Most of you are probably aware that the End Times were supposed to start last Saturday, the 23^rd of September. David Meade, a self-proclaimed “researcher”, says so. When the 23^rd came and went, with no noticeable world wide apocalypse occurring, he said he was misunderstood. The 23^rd was just a marker date he had calculated and that there would soon be much more noticeable events, Doom’s Day, for example, starting on October 15^th. The planet Niburu will make some sort of pass at the earth, the world’s electrical grid will collapse, and the long awaited seven years of tribulation will begin. Wars, famine, fires, volcanoes, tidal waves, earthquakes. Although how this makes the End Times differ from regular times is beyond me.

Now, as to the complete non-existence of the planet Niburu, I refer you to my quasi-theory from a year ago March, “Two Comets Plus a Hopi Prophecy Do not Equal Doomsday from a Twelfth Planet”. I shan’t rehash poor Niburu again today.

No, what I am going to hash up here is a bit of Meade’s methodology by which he came up with this prediction of his. To wit, he says he is using numerology to get a lot of his numbers and dates. He’s doing numerology on the Bible.

Numerology is bogus, of course, just like most forms of divination. But, it is a modern bastardization of an ancient system of encoding hidden meanings into stories and poems. That system was called, in Greek, gematria.

Briefly, most of the ancient Mediterranean cultures, like Greece and Rome, didn’t use separate symbols for numbers when they did any math. These days we use what we call Arabic numerals, which were actually invented by Hindus in India.

The Mediterraneans simply used their alphabets. You know, like Roman numerals. The Greeks, and Greek was the actual language of the Roman empire, went alpha is one, beta is two, you get the idea.

So, many philosophers and poets back then actually encoded hidden meanings and messages in their writings. The name of a hero, for example, would be spelled in such a way as to, when you added up the numerical equivalent of the letters in the name, it would give you a clue as to the real underlying meaning of the story or poem.

Gematria is actually much more complicated than that. There were rules for taking all these numbers gotten from adding up the letters and then doing some math with them, adding, subtracting, all sorts of little things. If you were initiated into the system, you could hide all sorts of things in your writings, things that could only be figured out by other initates.

I use the words initiate and initiated for reason. Gematria was invented by the founders of the ancient mystery religions, and you had to be initiated into these mysteries to know how to use gematria. The Greco-Roman religion consisted of numerous cults to individual gods. Bacchus, Apollo, Diana, Demeter, Venus, Herakles, et al, all had their cults.

The Christian New Testament was written by people who had been initiated into the mystery religions. It has a lot of things that can be read via gematria, but the gematria has to be done on the Greek text, not on the Latin, English, or whichever, but on the original Greek texts, which we ain’t got no more.

It gets better, or worse, depending on your point of view. No one knows all the real rules for gematria. Some claim to know them, but the initiates into the mysteries never wrote them down.

There is one example of gematria in the Book of Revelations for which the real meaning is known. It is the number 666, the number of the beast.

The Hebrew name of the messiah was Yehoshua. You can certainly spell that in Greek letters, but the authors of the New Testament spelled it as Iesous. That’s iota, eta, sigma, omicron, upsilon. They add up to 888. Pythagoras said that 888 is the number of the perfected human. Therefore Jesus’s name had to add up to 888, he being the only perfect human and all. Pythagoras also said that 666 is the number of the carnal man who lives only to satisfy his lustful urges. Therefrom comes the number of the beast.

So, when someone like Meade starts using numerology, not gematria, on their English Bible to figure out what the gods have in store for us, they might as well pull out a Ouija board, or inspect chicken guts, or maybe throw some yarrow sticks and consult the I Ching. It will be at least as reliable as mixing selected bits of the Old Testament with selected bits of the New Testament and running them over with a rogue planet.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here: