"666"
- and -
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
In
this essay we will be presenting large verbatim segments of Friedrich Engles'
1894 writing "On the History of Early Christianity" in which the
author draws parallels between the early Christian religious movement and the
communist system envisioned by Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Engles (1820-95). Of
special interest to occultists is Engles' interpretation of that mysterious
NUMBER 666.
Marx was the great economist and social scientist, the motivating genius (by Engle's own account) of the pair. Tied as he was to 19th Century terminology and semantic forms of expression, Marx's entire works can often be difficult to fully read and grasp. Engles, on the other hand, tended to write about cultural concerns in a style more accessible (if less comprehensive than Marx's) to the modern reader.
Of special interest is Engles' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and Marx's The Class Struggles in France (1848-1850.)
In the first part of "On the History of Early Christianity," Engles points out how Christianity, "first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome." He goes on to illustrate the similarity between the professed egalitarian outlook of socialism and early Christianity, and also points to their vastly different material goals: "Only this Christianity, as was bound to be the case in the historic conditions, did not want to accomplish the social transformation in this world, but beyond it, in heaven, in eternal life after death, in the impending 'millennium.'"
Further on, in a humorous turn, Engles parallels the economic plight of the 1860's International Workingmen's Association with that of the early Church: "The whole epistle, (Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians--ed.) from Chapter Eight onwards, echoes the eternal and oh! so well known complaint: "Les cotisations ne rentrent pas." [Contributions are not coming in!"]
Continuing, the author equates early Christian opportunists with opportunists in the labor movement. In both respects the people in question characteristically support ostensibly liberal movements out of personal connivance, with the ultimate goal being self-aggrandizement. Obviously this continues today in both the religious and secular areas of concern.
Later, Engles reveals his own idealism, overrating the actual progress and prospects of the labor movement at the time of his writing. He did not foresee what a devastating effect such opportunistic forces as the capitulation of Social Democracy leading to World War I, and later Stalinism, would have on the international socialist movement.
It's probably a good thing that he did not live to see it.
Closer to the core of our interest with "666," Engles states: "Not Galilee and Jerusalem, but Alexandria and Rome...are the birth places of the new religion"--(i.e., Christianity-ed.)
Now we quote directly from the text:
...But
we have in the New Testament a single book the time of the writing of which can
be defined within a few months, which must have been between June 67 [Common
Era--.ed] and January or April 68; a book, consequently, which belongs to the
very beginning of the Christian era and reflects with the most naive fidelity
and in the corresponding idiomatic language the ideas of the beginning of that
era. This book, therefore, in my opinion, is a far more important source from
which to define what early Christianity really was than all the rest of the New
Testament, which, in its present form, is of a far later date. This book is the
so-called Revelation of John. And as this, apparently the most obscure book in
the whole Bible, is moreover today, thanks to German criticism [of the
early-middle 19th Century--.ed], the most comprehensible and the clearest, I
shall give my readers an account of it.
One needs but
to look into this book in order to be convinced of the state of great
exaltation not only of the author but also of the "surrounding
medium" in which he moved. Our Revelation is not the only one of its kind
and time. From the year 164 before our era, when the first which has reached
us, the so-called Book of Daniel, was written, up to about 250 of our era, the
approximate date of Commodian's Carmen, Renan [French historian who made
the remark re: "contributions" above--.ed] counted no fewer than
fifteen extant classical Apocalypses, not counting subsequent imitations...That
was a time 
when
even in Rome and Greece and still more in Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt an
absolutely uncritical mixture of the crassest superstitions of the most varying
peoples was indiscriminately accepted and complemented by pious deception and
downright charlatanism; a time in which miracles, ecstasies, visions,
apparitions, divining, gold-making, cabala, and other secret magic played a
primary role. It was in that atmosphere, and, moreover, among a class of people
who were more inclined than any other to listen to these supernatural
fantasies, that Christianity arose. For did not the Christian Gnostics in Egypt
during the second century of our era engage extensively in alchemy and
introduce alchemistic notions into their teachings, as the Leyden papyrus
documents, among others, prove? And the Chaldean and Judean mathematici,
who, according to Tacitus, were twice expelled from Rome for magic, once under
Claudius and again under Vitellius, practiced no other kind of geometry than
the kind we shall find at the basis of John's Revelation.
To this we must add another thing. All the Apocalypses attribute to themselves the right to deceive their readers. Not only were they written as a rule by quite different people than their alleged authors, and mostly by people who lived much later, for example the Book of Daniel, the Book of Enoch, the Apocalypses of Ezra, Baruch, Judah, etc., and the Sibylline Books, but, as far as their main content is concerned, they prophesy only things that had already happened long before and were quite well known to the real author. Thus in the year 164, shortly before the death of Antiochus Epiphanes, the author of the Book of Daniel makes Daniel, who is supposed to have lived in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, prophesy the rise and fall of the Persian and Macedonian empires and the beginning of the Roman Empire, in order by this proof of his gift of prophecy to prepare the reader to accept the final prophecy that the people of Israel will overcome all hardships and finally be victorious. If, therefore, John's Revelation were really the work of its alleged author it would be the only exception among all the apocalyptic literature.
The John who claims to be the author was, in any case, a man of great distinction among the Christians of Asia Minor. This is borne out by the tone of the message to the Seven Churches. Possibly he was the apostle John, whose historical existence, however, is not completely authenticated but is very probable. If this apostle was really the author, so much the better for our point of view. That would be the best confirmation that the Christianity of this book is real, genuine early Christianity. Let it be noted...apparently, the same author as the Gospel or the three Epistles, which are also attributed to John, did not write the Revelation.
The
Revelation consists of a series of visions. In the first, Christ appears in the
garb of a high priest, goes in the midst of seven candlesticks representing the
Seven Churches of Asia and dictates to "John" messages to the seven
"angels" of those churches. Here at the very beginning we see the
difference between this Christianity and Constantine's universal
religion, formulated by the Council of Nicaea. The Trinity is not only unknown,
it is even impossible. Instead of the one Holy Ghost of later we have
here the "seven spirits of God," construed by the rabbis from
Isaiah 11:2. Christ is the son of God, the first and the last, the alpha and
the omega, by no means God himself or equal to God, but, on the contrary,
"the beginning and the creation of God," hence an emanation of
God, existing from all eternity but subordinate to God, like the
above-mentioned seven spirits. In Chapter 15:3 the martyrs in heaven sing
"the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb,"
glorifying God. Hence Christ here appears not only as a subordinate to God but
even, in a certain respect, on an equal footing with Moses. Christ is crucified
in Jerusalem (11:8) but rises again (1:5, 18); he is "the Lamb" that
has been sacrificed for the sins of the world and with whose blood the faithful
of all tongues and nations have been redeemed to God. Here we find the basic
idea, which enabled Christianity to develop into a universal religion. All
Semitic and European religions of that time shared the view that the gods
offended by the actions of man could be propitiated by sacrifice; the first
revolutionary basic idea (borrowed from the Philonic school) in Christianity
was that by the one great voluntary sacrifice of a mediator the sins of all
times and all men was atoned for once for all--in respect of the faithful. Thus
the necessity for any further sacrifices was removed and with it the basis for
a multitude of religious rites, but freedom from rites that made difficult or
forbad intercourse with people of other confessions was the first condition of
a universal religion. In spite of this the habit of sacrifice was so deeply
rooted in the customs of peoples that Catholicism--which borrowed so much from
paganism--found it appropriate to accommodate itself to this fact by the introduction
of at least the symbolical sacrifice of the mass. On the other hand, there is
no trace whatever of the dogma of original sin.
But the most
characteristic in these messages. is that it never and nowhere occurs to the
author to refer to himself and his co-believers by any other name than that of Jews.
He reproaches the members of sects in 
Smyrna
and Philadelphia against whom he fulminates with the fact that they "say
they are Jews, and are not, but are of the synagogue of Satan"; of those
in Pergamos he says they hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast
a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things
sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication. Here it is therefore not a
case of conscious Christians but of people who say they are Jews. Granted,
their Judaism is a new stage...but for that very reason it is the only true
one. Hence when the saints appeared before the throne of God, there came first
144,000 Jews, twelve thousand from each tribe, and only after them the countless
masses of heathens converted to this renovated Judaism. That was how little our
author was aware in the year 69 of the Christian era that he represented quite
a new phase in the development of a religion which was to become one of the
most revolutionary elements in the history of the human mind.
We therefore see that the Christianity of that time, which was still unaware of itself, was as different as heaven from earth from the later dogmatically fixed universal religion of the Nicene Council; one cannot be recognized in the other. Here we have neither the dogma nor the morals of later Christianity, but instead a feeling that one is struggling against the whole world and that the struggle will be a victorious one, an eagerness for the struggle...
In fact, the struggle against the world that...was superior in force...is common to the early Christians and the socialists...And mass movements are bound to be confused at the beginning...This confusion is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which fight against one another with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy. So it was with early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialist movement, no matter how much worried the well-meaning worthies who preached unity where no unity was possible.
...more details are given the accusation bears on eating meats offered to idols and on fornication, two points on which the Jews--the old ones as well as the Christian ones--were in continual dispute with converted heathens. The meat from heathen sacrifices was not only served at festal meals where refusal of the food offered would have seemed improper and could even have been dangerous, it was also sold in the public markets...By fornication the Jews understood not only extra nuptial sexual relations but also marriage within the degrees of relationship prohibited by the Jewish law or between a Jew and a gentile, and it is in this sense that the word was generally understood in the Acts of the Apostles 15:20 and 29. But our John has his own views on the sexual relations allowed to orthodox Jews. He says, 14:4, of the 144,000 heavenly Jews: "These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins." And in fact, in our John's heaven there is not a single woman...
...But
this heavenly paradise does not open to the faithful by the mere act of their
death. We shall see that the kingdom of God, the capital of which is the New
Jerusalem, can only be conquered and opened after arduous struggles with the
powers of hell. But in the imagination of the early Christians these struggles
were immediately ahead. John describes his book at the very beginning as the
revelation of "things which must shortly come to pass"; and
immediately afterwards, 1: 3, he declares: "Blessed is he that readeth and
they that hear the words of this prophecy...for the time is at hand.” To
the church in Philadelphia, Christ sends the message: "Behold, I come quickly."
...The sequel will show us how soon this coming was expected.
The visions of the Apocalypse...are copied throughout, and mostly literally, from earlier models, partly from the classical prophets of the Old Testament, particularly Ezekiel, partly from later Jewish apocalypses written after the fashion of the Book of Daniel and in particular from the Book of Enoch, which had already been written at least in part. Criticism has shown to the smallest details where our John got every picture, every menacing sign, every plague sent to unbelieving humanity...so that he not only shows great poverty of mind, but even himself proves that he never experienced even in imagination the alleged ecstasies and visions which he describes.
The order of these visions is briefly as follows: First, John sees God sitting on his throne, holding in his hand a book with seven seals, and before him the Lamb that has been slain and has risen from the dead (Christ) and is found worthy to open the seals of the book. The opening of the seals is followed by all sorts of miraculous menacing signs. When the fifth seal is opened, John sees under the altar of God the souls of the martyrs of Christ that were slain for the word of God and who cry with a loud voice, saying: “How long, O Lord, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on earth?" And then white robes are given to them and they are told that they must rest for a little while yet, for more martyrs must be slain.
So here it is not yet a question of a "religion of love,"...Here undiluted revenge is preached...So it is in the whole of the book. The nearer the crisis comes, the heavier the plagues and punishments rain from the heavens and with all the more satisfaction John announces that the mass of humanity will not atone for their sins, that new scourges of God must lash them, that Christ must rule with a rod of iron...
When the
seventh seal is opened, there come seven angels with seven trumpets, and each
time one of them sounds his trumpet new horrors occur. After the seventh blast
seven more angels come onto the scene with the seven vials of the wrath of God,
which they pour out upon the earth; still more plagues and punishments, mainly
boring repetitions of what has 
already
happened several times. Then comes the woman, Babylon, the Great Whore, sitting
arrayed in scarlet over the waters, drunk with the blood of the saints and the
martyrs of Jesus, the great City of the Seven Hills that rules over all the
kings of the earth. She is sitting on a beast with seven heads and ten horns.
The seven heads represent the seven hills, and also seven "kings." Of
those kings "five are fallen, one is, and the other is not yet come,"
and
after him comes again one of the first five; he was wounded to death but was
healed. He will reign over the world for forty-two months, or three and a half
years (half a week of seven years), and will persecute the faithful to death
and bring the rule of godlessness. But then follows the great final fight, the
saints and martyrs are avenged by the destruction of the Great Whore, Babylon,
and all her followers, i.e., the main mass of mankind; the devil is cast into
the bottomless pit and is shut up there for a thousand years, during which time
Christ reigns with the martyrs risen from the dead. But after a thousand years
the devil is freed again and there is another great battle of the spirits, in
which he is finally defeated. Then follows the second resurrection, when the
other dead also arise and appear before the throne of the judgment of God (not
of Christ, be it noted), and the faithful will enter a new heaven, a new earth,
and a new Jerusalem for life eternal.
...We have already seen that Babylon, the Great Whore, stands for Rome, the City of the seven Hills...the beast on which she sits...is Roman world domination, represented by seven Caesars in succession, one of them having been mortally wounded...will be healed and will return..."And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save that he had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six." (13:7-18.)
We merely note
that boycott is mentioned here as one of the measures to be applied against
Christians by the Roman Empire--and is therefore patently an invention of the
devil--and pass on to the questions who this Roman emperor IS who reigned once 
before,
was wounded to death and removed, but will return as the eighth in the series
in the role of Antichrist.
Taking Augustus as the first, we have: 2. Tiberius, 3. Caligula, 4. Claudius, 5. Nero, 6. Galba. "Five are fallen, and one is." Hence Nero is already fallen and Galba is. Galba ruled from June 9, 68, to January 15, 69. But immediately after he ascended the throne, the legions of the Rhine revolted under Vitellius, while other generals prepared military risings in other provinces. In Rome itself the praetorians rose, killed Galba, and proclaimed Otho emperor.
From this we
see that our Revelation was written under Galba. Probably towards the end of
his rule. Or, at the latest, during the three months (up to April 15, 69) of
the rule of Otho, "the seventh." But who is the eighth, who was, and
is not? That we learn from the number 666.
Among the Semites--Chaldeans and Jews--there was at this time a kind of magic based on the double meaning of letters. As about three hundred years before our era Hebrew letters were also used as symbols for numbers: a=1, b=2, g=3, d=4, etc. The cabala diviners added up the value of each letter of a name and sought from the sum to prophecy the future of the one who bore the name, e.g., by forming words or combinations of words of equal value. Secret words and the like were also expressed in this language of numbers. This art was given the Greek name GERMATRIAH, geometry; the Chaldeans, who pursued this as a business and were called MATHEMATICI by Tacitus, were later expelled from Rome under Claudius and again under Vitellius, presumably for "serious disorders."
It was by means of this mathematics that our number 666 appeared. it is a disguise for the name of one of the first five Caesars. But besides the number 666, Irenaeus, at the end of the second century, knew another reading--616, which, at all events, at a time when the number puzzle was still widely known. The proof of the solution will be if it holds up for both numbers.
This solution was given by Ferdinand Benary of Berlin. The name is Nero. The number is based on [here are printed Hebraic letters for] Nero Kesar, the Hebrew spelling of the Greek Neron Kaisar, Emperor Nero, authenticated by means of the Talmud and Palmyrian inscriptions. This inscription was found on coins of Nero's minted in the eastern half of the empire. And so--n (nun)=50; r (resh)=200; v (vau) for o=6; n (nun)=50; k (kaph)=100; s (samech)=60; r (resh)=200. Total 666. If we take as a basis the Latin spelling NERO CAESAR the second nun=50 disappears and we get 666 - 50=616, which is Irenaeus's reading.
Christian and
Chrsitian-influenced literature in the first two centuries gives sufficient
indication that the secret of the number 666 
was
then known to many. Irenaeus no longer knew it, but, on the other hand, he and
many others up to the end of the third century also knew that the returning
Nero was meant by the beast of the Apocalypse. This trace is then lost, and the
work which interests us is fantastically interpreted by religious-minded
future-tellers; I myself as a child knew old people who, following the example
of old Johann Albrecht Bengel, expected the end of the world and the last
judgment in the year 1836. The prophecy was fulfilled, and to the very year.
The victim of the last judgment, however, was not the sinful world, but the
pious interpreters of the Revelation themselves. For in 1836, F. Benary
provided the key to the number 666 and thus put a torturous end to all the
prophetical calculations, that new GEMATRIAH.
[Conclusion of quoted material.]
[See also, NUMBERS, MAGICK & MOTION]
