665: The Mark of the Almost-Beast

6/5/2012: As the prophecy ordained — or the Fire God of the Kindle, The Book of Paul was published yesterday! Yeah! Or as Paul would say, “Hhmmph! What do you think about that?” With fantastic cover art by the award-winning book jacket designer Jason Heuer, and a postage stamp-sized badass author photo by the ultra-talented Christian Woods, the book was published on the Kindle first, followed shortly by the Nook. The print version should be available soon — as in tmw.

Getting back to the odd (numbered) title of this post — my occult dabblings (from the verb “to dabble”), have centered primarily around divination — numerology and tarot. The tarot plays a significant role in the mythology of The Book of Paul, and while numerology is not addressed directly to the same extent, it’s always there, coded into the text and inextricably intertwined in Paul’s interpretation of the tarot’s major arcana — where the majority of the trumps have been renamed (i.e. Temperance becomes The Alchemist, The Hanged Man is The Saint). If you’ve already read The Book and you’re curious about the origin of Paul’s creation mythology as manifest in his very, very old tarot deck –all I can say is that you won’t find it in any available resource. I guess you’ll have to ask Paul and William — when they awaken.

In the meantime, here’s a somewhat-funny observation: When a non-numerolgy nut (i.e. 99.999% of the human population) looks at a calendar date, he’ll always use an abbreviated version of the year — as in the umpteen horror movies released in November last year with the title: 11/11/11. Ooooooh! Scary huh? Not really. It get’s even less spooky when you use the full date, which any decent numerologist would insist on, were he/she to be consulted by zillionaire movie execs.

When you add up all the numbers in the date 11/11/2011 , 2011 comes out as 4, so you get 11+11+4=26. Ooooooh! Scary huh? Even scarier, 2+6=8! because you keep adding until you can’t add no more! What you’re left with is the essence of the situation. But that doesn’t sell movie tickets, or blog subscriptions, any more than 6/6/12, which is really 6/6/5 (2+0+1+2). The Mark of the Beastette! I can’t recall, but I’m guessing some marketing maven went batshit in 2006 trying to sell the masses on the apocalyptic implications of 6/6/6. Which, of course, is actually 6/6/8 (2+0+0+6), which is 20, (6+6+8), or more accurately — 2 (2+0).

Where am I going with all this numerical nonsense? The numbers we’ve been thought to fear, like 666 are not as forbidding as you would assume, assuming you’re superstitious at all. And other numbers that you’ve never even thought about (like 315) are more terrifying than you can possibly imagine. Some numbers are a mixed bag. Take 13 for example. There are 13 full moon cycles in every year, there are 13 weeks in each of the four seasons. And while 13 is The Death card in the tarot, it symbolizes both death and rebirth. In The Book of Paul it’s called The Turning. Why? Does that make it less or more frightening?

Well, if you’re really curious — and God (or HT or Sophia) knows you should be — you’ll just have to hit this link!

Once again, thanks to all the wonderful people who have supported The Book of Paul. The journey has just begun!