What was that number again?

It seems that many bloggers internetwide have their panties in a twist because today's date, 6/6/06, looks like the number of the proverbial Beast, the one that was mentioned in Revelation, that piece of divinely-inspired writing tacked on to the end of the Christian Bible which describes in great and gory detail the end of the world, Ragnar�k (isn't that a great word?), G�tterdammerung or what have you. I haven't read all of the Christian Bible, but I have read Revelation, mostly because when I was at university studying music (1980), the whole faculty was drafted into performing a piece by Canada's own R. Murray Schafer, called Apocalypsis (conveniently published in two sections: Part I: John's Vision, Part II: Credo), a musical extravaganza of sorts, which took up the whole floor of the concert hall in town with the seats removed. There was the choir, of course, actually several choirs, actors, dancers (the Whore of Babylon was amazing), musicians playing all sorts of "found" instruments (Murray loved to go out into the field and pick up interesting-sounding rocks, for instance) and traditional instruments, percussionists rattling great big thundersheets (they make an incredible sound), and several conductors to keep it all coordinated.

That was just the first half. The second half consisted of 12 small choirs placed around the performing space with a conductor in the middle, making "celestial" sounds in order to evoke the ambience of Murray's concept of the New Jerusalem. That was the part I remembered from an earlier incarnation. In 1976 (or thereabouts) I was in the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir under the direction of Elmer Isler when we read through that piece. After the flash and excitement of the earlier movement, it is boring beyond words. Beautiful maybe, but boring definitely. Anyway, it was for that occasion that I decided to bone up on the Christian take on the end of the world. Pretty wild stuff, let me tell you.

You know, I visited the island of Patmos in the Aegean and saw the very cave where John the Divine purportedly wrote this work. There is a little chapel built into the cave with a church on top (you get to the site through the church) overseen by the typical Greek Orthodox priest in flowing black robes and waist-length beard. The ceiling of the cave has a crack which supposedly happened when God spoke to John. There is a depression in the wall just above floor level where he was supposed to have placed his head for sleeping purposes, and there is another, smaller depression a little farther up which he was supposed to have used as a handhold to get up from kneeling or lying. Apparently he wasn't a spring chicken anymore. Both of these depressions are outlined with gold. I presume that is a later addition.

So, back to the number of the Beast, that literary invention of John the Divine. It was thought for the longest time that its "number" was 666. I'm not quite sure what is meant by that. Does the Beast wear a football jersey, perhaps? However, I have it from a religion scholar friend of mine that the number of the Beast is actually 616. To quote him:

Indeed. That is so. The latest finds at Oxhyrhynchus have determined the oldest extant copy of Revelation has 616 marked as the number of the Beast. There was already some doubt about it, as many more recent copies also had that number.

So, I would like to reassure all of you superstitous types out there that January 6, 2006 (or June 1, 2006, depending on whether you live in French or English Canada) was actually the Number-of-the-Beast Day, and we all lived through it just fine.

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