22.     THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

The question remains … how did they actually make a nuclear device?

It had to do with lapis lazuli, in a ‘House of Seven Spheres’, and the ‘body’ was dead (inert) until it was ‘fed’ with cakes and ale.

Lapis lazuli is an unremarkable blue-green crystalline stone sourced uniquely from the mines of Badakhshan in north-east Afghanistan – several thousand kilometres from the pyramids of Egypt. It was highly revered in the Old Kingdom and continued to be oddly valued for jewellery and decoration down through the ages into modern times.

In 1872 Scots explorer Piazzi Smyth fossicked inside the Great Pyramid lower chamber shaft and found a small bronze grapnel hook with a wooden handle and a small greenstone ball. [1] The greenstone sphere (now in the British Museum) is about 70 mm in diameter but it is only dull greenish dolerite, not lapis lazuli. Perhaps it didn’t pass QC and so was discarded and left behind as a reject? But fortunately, it provides an important clue to the characteristics of the ‘seven spheres’.

Egyptian texts said plainly that the home of the sun god was in a stone coffer of spherical ‘eyeballs’ or ‘eggs’ of lapis lazuli – from which, if he was properly fed with ‘light food’, he arose like the sun. Text vignettes and temple murals depicted humanised sun gods seated on a stylised throne as a chest filled with regular layers of small blue-green balls.  From the size of Piazzi Smyth’s discarded stone ball it is easily possible to calculate the arrangement and number of balls to fill the coffer – which became known in ancient times as the ‘Number of the Beast’.

Early Egyptian texts stated plainly that the home of the sun god, the lord of the pyramid, was ‘in’ lapis lazuli: [2]

Lord [of the pyramid] … Hail dweller in the lapis lazuli … my homestead is there among the lapis lazuli …the costly stones of the gods are on [in] me.

Not just in any lump of stone but in multiple ‘costly stones’ which are elsewhere referred to as the ‘eye of Horus’ – by implication plural spherical eyeballs. Also portrayed in other evocative imagery as ‘eggs’ – again suggesting a rounded shape and a wellspring from which new life bursts forth:

your breasts are eggs inlaid with lapis lazuli … the egg of the great Cackler  it groweth, it groweth … a flaming breath makes the lapis lazuli grow …

[until he] …came forth from his egg.

Until, if everything was in order – counted and weighed correctly and suitably ‘fed’ with ‘light food’, the body came alive with the energy of the sun:

… the King arose like the sun from a chamber [coffer] of lapis lazuli.

Where these particular texts said the sun god arose from a ‘chamber’, others elsewhere described and vividly illustrated a ‘booth, chest, cabin or coffer of flint (stone)’ … referring to the stone coffer found today in the King’s chamber:

dweller in sun city (Heliopolis)’  … who is in the coffer, who is in the chest … Horus has completely filled you with his eye[s]

The ‘god’ arose ‘in the midst of his box … shining in the crystal … of eyes of lapis lazuli … a great shining light in the ‘cabin’ (Book of the Dead)

The royal chest or coffer was clearly illustrated in numerous vignettes of the Book of the Dead, and several murals in various temples and tombs – typically showing the humanised ‘sun god’ (usually Osiris) seated on a stylised throne as a chest containing layers of blue-green spheres.  The ancient Egyptian ‘god’ was merely an anthropomorphic personification seated on a box embellished as a throne. But the real power was not on the throne, it was in the throne.

The text and temple illustrations make it plain that the lapis lazuli balls were not just haphazardly heaped into the coffer but were carefully placed in layers, with each succeeding layer nestled into the one below. So from a side view, the layers formed a repeating overlap pattern like a ‘fish scale’ motif frequently portrayed in costumes of the gods. Or from a see-through perspective, the repeating pattern appeared as the ‘flower of life’, inscribed in stone on the walls of the Temple of Osiris at Abydos.

In order to form this regular pattern, the lapis lazuli balls had to be carefully placed in the stone coffer in a specific matrix arrangement in multiples of seven – which is reflected in the Egyptian ‘Book of Instructions’ for the netherworld in which the ‘sistrum player’ (counting on an abacus) watched over an iterative process for the preparation of the ‘Fourteen Mounds’, chanting …may the sistrum player shape my bones … knit my bones together, make my members firm. The ‘bones’ were made fit and proper in a matrix of units of seven, detailed as … the seventh of the seven names which are in the chest of the lord of sunshine … I am the bull of On [the ‘sun’] he who is in seven portions in god’s booth …Horus has put thee together without anything being disordered in thee.

