still, in neither case is the new alephnumeral very

388

7.

8.

9. 10.

1 1.

W. C. Watt similiar in form to the original, making such a mistake concomitantly less probable. By the same token, the corresponding mistake is no more likely to have happened through mistranscription of the Greek wording, since 'hexakosioi hexekonta hex' ('666') would have to have been mistranscribed as 'hexakosioi hekkaideka' ('6 1 6'). On the other hand, a simple mistake in transcribing Roman '666' ( ( DCLXVI)) can easily produce '6 1 6' ((DCXVI)), since all that is required is to omit (L). Thus the erroneous or alternate '6 1 6', so often discussed, on fresh inspection yields an independent argument in favor of the thesis that '666' was originally expressed, or understood as being expressed, in Roman numerals; though needless to say the argument is scarcely so persuasive as to rule out the usual ' "Nero" for "Neron-'" line of attack. This is meant, of course, as no reflection on Richard M. Nixon. To obtain the requisite alephnumeration, 'Nixon' must first be transliterated into Hebrew as well as it can be. The English 'X', which has no single-letter equivalent in Hebrew, is best transliterated as the two-letter sequence 'kaph shin' ((:lVI)), preserving its sound /ks/; and since the Hebrew alphabet has no true vowel-letters (i) must be omitted, though the ( o ), just as in (Neron), can be transliterated by (,), 'waw'. Thus 'Nixon' best transliterates as (l'IVI:ll). At once it is seen that 'R.M.Nixon' alephnumerates as 200 + 40 + 50 + 20 + 300 + 6 + 50 = 666. Perhaps a famous numerological anecdote best illustrates this notion. The mathemati­ cian G. H. Hardy, the story goes (e.g., in Hodge 1 976: 1 665), once visited the legendary Srinivasa Ramanujan in the hospital and remarked that the taxi that had transported him there had the uninteresting license-number 1 729. Ramanujan immediately replied that on the contrary 1 729 was · quite interesting, being the smallest positive integer expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways - namely, as 123 + 1 3 and as 1 03 + 93• The first five 'perfect' numbers are 6; 28; 496; 8 , 1 28; and 33,550,336. '666' exhibits another absolute-numerological trait of possible interest, though its relevance to Revelation may be purely accidental, and probably is. That is, 666 = 6 x 3 x 37 and all three of these divisors could be said to have significance: the portentous word 'beast' (Gk. 6epiov) occurs exactly 37 times in Revelation, and 6 and 3 have independent 'interest' in their own right, respectively numerological (the smallest 'perfect' number) and Christian (the number of the Trinity). This consideration would seem to rule out, among many other folk solutions to the riddle, the kind of answer that Abellio and Hirsch propose. They assert ( 1984: 32) that one source of the significance of '666' is that it is the sum of 1 66 and 500 (which no one could doubt) and the written number composed of the juxtaposition of those two written numbers, nameiy ( 1 66,500), is the sum of the triangular numbers of all combinations of ( I ), (2), and (3). (That is, the sum of the triangulars of ( 1 23), ( 1 32), ( 2 1 3), (23 1 ), ( 3 1 2), and (32 1 ) - in other words, of (7,626) , (8,778) , (22,791 ), (26,796), (48,828), and ( 5 1 ,68 1 ).) But of course these remarks pertain only to the number '666' as expressed in the Brahmi-Arabic system, which as of the writing of Revelation would not be invented for five or six hundred years. Whether or not certain other interpretations of '666' are also excluded once the Brahmi-Arabic numeral system is excluded is an open question: I mean those interpretations that depend on the 'tripling of 6s', or for that matter of 8s. ('888', simply the sum of the alephnumerals of Greek (ITJaouc;), 'Jesus' [Barclay 1959: 295; Robinson 1976: 235, n.], is by one soi-disant cabalistic source claimed to be a 'good' number because it triples '8', said to be Christ's number [Bond and Lea 1 977: 24-25], negleCting the usual view that it's the number of the Anti-Christ [Mounce . 1 977: 264 and see above under 'Numerology']. Note that, curiously, no one seems anxious to

666

12.

13.

