Sixes

This morning, despite my general aversion to talking video, I somehow found myself watching Jonathan Pageau expound on the meaning of 666.

Instead of the usual gematria/isopsephy approach of finding words and names that add up to 666, Pageau (following the lead of St. Irenaeus and others) focuses on the meaning of 6 itself and other occurrences of it in the Bible. He mentions the six days of creation, the supposed 6,000-year history of the earth, Nebuchadnezzar's golden image that was 60 cubits high and six cubits wide, and the fact that Noah was 600 years old when the Flood occurred.

Pageau doesn't use the term "triangular number," but he does mention that 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, and that the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 6² is 666. I would add that 6 is the most triangular number there is: 6 is triangular, 6² is triangular, 66 is triangular, and 666 is triangular.

(Pageau also discusses how and why 666 symbolizes the all-encompassing System from which no one is allowed to opt out, and is well worth watching for those insights, but they are not directly relevant to the synchronicities noted in this post.)

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Just after watching that, I checked some blogs and read a recent post by Vox Day saying that "Thomas Wictor is a goofball" for accepting the official belief that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Vox writes:

As it happens, the iconic six million figure long predates the existence of the German National Socialist Workers Party, and even predates the existence of Germany, Charlemagne, and the Holy Roman Empire, as it goes back to at least 136 AD. Forget Nazis and death camps, we are reliably informed that six million Jews faced starvation in 1931 after another six million Jews died in the Bar-Cochiba Revolt during the Third Jewish-Roman War.

A commenter asks:

What's the significance of six million to them? Does it have occult symbolism or something?

Another commenter suggests:

I think the 6 million choice for a number is based on some kind of kabbalistic principle. There is a consistent belief that there were 600,000 Jewish souls at Mt. Sinai, based on the number of letters believed to make up the Torah.

Looking this up, I find that there are really only 304,805 letters in the Torah, but that there are assumed to be additional "invisible letters" which bring the total up to the requisite 600,000. The article also says:

There's yet more significance to the idea of inverse letters. The 600,000 letters correspond to the 600,000 souls of Israel. Although there are many more than 600,000 Jews, there are 600,000 general souls which divide into the individual sparks that become each of our souls.

So obviously, the significance of 6 (times various powers of 10) comes first, and actual figures -- like the numbers of Jewish souls, Torah letters, and Holocaust victims -- are arbitrarily enlarged or reduced to fit that Procrustean bed.

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After writing most of the above, but before publishing it, I met with one of my students, a businessman. He subscribes to a magazine for student of English which has articles on a variety of subjects, with accompanying notes on potentially unfamiliar vocabulary and grammar. We went through two of the articles he had read recently -- one about stop-motion animation and one about Oedipus -- so I could explain anything he still didn't understand.

For each article, a handful of vocabulary words are chosen for emphasis, and at the end of the article these are listed, each with a definition and an example sentence.

At the end of the first article, this sentence was used to exemplify the use of the word represent:

This eight-meter statue represents the country's first president.

Recall that Pageau had discussed the measurements of the golden statue made by Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 3:1): six cubits wide and 60 cubits high. The sentence in the magazine didn't use the number six, but the strange focus on the height of the statue still seemed a significant synchronicity. I mean, if you were asked to use the word represent in a sentence, would you naturally come up with a sentence about how tall a specific statue is?

The second article mentioned how the Sphinx drowned herself after her riddle had been solved, so at the end there was an example sentence for drown.

Officials said that six people drowned in the flood.

Now that's a more impressive sync! Six is given as the "official" number of people who died, as in the Holocaust. And they died in "the flood"; recall that Pageau had mentioned that the Flood occurred when Noah was 600 years old.