The Number of the Beast Is the Number of Man

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Planetary Rounds and Globes Series · 56 pages

Fifty-six pages, the second-longest file in this section, opened by a long abstract and train of thoughts. Its subtitle announces the four registers it works in — the kabbalistic numbers explained esoterically, astronomically, geometrically and sexually — and readers should expect the last of those to be treated as plainly as the others.

The governing claim is that the Apocalypse is a kabbalistic book par excellence and far older than Christianity, written in the mystery language of the ancient Tannaïm — themselves described as initiates from whom the later Talmudists obtained the wisdom of the Kabbalah — and that it preserves a relic of Egyptian and Chaldean wisdom. The method it turns on is Isopsephia, the numerical value of words, described as a branch of the ancient sacerdotal language, in which words or phrases sharing a numerical value share a spiritual significance; it was taught in the Lesser Mysteries, though the language itself was reserved for high initiates. That method is then applied to the year 1881, treated as the number of the Great Beast, with the observation that it will not recur until 11811. The author of the Apocalypse is identified as Oannes, the Chaldean Dagon or Man-Fish, who rose daily from the Persian Gulf to teach wisdom and retired into the sea at sunset — amphibious, the study says, in the sense of living on two planes, the spiritual and the physical — and the Gnostic Oannes-John is equated with the Hindu Vishnu as personifications of the inner man. The reading of 666 given is not a warning but a promise: that when good and evil come to an equilibrium in the scales of human action, six hundred and sixty-six million men will have supreme wisdom incarnated in them. Running through the whole is a caution against the use that has actually been made of these numbers — that 1881 fuelled as much unbridled superstition among the gullible as 666 has done and still does, and that fanciful beliefs passed down like heirlooms take on the authority of tradition and the status of prophecy.

Read the full text (PDF, 4.4 MB, 56 pages)