The mark of the beast

A good way to get visits to your blog is to write about the end of the world. Today is 6/6/6, or June 6, 2006, a fateful date for many.

Ridiculous, if we consider that this happens every 100 years. But even giving Revelation some credit, 666 is the mark of The Beast, not a date. In fact, it isn’t The Beast, or the devil, but a different character: the second beast.

The Antichrist

For many, 666 stands for the Antichrist, when it’s actually the mark of the second beast. It isn’t even the Devil, since he is represented by the dragon in the Revelation of John.

It’s all in the famous chapter 13 (another ill-omened number) of the Book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse.

About the first beast we read in Revelation 13:1-2

1 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

2 And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.

In this book, the dragon is the devil, or the enemy of God.

The second beast appears in verse 11:

11 And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.

And it is about this second beast that we are told in verses 17 and 18:

17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

18 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.

You won’t be able to buy or sell without the mark of the beast

Today I heard a theologian liken this business of no one being able to buy or sell without the mark of the beast to the fact that in Chile we have to use our RUT (the national ID number) to carry out any commercial activity. The same could be said of credit cards, or the serial numbers on banknotes.

It makes no sense. Identification numbers are used because computer systems need them, because they’re useful as indexes. There is no depersonalization, no drive to reduce people to mere figures.

Looking for The Beast

Numerology lends itself to a lot of speculation, and nonsense. The bad part is that many people take it seriously.

I’m going to give some examples of where the mark of the beast might be, so we can have a little fun with so much innumeracy.

In the Loto

The Loto, at least in Chile, is a lottery where you have to pick 6 numbers out of a total of 36 possible numbers. 36 is 6 times 6. So in the Loto you have 666, but what’s worse, if you add up the numbers from 1 to 36 you get 666.

Here is our first suspect.

In the number pi

The first 144 decimal digits of pi add up to 666. 144 is 12 × 12 = (6+6) x (6+6).

The number 144 shows up in Revelation too.

In Roman numerals

If you line up the first 6 Roman numerals from left to right you get: DCLXVI = 666.

There are many arithmetic properties of 666 on this site.

Bill Gates

ASCII is an encoding of the first 127 characters used in computers. In ASCII the letter A (uppercase) is 65, B is 66, and so on.

Bill Gates’s real name is William Henry Gates III, or BILL GATES 3, and if we add up the ASCII codes we get

B I L L G A T E S 3

66 + 73 + 76 + 76 + 71 + 65 + 84 + 69 + 83 + 3 = 666

Other examples

M S - D O S 6 . 2 1

77+83+45+68+79+83+32+54+46+50+49 = 666

W I N D O W S 9 5 87+73+78+68+79+87+83+57+53+1 = 666

In Unix (Linux)

On file systems, to give read and write permission on all files we run this command:

chmod 666 *

And so on. You can amuse yourselves finding 666 in lots of places, and you’re welcome to contribute more. But try to send your comments before 6 minutes and 6 seconds past 6 in the evening :).