389

assign Christ his most obvious number, '80 1 ', the sum of the alephnumerals 'Alpha' and 'Omega', or the number '4095', the sum of all the alephnumerals from 'Alpha' to 'Omega' inclusive.) The only way to save this sort of 'tripling of sixes' significance is to rely not on the numeral system in which '666' is expressed but on the Greek in Revelation 1 3 : 1 8, focusing therefore on the tripling of 'hex' in 'hexakosioi hexekonta hex'. This seems to be the only possible way of saving Emanuel Swedenborg's claim that '666' is the number of the beast because ' . . . six signifies the same as three multiplied by two, and three signifies what is full . . . and two signifies the marriage of truth and good . . . ' and 'the number six hundred sixty and six is used, because in that number six is tripled, and triplication completes . . .' ( 1 883: 6 1 0). But this interpretation in terms o � the Greek wording is perhaps too liberal. In a posthumous work Sweden borg appears to offer a somewhat different account of the arcane meanings of 6, 3, and 2, one that leans more openly on the Brahmi-Arabic writing of (666) [ 1 897: 235]; and even in the passage quoted from just above he speaks further of 'multiplying [6] by one hundred, whence comes six hundred . . ' and so on: not that 600 is not always obtainable by multiplying 6 x 1 00, but that only in the Brahmi-Arabic system is '600' spelled with a (6). (M) is of course the Roman Numeral for ' 1000' in modem usage, and though it apparently was never used by the Romans as a true numeral (Menninger 1 969: 28 1 ) it does appear occasionally, in post-Augustan times, as an abbreviation for 'mille' in such expressions as 'CX.M' meaning ' 1 1 0 x 1 000' (Cajori 1 928: 30; for an illustration from Pliny as of about A.D. 77, see Cajori 1 928: 32). Considering its relative novelty, though, even this usage may not have been known to St. John, writing at about the same time as Pliny but on a remote island in the Aegean. For St. John the proper Roman numeral for ' 1000' would have been ((1)) , apparently merely a parenthesization o f ( I ) itself, the parentheses indicating that the sequence was starting over, with (I), and was counting thousands. (The origin of ((I)) is a little controversial, but since a Roman abacus has survived on which ' 1 000 ' appears plainly as ((1)), ' 1 0,000' plainly as (((1))), and ' 100,000' plainly as ((((I)))) (photograph in Menninger 1 969: 395), the origin of the symbol ((I)) as seen in its own time·could scarcely be clearer.) Moreover, starting over at ' 1000 ' should have seemed perfectly natural to St. John, since the Greek and Hebrew alephnumeral systems also stopped their ordinary letter-series at '999', like the Roman numerals prior to the introduction of ( M ) starting over again at ' 1 000' with alpha or aleph, indicating that it was thousands that were being counted through the use of a sort of subscript apostrophe (illustrated in Cajori 1 928: 25), comparable to the use of the parentheses in Roman ((1)) . Three last notes: ( l ) some have claimed a n origin for ((I)) other than from the parenthesization of (I) - see Menninger 1 969: 243-244 for discussion, though (2) the alternative common Roman symbol ( oo ) for ' 1000' probably represents a mere facilitation of ((I)), contrary to Priscian (Cajori 1 928: 33); and (3) (D) for '500' appears to represent a halving of the < a> ) variant of the ((I)) numeral for '1 000 ' (Menninger 1 969: 243). However, this leaves unexplained why the number of the beast was not '50 1 ', which expressed in Roman numerals is (Dl), the last Roman letter-numeral followed by the first, hence the precise antithesis of 'Alpha and Omega' and the closer parallel. The reason could be any one or any combination of the following: ( 1 ) It is hard to obtain an alephnumeric spelling of any variety of 'Nero(n) Caesar' that sums to '50 1 '; (2) (DC LXVI) contains the entire series of letter-numerals and may thus have been found a salient number in its own right or even arcanely significant, well before St. John

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W. C. Watt wrote Revelation; and (3) in any case the expression 'Alpha and Omega' is assuredly not meant to imply that Christ is the beginning and the end but not anything between: what is meant is that he is all-encompassing, alpha and omega therefore standing for the entire letter-sequence, as synecdoches, so that is, if not to the letter. To which it may be added that '666' has been argued to have been chosen from among a variety of alephnumerations all in the six hundreds and (as noted above) to have competed with ' 6 1 6' (the Hebrew alephnumeration of 'Nero Caesar' rather than 'Neron- Caesar') in the early versions of Revelation (Sanders 1 9 1 8: 98-99), suggesting still another reason for convergence on '666'. The parallelism in Revelation, though perhaps the book's most noted feature, is scarcely exact, in any case. Its basic structure can be represented thus: PRIMUM BONUM (God) PRIMUM MALUM (Satan)

MESSIAH (Christ) FALSE MESSIAH (Anti-Christ)

PROPHETS, EVANGELS, &c. (St. John, &c.) FALSE PROPHET(S), &c. (Second Beast, &c.)

