Two hundred and fifty-nine

Last night I stopped at a coffee shop on my way home to buy something for my wife. The cashier gave me a receipt saying that my order number was 259, circling that number with a sharpie.

This is a significant number to me.

Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:) assigns numerical values to words and phrases by adding up the ordinal values of their constituent letters (A = 1, B = 2, . . . Z = 26). In this system, the value of the string "two hundred and fifty-nine" is 259. I am only aware of two numbers that have this property, the other being 251.

Furthermore, 259 is seven times 37, and 37 is a highly significant number. Twice 37 is 74, the S:E:G: value of the words simple, English, and gematria, as well as that of Jesus, cross, gospel, and Messiah. Twenty-four times 37 is 888, the value of the name Jesus in Greek gematria. Eighteen times 37 is 666. Seventy-three times 37 is 2701, the Hebrew gematria value of the first verse of the Bible.

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This morning, I prayed the Rosary in my chapel, as is my habit these days. At the end of my prayers, a phrase popped into my mind unbidden: "to evade this world's snares and penetrate its mysteries." My eyes then fell on two books that I had left on a shelf in the chapel, having forgotten to take them out when I converted the room to its present purpose: Moby-Dick and Strieber's The Secret School. About an hour before my prayers, I had read a few pages of Mike Clelland's The Messengers -- a passage that mentioned whales, and another that said, "An example: a hologram of an owl would appear. When I would see something like that, that would tell me it's time for school."

The number 259 came back into my mind, and I had the distinct impression that I should check the 259th page of each of those books.

In my copy of Moby-Dick, page 259 is the last page of a chapter and only has a few lines of text on it:

This seemed highly relevant to "to evade this world's snares and penetrate its mysteries."

Page 259 of The Secret School is part of the afterword by journalist Ed Conroy. Here is the first paragraph on the page:

The juxtaposition of this with the Moby-Dick page, with its heading "The Albatross," struck me because in my July 2021 post "In the sync stream," I had connected an angel on a temple spire with the albatross and Moby-Dick.

I thought of how the angel Moroni [on the spire of the Nauvoo temple] was occupying the place that would traditionally be given to the cross, which made me think of the Coleridge line “instead of the cross, the albatross.” And this brought me back to Melville: Ishmael’s recollection of the first albatross he ever saw, which he repeatedly likens to an angelic being. “Its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark” — “flew to join the wing-folding, the evoking, the adoring cherubim” — “as Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself.”

Conroy mentions "four-winged angels" -- i.e., cherubim as described by Ezekiel (in contrast to the six-winged seraphim of Isaiah) -- and cherubim is the precise word used by Melville with reference to the albatross.