THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

Little Gwion forced himself on me pleasantly but importunately, as children do, at a time when I was too busy with another book to think of anything else. He refused to be shaken off, though I protested that I had not the least intention of breaking into the field of bardic myth and no scholarly equipment for doing so. Despite my present appearance of easy familiarity with Celtic literature I could not at the time have answered a single question in the Hanes Taliesin puzzle (which at first sight recalled the ‘lovely riddle – all in poetry – all about fishes’ that the White Queen asked Alice at the final banquet in Looking-Glass Land) if I had not known most of the answers beforehand by poetic intuition. Really, all that I needed to do was to verify them textually; and though I had no more than one or two of the necessary books in my very small library the rest were soon sent, unasked for, by poet friends or tumbled down into my hands from the shelves of a second-hand sea-side bookshop. I drafted this whole volume at about one-half of its present length, in six weeks, then returned to the other book; but spent six years polishing the draft.

The train of coincidences that made my task possible was of a sort familiar to poets. What after all does ‘coincidence’ mean? What did it mean to Euclid? It meant, for example, that if in certain circumstances you applied the triangle Alpha-Beta-Gamma to the triangle Delta-Epsilon-Zeta then Gamma and Zeta would be more or less identically situated. Similarly, since I knew in advance the answers to Gwion’s riddles, this presupposed the necessary book-knowledge as extant and accessible and therefore the books subsequently coincided with my needs. Zeta and Gamma gently kissed, and I could dress up in reasonable form an arrangement of thought arrived at by unreason.

One day William Rowan Hamilton, whose portrait occurs on the centenary stamps of Eire issued in 1943, was crossing Phoenix Park in Dublin, when the foreknowledge came to him of an order of mathematics, which he called ‘quaternions’, so far in advance of contemporary mathematic development that the gap has only recently been bridged by a long succession of intervening mathematicians. All outstanding mathematicians have this power of making a prodigious mental leap into the dark and landing firmly on both feet. Clerk Maxwell is the best known case, and he gave away the secret of his unscientific methods of thought by being such a poor accountant: he could arrive at the correct formula but had to rely on his colleagues to justify the result by pedestrian calculation.

Most outstanding physicians diagnose the nature of a disease by the same means, though afterwards they may justify their diagnoses by a logical examination of the symptoms. In fact, it is not too much to say that all original discoveries and inventions and musical and poetical compositions are the result of proleptic thought – the anticipation, by means of a suspension of time, of a result that could not have been arrived at by inductive reasoning – and of what may be called analeptic thought, the recovery of lost events by the same suspension.

This need mean no more than that time, though a most useful convention of thought, has no greater intrinsic value than, say, money. To think in temporal terms is a very complicated and unnatural way of thinking, too; many children master foreign languages and mathematic theory long before they have developed any sense of time or accepted the easily disproved thesis that cause precedes effect.

I wrote about the Muse some years ago in a poem: 

Poets will be able to confirm this from their own experience. And because since I wrote this poem J. W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time has prosaicized the notion that time is not the stable moving-staircase that prose men have for centuries pretended it to be, but an unaccountable wibble-wobble, the prose men too will easily see what I am driving at. In the poetic act, time is suspended and details of future experience often become incorporated in the poem, as they do in dreams. This explains why the first Muse of the Greek triad was named Mnemosyne, ‘Memory’: one can have memory of the future as well as of the past. Memory of the future is usually called instinct in animals, intuition in human beings.

An obvious difference between poems and dreams is that in poems one is (or should be) in critical control of the situation; in dreams one is a paranoiac, a mere spectator of mythographic event. But in poems as in dreams there is a suspension of temporal criteria; and when the Irish poets wrote of enchanted islands where three hundred years went by as if they were a day, and put these islands under the sovereignty of the Muse, they were defining this suspension. The sudden shock of a return to the familiar temporal mode of thought is typified in the myths by the breaking of the saddle girth when the young hero rides back home on a visit from the Island. His foot touches the ground and the charm is broken: ‘then the troubles of old age and sickness fell suddenly upon him.’

A sense of the equivocal nature of time is constantly with poets, rules out hope or anxiety about the future, concentrates interest detachedly in the present. I wrote about this with proleptic detail in 1934, in a poem ‘The Fallen Tower of Siloam’, which began: 

But an interesting feature of prolepsis and analepsis is that the coincidence of the concept and the reality is never quite exact: Gamma coincides with Zeta, but not so closely that either loses its identity. The coincidence is as close, you may say, as between the notes B natural and C flat which, for economy’s sake, are given only a single string on a pianoforte: they have slightly different vibration lengths, but only a remarkably true ear can distinguish one from the other. Or, as close as between the values 22/7 and pi: if you wish to calculate, say, how much binding you will need for the bottom of a bell-tent three yards in diameter, 22/7 will be an adequate formula.

In September 1943, when I could not stop my mind from running all day and all night in chase of the Roebuck, so rapidly that my pen could not keep up with it, I tried to preserve a critical detachment. I said to myself: ‘I am not particularly enjoying this jaunt. I am not greatly interested in the strange country through which my broom-stick mind is flying me, and not at all sure whether I should trouble to chart it.’ Then I addressed myself schizophrenically: ‘I’ll tell you what, Robert. I’ll propound a simple, well-known, hitherto unsolved riddle and if you can make sense of that, very well, I’ll pay attention to your other discoveries.’

The riddle that I propounded was the last verse of the thirteenth chapter of the Apocalypse:

I vaguely remembered, from my school days, the two traditional solutions of St. John’s cryptogram. They are both based on the assumption that, since letters of the alphabet were used to express numerals in Greek and Hebrew alike, 666 was a sum arrived at by adding together the letters that spelt out the Beast’s name. The earliest solution, that of the second-century bishop Irenaeus, is LATEINOS, meaning ‘The Latin One’ and so denoting the race of the Beast; the most widely accepted modern solution – I forgot whose – is NERON KESAR, namely the Emperor Nero regarded as Antichrist.1 Neither solution is quite satisfactory. ‘The Latin One’ is too vague a characterization of Beast 666, and KAISAR, not KESAR, was the ordinary Greek way of writing ‘Caesar’. Besides, the possible combinations of letter-values which add up to 666, and the possible anagrammatic arrangements of each of these sets of letter-values, are so numerous that the aggregate of possibility approaches as near to infinity as anyone could wish.

The Apocalypse was written in Greek, but my analeptic self, when thus addressed, stubbornly insisted on thinking in Latin; and I saw in a sort of vision the Roman numerals flashed across the wall of the room I was in. They made a placard:

When they steadied, I looked at them slantwise. Poets will know what I mean by slantwise: it is a way of looking through a difficult word or phrase to discover the meaning lurking behind the letters. I saw that the placard was a titulus, the Roman superscription nailed above the heads of criminals at the place of execution, explaining their crime. I found myself reading out:

‘Domitian Caesar basely killed the Envoys of Christ.’ I.N.R.I. was the titulus of Christ; D.C.L.X. V.I. was the titulus of Antichrist.

The only word I stumbled at was VILITER; it had a blurred look.

The persecution of the Church under Nero and Domitian had never greatly interested me, and the test that I had set my mind was therefore a routine one – just as I might have tested myself with the routine formula: ‘The Leith police dismisseth us,’ if I had suspected myself of being drunk. No historical prejudice was involved, and my clinical observations on the case are therefore to be trusted.

In the first place I had been aware that the Apocalypse was referred by most Biblical scholars to the reign of Nero (54–67 AD), not to that of Domitian (81–96 AD), the whole trend of the visions being anti-Neronic. And yet my eye read ‘Domitianus’. In the second, I was aware that viliter, in the Silver Age of Latin, means ‘cheaply,’ and that its derived sense of ‘basely’ implies worthlessness, not wickedness. And yet my eye read ‘viliter’.

It was some weeks before I began to understand this paradox. It seemed to me that the work which my analeptic self had done was sound enough: D.C.L.X.V.I, was the correct text, and the solution was correct. But my eye, under the influence of my reasonable self, had evidently been at fault: it had misread, as it frequently misreads letters and newspaper headings when I am not quite awake in the morning. The text had really been:

But since ‘Domitius Caesar’ meant nothing to my reasonable self – indeed, there was no person of that name – it had officiously corrected the mistake by reading ‘Domitianus’. Now I remembered that Domitius was Nero’s original name before the Emperor Claudius adopted him into the Imperial family and changed his name to Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus, and that he hated to be reminded of his plebeian origin. (I think it is Suetonius who mentions this sensitivity of Nero’s.) Nero’s criminal father, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, when congratulated on the child’s birth, replied coolly that any offspring of himself and his wife Agrippinilla could bring only ruin on the State. So ‘Domitius Caesar’ was a suitable taunt for the cryptogram – as anti-Hitlerians in 1933 made political capital out of ‘Chancellor Schickelgruber’. St. John the Divine would naturally not have respected Nero’s feelings when composing it, and the use of D.C. for N.C. would have served to protect the secret.

Violenter means something more than ‘roughly’ or ‘impetuously’: it contains the sense of sacrilegious fury and outrage. So it seemed that my amending eye had brought up the EN from VIOLENTER into the word written just above it, to form DOMITIENUS, which came near enough to ‘Domitianus’ to make no odds; and that the meaningless word VIOLTER which remained below was a blur which I stumblingly read as VILITER, recognizing it as a word of condemnation.

(I do not claim more for this reading than that it makes historical sense. Who can say whether the sense was put there by St. John, as it were for my benefit, or by myself, as it were for St. John’s benefit? All I know is that I read the words off just about as easily and unthinkingly as, say, the censor of soldiers’ mail reads the cryptogram at the close of a letter to a wife: ‘X.X.X – W.I.W.R.D.D.Y?’ as ‘Kiss-kiss-kiss – wish it was real, darling, don’t you?’)

This is not all. When I came to scrutinize the Apocalypse text, I found in the margin a cross-reference to Chapter XV, verse 2, which runs:

The ‘image’ is the one mentioned in the previous context: apparently the meaning is that Christians were martyred who loyally refused to worship Nero’s statue. So ‘them that had gotten the victory over the Beast and over his image and over his mark and over the number of his name’ were the Envoys of Christ who refused to be terrorized into Emperor worship, and who when sacrilegiously slain were carried straight up into Paradise.

Now the question arose: why had my eye read ‘Domitianus’ when the text was ‘Domitius’? That had to be answered, for my eye had been convinced that Domitian, not Nero, was meant, and had rapidly amended the text to prove its point. Perhaps my eye had been a servant of my crazy analeptic self after all. Perhaps both Domitius and Domitian were meant. I mean, perhaps the Apocalypse was originally written in the time of Nero’s persecutions, but expanded and brought up-to-date in the reign of Domitian, who revived the Neronic persecutions and whose name means ‘of Domitius’s kind’. What about the verses:

The reference is clearly to the well-known contemporary belief that Nero would come again, surviving his deadly sword-wound, and to the natural Christian supposition that he was reincarnate in Domitian.

[Excellent: I now find that this is the conclusion of Dr. T. W. Crafer in his recent work on the Apocalypse.]

Forty-two is the number of years (54–96 AD) between the accession of Nero the seventh Caesar and the death, by the sword, of Domitian the twelfth and last Caesar. In this sort of prophetic writing years are usually expressed as months, and months as days. The sentence ‘and power was given unto him to continue forty-and-two months’ seems to be an interpolated gloss on the original prophecy that Domitian, who blasphemously called himself Lord and God, would come to a violent end. The Church had a comparatively peaceful time under Domitian’s successor, Nerva. That some MSS. read 616, not 666, does not spoil my argument; it merely cuts out the L for legatos. DCXVI means that, in St. Paul’s words, the Beast ‘crucified the Son of God afresh’.

The result of the test satisfied me, and I hope will satisfy others, that I had not slid into certifiable paranoia.

I should add, however, that since the eleventh chapter of the Apocalypse predicts the preservation of the Temple, the original version of the book must have been written after the death of Nero, but before the destruction of the Temple and at a time when rumours of his reappearance in the flesh were widely current. Also that the Hebrew letters TRJVN, which add up to 666 (Tav = 400; Resh = 200; Yod = 10; Vav = 6; Nun =50), form the common cypher-disguise in Talmudic literature for Nero (trijon means ‘little beast’) and that the authors of the Talmud are most unlikely to have borrowed from the Gentile Christians. It is possible, then, that the first version of the Apocalypse was a Jewish nationalist tract, written in Aramaic before AD 70, in which 666 was a cypher meaning ‘Little Beast’, which pointed to Nero; but that it was re-written in Greek and expanded for Christian readers at the close of the first century, by which time the Pauline converts, who knew no Hebrew, were at pains to prove that Jesus had rejected the Law of Moses and transferred Jehovah’s blessing from the Jews to themselves. And that in this second version, with its many interpolations and uncritical retention of out-of-date material, the cypher 666 was given a new solution, and one that any intelligent person could understand without recourse to Hebrew: namely DCLXVI. If this is so, the legend was never Domitius Caesar etc., yet my analeptic eye was right to recognize that since the original Hebrew meaning of the cypher was TRIJON; the beastly spirit of Domitius was latent in Domitianus.

The proleptic or analeptic method of thought, though necessary to poets, physicians, historians and the rest, is so easily confused with mere guessing, or deduction from insufficient data, that few of them own to using it. However securely I buttress the argument of this book with quotations, citations and footnotes, the admission that I have made here of how it first came to me will debar it from consideration by orthodox scholars: though they cannot refute it, they dare not accept it.