As to further parallels, Revelation is in some respects an uneven rendering of the earlier prophetic book of Daniel; in fact some of the ambiguities in Revelation probably result from its inexact echoing of Daniefs apparatus of ominous beasts and so on. (Daniel 7:3: 'And four great beasts came up from the sea . . .'). Daniel's beasts are supposed to represent the four great kingdoms that must rise and fall before the Final Days can begin - namely, Babylonia, Media, Persia, and Greece (Mounce 1 977: 250, n.), or Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome (Weber I 987: 1 06). The fourth of thr.se has tP.n horns (Danie/ 7:7), and few commentators neglect to compare this beast to St. John's similarly-equipped beast from the sea (e.g., Mounce 1 977: 2 5 0) . Modem millennialists were at one time fond of interpreting the ten horns as ten kings and predicting that when the European Common Market reached exactly ten members it would fulfill Biblical prophecy as the reconstituted Roman Empire, with dire results for the planet (for discussion, see Weber 1 987: 2 1 3-2 1 5). Now that the Common Market has more than ten members other predictions would seem to be in order (nor will they be lacking). From this and other failed predictions based on these books one might almost infer that the various numerical schemes of Daniel and Revelation are best taken not literally, but as equating the certainty of the predicted sequence of events with that of the sequence of numbers (Mounce 1 977: 309, 3 1 5-3 1 6), or equivalently of letters - a final countdown, as one might say. As need scarcely be added, the decision as to which parts of sacred writ one takes literally and which one is free to interpret

with more latitude is highly individual, within certain parameters. For example, of

1 4.

those who interpret Daniefs prophecies by means of translating its 'weeks' into 'years', thus deriving a particular modem date as fulfilling its prediction that the Jews would be restored to Israel, few also consider themselves free to interpret 'Israel' as meaning, for example, 'Uganda'. Yet in 1 903 the great Zionist leader Theodore Herzl was willing to consider the latter as an acceptable Promised Land (Weber 1 987: 1 34). Before leaving the subject of scriptorial numerology altogether I should like to note that, just as '3' and '37' are 'interesting' in the 'absolute-numerological' sense, as noted in n. 9 just above, so the same numbers have been found to be 'interesting' in the scriptorial-numerological sense. As Carter has observed (n.d.: 66-7 1), they are associated in an 'interesting' Brahmi-Arabic series: if one multiplies 37 by the multiples of 3 in sequence, one obtains I l l ( 37 x 3), 222 ( 37 x 6), 333 ( 37 x 9), 444 =

=

=

666

1 5.

1 6. 1 7.

1 8.

39 1

( = 37 x 1 2), 555 ( = 37 x 1 5), and then 666 ( = 37 x 1 8). Unfortunately, however, the series continues (after 777, 888, and 999) as l l lO, 1 22 1 , 1 332, getting duller all the time, which rather dampens one's 'interest' in it, quite apart from the fact that none of these Brahmi-Arabic expressions could have been known to St. John. Nor does the series I l l , 222, 333 . . . have much 'interest' in the three numeral systems that St. John probably knew. In the Roman, for instance, the series reads as CXI, CCXXII, CCCXXXIII (so far so good), but then CDXLIV, DLV, DCLXVI, DCCLXXVII, DCCCXXXVIII, DCCCCXCIX (or DCDXCIX), and so on. According to Suetonius the graffito read: (ve61jfe<j>ov· Ntprov Uiietv JlTJ'tEpet &1tEKtttvt) (as see for example Warmington 1 977: 4 1 ), or in Roman transliteration (NEOPSE­ PHON: NERON IDIAN METERA APEKTEINE) ( = 'A new psephon [alephnumer­ ation]: Nero killed his mother'). The point being that the alephnumerals of both (Ntprov) (as see Table 2a, below) and (illietv JlTJ'tEpet etltEK'tttvt) add up to 1005: 50 + 5 + 1 00 + 800 + 50 = ([1 0 + 4 + 1 0 + 1 + 50] + [40 + 8 + 300 + 5 + 1 00 + 1 ] + [ l + 80 + 5 + 20 + 300 + 5 + 10 + 50 + 5]) = l 005. A surprising graffito, since 'Nero', rather than being hidden behind the isopsephic riddle 'murdered his mother', is inscribed outright. E.g., in Parade (January 22, 1 989: 1 2, 1 3), complete with dippable coupon to be directed to an address in Hauppauge, N.Y. But notice that the sign/object relations vary logically and otherwise. Thus when '666' signifies 'evil' it is purely symbolic, but when signifying 'Nero' it's partly isomorphic hence iconic since both '666' and 'Nero'(n Caesar)' parse into 50 + 200 + 6 + . . . = 666. Yet '666' is a symbol in the first place because it is an icon in the second place. Such 'signiplexes', as we might call them, will repay deeper study. This example is modeled on the sentences used to argue the 'Bach-Peters Paradox' about twenty years ago (see for example Bach 1 970).

