777
Assorted chatter out there that 777, 666 + 111, signals the onset of Armageddon. That’s a new one on me. I didn’t spot anything much more authoritative than a gaming site. Apparently it’s some kind of Aleister Crowley, