by John Lloyd
The controversy has been around since the second century AD. A version of the Bible citing the Number of the Beast as 616 was castigated by St Iranaeus of Lyon (c.130–200) as ‘erroneous and spurious’. Karl Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels analysed the Bible in his book On Religion (1883). He too calculated the number as 616, not 666.
Revelation was the first book of the New Testament to be written and it is full of number puzzles. Each of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet has a corresponding number, so that any number can also be read as a word.
Both Parker and Engels argue that the Book of Revelation is a political, anti-Roman tract, numerologically coded to disguise its message. The Number of the Beast (whatever that may be) refers to either Caligula or Nero, the hated oppressors of the early Christians, not to some imaginary bogey-man.
The fear of the number 666 is known as Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. The fear of the number 616 (you read it here first) is Hexakosioidekahexaphobia.
The numbers on a roulette wheel added together come to 666.
Where does the word ‘assassin’ come from?
Not from hashish.
The earliest authority for the medieval sect called the Assassins taking hashish in order to witness the pleasures awaiting them after death is the notoriously unreliable Marco Polo. Most Islamic scholars now favour the more convincing etymology of assassiyun, meaning people who are faithful to the assass, the ‘foundation’ of the faith. They were, literally, ‘fundamentalists’.
This makes sense when you look at their core activities. The Al-Hashashin, or Nizaris as they called themselves, were active for 200 years. They were Shi’ite muslims, dedicated to the overthrow of the Sunni Caliph (a kind of Islamic king). The Assassins considered the Baghdad regime decadent and little more than a puppet regime of the Turks. Sound familiar?
The sect was founded by Hassan-i Sabbah in 1090, a mystic philosopher, fond of poetry and science. They made their base at Alamut, an unassailable fortress in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea. It housed an important library and beautiful gardens but it was Hassan’s political strategy that made the sect famous. He decided they could wield huge influence by using a simple weapon: terror.
Dressed as merchants and holy men they selected and murdered their victims in public, usually at Friday prayers, in the mosque. They weren’t explicitly ‘suicide’ missions, but the assassins were almost always killed in the course of their work.
They were incredibly successful, systematically wiping out all the major leaders of the Muslim world and effectively destroying any chance of a unified Islamic defence against the Western crusaders.
What finally defeated them was, ironically, exactly what defeated their opponents. In 1256 Hulagu Khan assembled the largest Mongol army ever known. They marched westward destroying the assassins’ power base in Alamut, before sacking Baghdad in 1258.
Baghdad was then the world’s most beautiful and civilised city. A million citizens perished and so many books were thrown into the river Tigris it ran black with ink. The city remained a ruin for hundreds of years afterwards.
Hulagu destroyed the caliphs and the assassins. He drove Islam into Egypt and then returned home only to perish, in true Mongol style, in a civil war.
Which crime did Burke and Hare commit?
Murder.
In the early nineteenth century, there was a big increase in the number of students of anatomy. The law in Britain specified that the only corpses that could be legally used for dissection were those of recently executed criminals. This was quite an advance on the anatomy lessons in Alexandria in the third century BC, where criminals were dissected while still alive.
The number of executions was inadequate to supply the demand and a brisk trade grew up in illicit grave robbing. Its practitioners were known as ‘resurrection men’.
Burke and Hare were more proactive; they just murdered people and sold the bodies to an anatomist named Knox on an ‘ask no questions’ basis. In all, they killed sixteen people.
When suspicion fell on them, Burke and his wife Helen tried to get their story straight before they were separated to be interviewed by the police. They agreed to say that a missing woman had left their house at seven o’clock. Unfortunately, Mrs Burke said 7 p.m. and Mr Burke 7 a.m.
In return for his own immunity, Hare gave evidence against the Burkes. Burke was executed in 1829 but Helen got off ‘not proven’ and promptly vanished. Mr and Mrs Hare also disappeared, and Knox escaped prosecution altogether.
The father of systematic dissection was a sixteenth-century Belgian anatomist called Andreas Vesalius. He published his findings in the classic seven-volume text On the Fabric of the Human Body.
In those days, dissection was forbidden by the Catholic Church, so Vesalius had to work in secret. At the University of Padua, he built an ingenious table in case of unexpected visitors. It could be quickly flipped upside down, dumping the human body underneath and revealing a splayed-open dog.
Over the last twenty years, dissection has fallen out of favour in medical schools – the victim of overly packed curriculums, a shortage of teachers and a general sense that it’s an antiquated chore in a high-tech world.
It’s now possible to qualify as a doctor without ever having dissected a body at all. To save time and mess, students study ‘prosections’ – bodies that have already been professionally dissected – or computer simulations that do away with cadavers entirely.
What are chastity belts for?
The idea of a crusader clapping his wife in a chastity belt and galloping off to war with the key round his neck is a nineteenth-century fantasy designed to titillate readers.
