Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

I had been staying with my uncle in his house last summer. He has four kids who are of course my cousins. One of them is a 12-year old version of me; thinks for himself, unveils the bullshit in reality; and likes to enjoy things regardless of other people’s bias. In particular, Guitar Hero III’s song “The Number of the Beast” by Iron Maiden is his favorite song to play and he sometimes sings the song when he’s not playing. But my uncle is a Christian fundamentalist with no real grasp on what being a Christian means or what they believe. So he sees a song like that with lyrics going “Six, six, six, the number of the beast!” and chastises it. He must have Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia or something.

What’s wrong with him fearing all things related to six-hundred and sixty six (or in some cases the individual digits 6, 6, and 6 in sequential order)? It’s as bad as Triskaidekaphobia – the fear of the number 13. But is there any rationality to this fear of TRIPLESIX? No. There isn’t. When you factor in that most of people are so mixed up about where it’s written and why it’s written, then it’s not hard to see why people would be so stupid. As much as I hate the Christians’ Holy Bible,

Let’s look at the verse Revelation 13:18.
ωδέ η σοφία εστίν; ο έχων νουν ψηφισάτω τον αριθμόν του θηρίου; αριθμός γαρ ανθρώπου εστί; και ο αριθμός αυτού χξϛ΄

The New Testament of the Holy Bible was written in Greek, I’m not posting that mangled bit of mess you call the NIV or KJV or whatever version you’re using. For a translation, here’s my best;
“Find wisdom here: All with [mathematical] literacy tally the number of Therion (beast); number of anthropon esti (this human); the number is six-hundred and sixty six.”

More loosely: “This is wisdom. Anyone who can sum will find the number of the Beast. It’s the number of a man. The number is 600 plus 6 plus 60.”

Actually, that last part where it says “six-hundred and sixty six” is χξϛ. Chixis, and in Greek every letter has a number-value also. For instance, Chi, Xi, and Sigma have the values 600, 6, and 60. For a total sum-value of 666. So why did I write it as 600+60+6 in the loose translation? Let me get to that shortly but preface by saying: at the time, if you talked bad about a King or a ruler, you were put to death. Understand that people back then had no freedoms. John the Revelator was confined to a cave as a hermit when he wrote his famous book. It’s a collection of letters to the seven churches of the time serving as a warning about popular, bleeding-edge topics like emperors, keeping your faith strong, and not overdoing it with religion.

So what was John (or precisely, Yohan) trying to say? Well back then, if you wanted to warn someone of a leader, you did so cryptically and the most popular four ways were with math (because only some could do arithmetic) and do it in writing (because very few could read) and do it with metaphors (because fewer still could understand them). And lastly, it was popular to do so in the “Apocryphal” style because it’s entertaining and foreboding. It was security through obscurity but it worked. It worked so well that even today most people don’t know what Yohan was writing about. I’m going to tell you if you haven’t figured it out.

You see I did omit one important fact; the tally-number that the codebreakers on the other end would use was originally χιϛ (Chis). That’s Six hundred and sixteen if added using Greek numerology. This was the original number because the earliest version of that biblical book was found in the 3rd Century, whereas the one depicting 666 was found in the 11th century.

Now, just who he was talking about remains a mystery. It’s most probably Nero since he was the jackass du jour. Consequently his name “Caesar Nero” is added together (qsr nrw) to be 616. And his full Greek name (Caesar Neron or qsr nrwn) is added to make 666. He fits both profiles and the timing perfectly. It’s easy to see that later on someone decided to call him by his proper name in Greek, Neron, and therefore changed the sum of the numbers in the code (even though he was long dead).

On a tangent, I think that those of you out there who are Christians should seriously start calling your messiah “Yeshua” or “Yehoshua” since that’s his birth name. Unless you’d prefer to keep calling him this “Jesus” which is the Greek transliteration of the same name.

For those of you who shared the same hatred of “666″, do you feel any less ignorant now? I hope so. The number was about a man, in history, not to come. The number was not about Satan. The number was not about the Antichrist. It has no evil value, it has no mystic properties. It’s a numerical value. And all of you who take seriously the digit sequence of three sixes in a row are so far off the tangent I don’t know what to tell you. Yes I do: You’re pretentious dicks.