30% Evil

In scanning the net for references and rhetorics of evil (a current project of mine), I came across the Gematriculator, a web-based program that calculates the goodness or evilness of any give website based on a simple alpha-numeric algorithm. Gematria is the esoteric, kabbalistic method of divining the secret truths in Hebrew religious texts, assumed to be written in God's language by God himself. At the turn of the 20th century, one of its celebrated later practioners, Russian born mathematician Dr. Ivan Panin, became obsessed with the first verse of John's Gospel in the New Testament: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with the God and the Word was God..."

[This passage is one of my favorites as "word" in the Greek is "logos," a term that both means "the said" but also has in it a profound sense of "dividing up" of the world into opposites and proportions relative to one another. John's paradoxical statement seems to imply both that the world was spoken - "thus sayeth the Lord" - into view (of particular interest to students of rhetoric like myself) and that this God was and is an imminent thing that differentiated itself from a singularity into the manifest world - that God is the Big Bang and everything after. This is an altogether different conception than God as the transcendent being that stands outside of time and creation. An alternative interpretation of the Gospel passage might suggest that the word itself is responsible for the creation of God as Kenneth Burke argues - that the birth of language was also the birth of the idea of perfection and "God" as the ultimate term in the hierarchy of valuation that language fosters by its very nature.]

In any case, Panin found through his methods that the first verse in the Hebrew Bible, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Gen 1:1), contains over 30 different combinations of 7, and the 3 nouns, "God," "heaven," and "earth," equal 777. Moreover, 7 is a number of overwhelming significance in the Bible, especially Revelations in which there are 7 of almost everything. This is plain to see even without a calculator handy. The association of the number 7 with things divine - in Indo-European cultures - most likely has its roots in the seven visible planets. Also, 7 is a prime number, sum of 3 (heavenly things - trinity) and 4 (Earth - 4 elements). Here's a great numerological-cultural primer.

Addendum: After penning this entry, according to the Gematriculator, my blog's "evil" rating went down 1%. It's true!! It's all true!!