Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Wrote this for college newspaper
<br>
Throughout my many years in this world I have noticed that we tend to think about things in odd ways. Some of us are very superstitious and I understand that. What I don't understand is why. Don't get me wrong I don't think that people are in the wrong when it comes to their beliefs. I just want to find the origin of why people see 666 as such a bad number.

My question could be answered by math, but I am looking for a deeper meaning than that. So I am going a little further and decided on a very sensitive subject – religion. Christianity has the obvious negative outlook on the number but Paganism has nicer views.

The number 666 is referred to as "the mark of the beast" by many people. Also the bible says, "and his number is Six hundred threescore and six." To many people this would be considered the ultimate authority to why the number is so bad. This passage is last of the three that describe the anti-Christ, and because of this the number its self has such a bad connotation.

A Pagan, by definition, is a worshiper of a polytheistic religion and with this I looked at a couple of the different ancient religions. The ancient Babylonians worshiped 37 supreme gods. According to gods-heros-myth.com the Babylonians considered Marduk to be their "creator god." From there they assigned the numbers 1 though 36 to all the other gods, and by adding the numbers together they got Marduk's number – 666.

To prevent being struck down by a god the Babylonians believed you should have an amulet with that god's number on it. The largest of these amulets was a 6x6 matrix. The numbers of all the gods, 1 through 36, were placed so that each row and each column totaled 111. In this way it helped protect them from all the gods.

This doesn't quite answer where the number 666 originated though. Unfortunately in all of my searching I mostly came up with the Christian definition. When I did find something that wasn't related to the Christian belief the sources always said that the origin is unknown but this is how it might have come to be. So it might be that 666 is the number of the beast and it might not – one day I will find the answer.