Thirty-Seven and the Number of the Beast

The repunit property links thirty-seven to the most notorious number of all: six hundred and sixty-six is six times a hundred and eleven, and so eighteen times thirty-seven, which is why the number of the beast is itself divisible by thirty-seven and triangular. These relations are genuine and have been noticed for centuries, but they are properties of the base-ten writing of numbers rather than of anything the ancient authors intended, and they belong to recreational and mystical mathematics rather than to scriptural symbolism proper. Thirty-seven has no developed traditional lore of its own; its interest is entirely in the elegant arithmetic that connects it to a hundred and eleven, to six hundred and sixty-six, and to the gematria of Genesis.

Balliett's 1908 chart reduces thirty-seven to one, initiative and new beginnings in the standard modern keyword list, by way of three plus seven making ten and one plus zero making one; the American root reading and Cheiro's own compound reading of fortunate partnership sit at some distance from one another, one stressing solitary initiative and the other cooperative alliance, a reminder that even within the same twentieth-century tradition the compound and reduced readings of a number are not always in obvious harmony.