psychoceramics: Re: psychoceramics-digest V1 #4

[tbyfield @ panix.com (t byfield)]

> From: Alan Terlep <x--@u--.itd.umich.edu>
> Date: Sun, 24 Mar 1996 21:48:05 -0500 (EST)
> Subject: Re: psychoceramics: Barcodes = Mark of the Beast????
<...>
> A school of millenialist thought is convinced that any global agreement 
> is a precursor to a situation in which one person (the "beast") would be 
> able to exercise authority over the world.  Someone had the bright idea 
> to associate barcodes with the mark that everyone must receive, especially
> since the idea of barcoding people and computerizing the entire economic 
> system was brought up in the early 70's.

        Bar-codes are a staple of present-day apocalyptics, and have been for 15 years at least. This fixation is rooted in a _long_ history of numerology and calculation (see below), and a longer history of opposition to censuses--basically, spanning from the events surrounding the first Passover to Herod's alleged rounding up of the infants to Roman taxation to, in the Anglo tradition, the Domesday Book etc.
        What's interesting about the "global agreement" issue is how rapidly it has filled the vacuum left by old standbys--the USSR (collapsed), the pope (as the Vatican assimilated into an ever-more ecumenical "Christian community")--since both the USSR and the pope had served quite admirably as Beasts. Where forty years ago any self-respecting American apocalyptic _knew_ that commies were the minions of Satan, by twenty years ago the empahasis had shifted toward some final battle between "Gog" and "Magog" (the West versus the East) in the Mideast; but now that the USSR's gone, the specter of a unified regime, rather than a pitched battle between two superpowers, is the big news again. (Apocalyptic thought's quite flexible in its own way, since it has such a vast reservoir of imagery and structures to draw on.)

> If I may digress, the reference is more likely to economic restrictions 
> in the Roman Empire.  Greek letters were also used as numerals, and the 
> value of the letters in the Greek transliteration of "Nero Caesar" is 
> 666, a number which has numerological significance for "ultimate evil."  
> The passage is more likely a protest against some kind of law passed 
> during the reign of Nero or Vespasian.

        Definitely--but this 666 business wouldn't have survived so long if it wasn't so adaptable. I'll do your digression one better.
        Christian apocalypticism in the first two centuries of this era was fast undergoing a shift from a message of imminent transformation--with emphases ranging between spiritual salvation and cataclysmic upheavals--to a countdown mode, based on a synthetic exegesis of the claims that God had created the world in six days and that "a thousand years is a day in the eye of the Lord"--hence, the world was supposed to last for six thousand years followed by a "sabbatical millennium." By about 20O AD (or "CE," as biblical scholars prefer)--which, under Septimius Severus, saw the first empirewide persecution of Christians--most of the major Church Fathers were busy adding up all the lifespans enumerated in the Bible in order to figure out when the year 6000 would come (or when it _wouldn't_ come); when the numbers weren't looking so good endwise, they'd usually "adopt a new method," say, something like the numerological exegesis of Nero's name that you point out--or they'd just chuck the abacus out the window and start shouting about the rise of Someone Far Worse Than Nero..."Nero Redivivus." Even the pagans were hip to the fact that there's very little that can't easily be converted into 666--Reagan, Gates, etc.--the world-historical approach was more appealing: it cited venerable antiquity ("See, it says _right here_ in this old book!") and it was less dependent on political sympathies ("It doesn't matter if you _like_ the Romans _now_!").
        Three major waves of that world-historical calculation passed--"Annus Saeculi" (Age of the World) I, II, and III--with each becoming more prevalent, until the Venerable Bede cooked up the Anno Domini dating system--which Charlemagne installed ~780 CE, or twenty years before he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on 25 Dec 800 CE [= 25 Dec 5999 AS III]). That worked reasonably well to stave off this countdown-to-6000 stuff--until the people started counting _up_ to the year 1000. With 2000 rolling around, we're, er, back to square one.
        Nuff said. Too much, in fact.

Ted