From the size of the greenstone ball found left behind in the lower shaft of the Great Pyramid, and the known internal measurements of the King’s chamber coffer, it is easily possible to calculate the whole-number arrangement of balls to fill the coffer in regular layers. Just as the old texts say, it turns out to be an elegant series of seven units – 7 units wide x 14 units deep x 28 units long.

The number of the beast was: (7 x 14 x 28) = [(1 x 7) x (2 x 7) x (4 x 7)] = (2 x 7)³ = 2744

It was a cubic, 3-dimensional matrix based on units of seven – so both numbers of 3 and 7 became embedded in mythology and later religion.

The number seven – magic, divine, sacred – was reflected everywhere in ancient texts.

In Sumeria it was … they are seven, seven they are … the seven [who] were born in the mountain of Mashu … in the ‘house of Lapis lazuli’, the ‘House of the Seven Spheres of Heaven and Earth’.

In Egypt it was the sun god who arose ‘in the midst of his box … shining in the crystal … of eyes of lapis lazuli … he who is in seven portions in god’s booth …Horus has put thee together without anything being disordered in thee.

The Egyptian Book of Heaven and Earth recorded that the marvels of the Lord included a lake of fire [light] ‘whose number is seven’ – seven seas of light, seven stars of brilliant light, seven monstrances of light, seven clouds of light, seven vines of ‘grapes’, seven stones of ice (crystals), and seven mountains of light.

While later, in the Hebrew versions, it was King Solomon (the triple sun, Sol-Om-On) who like Thoth ‘ordered everything by measure and number and weight’ to arrange the ‘host of the heavens’. The Biblical term ‘host’ was from Hebrew tzva’ot, meaning a systematic order or geometric array. Thus in Genesis, ‘heaven and earth’ were finished when all the stars of the firmament [crystal] were set in their great array, all the host’ of them. And the Psalms sang, ‘Praise the Lord [YHWH], praise him in the firmament [crystal] of his power’ … the lord of hosts in his tabernacle … in his holy hill … his light shines out of Zion.’

Biblical texts are replete with allusions to the power of ‘seven’ … the throne of god with seven lamps of fire; the angel who held seven stars and walked in the midst of seven candlesticks; the seven angels with the seven vials of the seven plagues of the wrath of God …like a sea of glass mingled with fire; the beast with seven heads; and the dragon with seven heads with seven crowns.  Revelations referred to … the mystery of the seven stars… while Amos similarly instructed … seek him that maketh the seven stars…the Lord is his name. Enoch provided a direct eyewitness account of the ‘pointed mountain’ [pyramid] of the Lord(s) where he observed  … seven mountains of magnificent stones … seven stars like great burning mountains … as if it were a structure built of crystals …as bright as the sun. Abraham described the light of the creator of heaven and earth with a body of sapphires like peridot (green gems) …a throne of fire with a cloud of indescribable light from the [crystal] firmament …from spheres or eyes of the mighty host (array) of the theatre of stars. And Moses went into the mountain where ‘angels’ explained the seven great works of heaven and earth with angels of fire, angels of ‘wind spirits’ and angels of hail (crystals).

Of course, everyone knows that the Biblical Book of Revelations also says the number of the beast was 666, but that was just another garbled misunderstanding written hundreds of years later (there are dozens of such variations in the Gnostic texts). Or perhaps it was an early example of characteristic thrift, reducing 7x7x7 to 666.

Even today the Hebrew temple is adorned with the seven candlesticks of the menorah; as are the altars of Roman Catholic churches, although there the middle candle is now most often replaced by a cross. From the very beginning of Christianity Bishop Eusebius acknowledged, ‘all things were made by sevens in the starry heaven’ ; while those of the Anglican sect still sing hymns that laud the strange ‘ghost’ that arises from the sevenfold might of the triple/cubic god”

O Holy Ghost of sevenfold might, all graces come from thee,

                        Grant us to know and serve alright, one god in persons three. [3]

Now that the stars were in alignment in the coffer they had to be fed … with cakes and ale.

[1] Smyth, The Great Pyramid.

[2] Pyramid Texts; Book of the Dead

[3] Hymn 234, The Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England