There is very little evidence for the use of chastity belts in the Middle Ages at all. The first known drawing of one occurs in the fifteenth century. Konrad Kyeser’s Bellifortis was a book on contemporary military equipment written long after the crusades had finished. It includes an illustration of the ‘hard iron breeches’ worn by Florentine women.
In the diagram, the key is clearly visible – which suggests that it was the lady and not the knight who controlled access to the device, to protect herself against the unwanted attentions of Florentine bucks.
In museum collections, most ‘medieval’ chastity belts have now been shown to be of dubious authenticity and removed from display. As with ‘medieval’ torture equipment, it appears that most of it was manufactured in Germany in the nineteenth century to satisfy the curiosity of ‘specialist’ collectors.
The nineteenth century also witnessed an upturn in sales of new chastity belts – but these were not for women.
Victorian medical theory was of the opinion that masturbation was harmful to health. Boys who could not be trusted to keep their hands to themselves were forced to wear these improving steel underpants.
But the real boom in sales has come in the last fifty years, as ‘adult’ shops take advantage of the thriving bondage market.
There are more chastity belts around today than there ever were in the Middle Ages. Paradoxically, they exist to stimulate sex, not to prevent it.
What was Tutankhamun’s curse?
There wasn’t one. It was made up by the papers.
The story of the ‘pharaoh’s curse’ striking down all those who entered Tutankhamun’s tomb when it was discovered by Howard Carter in 1922, was the work of the Cairo correspondent of the Daily Express (later repeated by the Daily Mail and the New York Times).
The article reported an inscription that stated: ‘They who enter this sacred tomb shall swiftly be visited by wings of death.’
There is no such inscription. The nearest equivalent appears over a shrine dedicated to the god Anubis and reads: ‘It is I who hinder the sand from choking the secret chamber. I am for the protection of the deceased.’
In the run-up to Carter’s expedition, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – who also famously believed in fairies – had already planted the seeds of ‘a terrible curse’ in the minds of the press. When
Carter’s patron, Lord Caernavon, died from a septic mosquito bite a few weeks after the tomb was opened, Marie Corelli, writer of sensational best-sellers and the Dan Brown of her day, claimed she had warned him what would happen if he broke the seal.
In fact, both were echoing a superstition that was less than a hundred years old, established by a young English novelist called Jane Loudon Webb. Her hugely popular novel The Mummy (1828) single-handedly invented the idea of a cursed tomb with a mummy returning to life to avenge its desecrators.
This theme found its way into all sorts of subsequent tales – even Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, wrote a ‘mummy’ story – but its big break came with the advent of ‘Tutankhamun-fever’.
No curse has ever been found in an ancient Egyptian tomb. Of the alleged twenty-six deaths caused by Tutankhamun’s ‘curse’, thorough research published in the British Medical Journal in 2002 has shown that only six died within the first decade of its opening and Howard Carter, surely the number one target, lived for another seventeen years.
But the story just won’t go away. As late as 1970, when the exhibition of artefacts from the tomb toured the West, a policeman guarding it in San Francisco complained of a mild stroke brought on by the ‘mummy’s curse’.
In 2005, a CAT scan of Tutankhamun’s mummy showed that the nineteen-year-old was 1.7 m (5 feet 6 inches) and skinny, with a goofy overbite. Rather than being murdered by his brother, it seems he died from an infected knee.
CLIVE None of these superstitions should be worried about … touch wood.
Where does the V-sign come from?
It has nothing to do with archery.
The oldest definite record of someone using a V-sign only dates back as far as 1901, when there is documentary footage of a young man who clearly didn’t want to be filmed using the gesture to camera outside an ironworks in Rotherham. This proves that the gesture was being used by the late nineteenth century, but it’s a long way from the bowmen at the Battle of Agincourt.
According to the legend, English archers waved their fingers in contempt at their French counterparts, who were supposed to be in the habit of cutting off the fingers of captured bowmen – a fingerless archer being useless, as he could not draw back the string.
Although one historian claims to have unearthed an eyewitness account of Henry V’s pre-battle speech that refers to this French practice, there is no contemporary evidence of the V-sign being used in the early fifteenth century. Despite there being a number of chroniclers present at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, none of them mentions any archers using this defiant gesture. Secondly, even if archers were captured by the French they were much more likely to be killed rather than be subject to the fiddly and time-consuming process of having their fingers amputated. Prisoners were usually only taken to be ransomed and bowmen were considered inferior merchandise who wouldn’t fetch a decent price. Finally, there are no known references of any kind to the Agincourt story that date back further than the early 1970s.
What is certain is that the one-fingered ‘middle-finger salute’ dates back much further than the V-sign; it is obviously a phallic symbol – the Romans referred to the middle finger as the digitus impudicus, or lewd finger. In Arabic society, an upside-down version of ‘flicking the bird’ is used to signify impotence.
Whatever its date of origin, the V-sign wasn’t universally understood until quite recently. When Winston Churchill first began to use the V-for-Victory salute the wrong way round in 1940, he had to be gently told that it was rude.
