Judy Skatssoon ABC Science Online Tuesday, 6 June 2006
Today is the sixth day of the sixth month of the year 2006. Boil it down and you’ve got 666, the number of the beast according to the Bible’s book of Revelation, which prophecies the end of the world.
But if the date is enough to send you scurrying under your bedcovers, you may be a victim of what an Australian expert describes as a cognitive virus.
Professor John Bigelow, an expert in superstition and pseudoscience from Melbourne’s Monash University, says the number traditionally has a dark significance for occultists, alchemists, heretics and people of a superstitious bent.
“They’re a bit like a cognitive virus,” he says of superstitions.
“Like computer viruses, they get into people’s brains, they cause people to pass them onto someone else … and the person who hears them finds it difficult to get them out of their mind.
“But I think it’s better not to suppress them. [Superstitions] are like the flu, they need to be managed.”
The mythology of 666 goes back to chapter 13 in Revelation, the apocalyptic final book of the New Testament, which states “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast … his number is six hundred threescore and six”.
Bigelow says much of the imagery in Revelation has a schizophrenic quality and is often invoked by people with schizophrenia.
But he says it’s impossible to say whether the author, John of Patmos, or St John the Apostle, suffered from schizophrenia or delusional thinking.
Macquarie University’s Professor Max Coltheart, an Australian cognitive neuropsychologist, says being superstitious about 666 doesn’t necessarily add up to a delusion.
“If you believe something that people around you don’t believe in, and there’s no evidence for it, that’s a good working definition of delusion,” he says.
“If it’s in the Bible someone might call that evidence.”
Associate professor of anthropology Phillips Stevens of the University at Buffalo in New York, says fears of 666 are actually based on a misinterpretation of the Bible.
He says the beast referred to in chapter 13 isn’t Satan but several entities.
“Biblical scholars have pointed out there are several beasts in chapter 13 and elsewhere, and they all refer variously to Rome, Roman emperors and Roman cults of God and emperor worship,” he says.
“John of Patmos … was writing to other persecuted Christians in code.”
Perfect numbers
Six also has significance because it is the first perfect number, says Bigelow.
Perfect numbers, which are rare, are the sum of their factors, for example, 6 = 1 + 2 + 3 and it can be divided by one, two and three.
The next perfect numbers are 28 (1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14), 496 and 8128.
The last time the 666 combination occurred was in 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London.
However, it also marked the year in which Sir Isaac Newton published his Law of Gravity, leading it to be dubbed the Annus mirabilis.
Conjuring up thoughts of doom, Satan and rampaging evil in relation to a number is an example of magical thinking, Stevens says, where things associated with good things bring food fortune and things associated with disastrous events bring negative consequences.
But Bigelow says magical thought can have benefits that science doesn’t.
“Science is not tapping into our emotional nature whereas superstitions are a reflection of something about us,” he says.
“It may be a mistake to think you can control the world by projecting your own associations onto it, to turn it into science, but it’s not a mistake to register that we do have these deep correspondences among our ideas.”
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