References

Abellio, Raymond and Hirsch, Charles ( 1 984). Introduction a une theorie des nombres bibliques ( = Les essais 228). Paris: Gallimard. Bach, Emmon ( 1 970). Problominalization. Linguistic Inquiry I, 1 2 1 - 1 22. Ballhorn, Friedrich ( 1 86 1 ). Grammatography. London: Triibner and Co. Barclay, William ( 1 959). Great themes of the New Testament, V. Revelation xiii. (con­ tinued). Expository Times 70, 292-296. Bond, Frederick Bligh and Lea, Thomas S. ( 1 977). Gematria: A Preliminary Investigation of The Cabala Contained in the Coptic Gnostic Books. London: Research into Lost Knowl­ edge Organization. Cajori, Florian ( 1 928). A History of Mathematical Notations, vol. I . La Salle, IL: Open Court. Carter, Frederick (n.d.). Symbols of Revelation. London: Adam Fitzadam. Chamberlin, Roy B. and Feldman, Herman (eds.) ( 1 96 1 ). The Dartmouth Bible. Boston: Houghton Mifflin . Charles, R. H. ( 1 920). A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on The Revelation of St. John. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark. Crowley, Aleister ( 1 972). The Magical Record of the Beast 666. London: Duckworth. Dornseiff, Franz ( 1 925). Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie ( = Studien zur Geschichte des Antiken Weltbildes und der Greichischen Wissenschaft 7) Leipzig: Verlag und Druck von B. G. Teubner.

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Frazer, Sir James G. ( 1 935). Adonis A llis Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion (The Golden Bough, 3rd edition, Part IV). New York: Macmillan. Glasson, T. F. (ed.) ( 1 965). The Revelation ofJohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guarducci, Margherita ( 1 987). L 'Epigrafia greca dalle origini a! tardo impero. Rome: lstituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato. Hodge, Donald R. ( 1 976). Number theory. In Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia, 5th edition, Douglas H. Considine (ed.). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co. Jeffery, Lilian H. ( 1 96 1 ) . The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece. London: Oxford University Press. Lakotf, George ( 1 987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laughlin, T. Cowden ( 1 902). The Solecisms of the Apocalypse. Princeton, NJ: C. S. Robinson and Co. Marshall, Alfred ( 1 970). The R S. V. Interlinear Greek-English New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House. Menninger, Karl ( 1 969). Number Words and Number Symbols, trans. by Paul Broneer. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Mounce, Robert H. ( 1 977). The Book of Revelation. Grand Rapids, MI: William B . Eerdmans. Peirce, Charles Sanders ( 1 93 1-66). The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, vols. 1-8, C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. W . Burks (eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pryse, James M. ( 1 925). The Apoca/yse Unsealed, 3rd edition. Los Angeles: John M. Pryse. Robinson, John A. T. ( 1976). Redating the New Testament. London: SCM Press. Sanders, Henry A. ( 1 9 1 8). The number of the beast in Revelation. Journal of Biblical Literature 37, 95--99. Scholem, Gershom ( 1 978). Kabbalah. New York: New American Library. Swedenborg, Emanuel ( 1 883). The Apocalypse Revealed. New York: American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing Society. -( 1 897). The Apocalypse Explained According to the Spiritual Sense. New York: American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing Society. Warmington, B. H. (ed.) ( 1 977). Suetonius: Nero. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, University of BristoL Weber, Timothy P. ( 1 987). Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, enlarged edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

W. C. Watt (b. 1 932) is Professor of Soci�l Sciences at the University of California in Irvine. His principal research interests include general semiotic theory, zoosemiotics, semiotic evolution, and alephatics (the study of alphabetic letter orders). Among his publications are 'What is the proper characterization of the alphabet? II. Composition' ( 1 980), 'Grade der Systemhaftigkeit' ( 1 983), 'Signs of the times' ( 1 984), and 'The Byblos Matrix' ( 1 987).