What did feminists do with their bras?
No, they didn’t.
Arguably the most influential feminist protest in history occurred at the 1968 ‘Miss America’ beauty contest in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
A small group of protesters picketed the pageant with provocative slogans such as ‘Let’s Judge Ourselves as People’ and ‘Ain’t she sweet; making profits off her meat’.
They produced a live sheep which they crowned ‘Miss America’ and then proceeded to toss their high-heeled shoes, bras, curlers and tweezers into a ‘Freedom Trash Can’.
What they didn’t do was burn their bras. They wanted to, but the police advised that it would be dangerous while standing on a wooden boardwalk.
The myth of the bra-burning began with an article by a young New York Post journalist called Lindsay Van Gelder.
In 1992, she told Ms. magazine: ‘I mentioned high in the story that the protesters were planning to burn bras, girdles and other items in a freedom trash can… The headline writer took it a step further and called them “bra-burners”.’
The headline was enough. Journalists across America seized on it without bothering to even read the story. Van Gelder had created a media frenzy.
Even scrupulous publications such as the Washington Post were caught out.
They identified members of the National Women’s Liberation Group as the same women who ‘burned undergarments during a demonstration at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City recently.’
The incident is now used as a textbook case in the study of how contemporary myths originate.
What colour is the universe?
a) Black with silvery bits
b) Silver with black bits
c) Pale green
d) Beige
It’s officially beige.
In 2002, after analysing the light from 200,000 galaxies collected by the Australian Galaxy Redshift Survey, American scientists from Johns Hopkins University concluded that the universe was pale green. Not black with silvery bits, as it appears. Taking the Dulux paint range as a standard, it was somewhere between Mexican Mint, Jade Cluster and Shangri-La Silk.
A few weeks after the announcement to the American Astronomical Society, however, they had to admit they’d made a mistake in their calculations, and that the universe was, in fact, more a sort of dreary shade of taupe.
Since the seventeenth century, some of the greatest and most curious minds have wondered why it is that the night sky is black. If the universe is infinite and contains an infinite number of uniformly distributed stars, there should be a star everywhere we look, and the night sky should be as bright as day.
This is known as Olbers’ Paradox, after the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers who described the problem (not for the first time) in 1826.
Nobody has yet come up with a really good answer to the problem. Maybe there is a finite number of stars, maybe the light from the furthest ones hasn’t reached us yet. Olbers’ solution was that, at some time in the past, not all the stars had been shining and that something had switched them on.
It was Edgar Allan Poe, in his prophetic prose poem Eureka (1848), who first suggested that the light from the most distant stars is still on its way.
In 2003, the Ultra Deep Field Camera of the Hubble Space Telescope was pointed at what appeared to be the emptiest piece of the night sky and the film exposed for a million seconds (about eleven days).
The resulting picture showed tens of thousands of hitherto unknown galaxies, each consisting of hundreds of millions of stars, stretching away into the dim edges of the universe.
JEREMY HARDY It’s deceptive, the universe, ’cause from the outside, if you’re God, it looks quite small. But when you’re in there, it’s really quite spacious, with plenty of storage.
What colour is Mars?
Butterscotch.
Or brown. Or orange. Maybe khaki with pale pink patches.
One of the most familiar features of the planet Mars is its red appearance in the night sky. This redness, however, is due to the dust in the planet’s atmosphere. The surface of Mars tells a different story.
The first pictures from Mars were sent back from Viking I, seven years to the day after Neil Armstrong’s famous moon landing. They showed a desolate red land strewn with dark rocks, exactly what we had expected.
This made the conspiracy theorists suspicious: they claimed that NASA had deliberately doctored the pictures to make
them seem more familiar.
The cameras on the two Viking rovers that reached Mars in 1976 didn’t take colour pictures. The digital images were captured in grey-scale (the technical term for black and white) and then passed through three colour filters.
Adjusting these filters to give a ‘true’ colour image is extremely tricky and as much an art as a science. Since no one has ever been to Mars, we have no idea what its ‘true’ colour is.
In 2004, the New York Times stated that the early colour pictures from Mars were published slightly ‘over-pinked’, but that later adjustments showed the surface to be more like the colour of butterscotch.
NASA’s Spirit rover has been operating on Mars for the past two years. The latest published pictures show a greeny-brown, mud-coloured landscape with grey-blue rocks and patches of salmon-coloured sand.
We probably won’t know the ‘real’ colour of Mars until someone goes there.
In 1887, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported seeing long straight lines on Mars which he called canali, or ‘channels’. This was mistranslated as ‘canals’, starting rumours of a lost civilisation on Mars.
Water is thought to exist on Mars in the form of vapour, and as ice in the polar ice caps, but since more powerful telescopes have been developed, no evidence of Schiaparelli’s ‘canals’ has ever been found.
Cairo, or al-Qāhirah, is Arabic for Mars.
What colour is water?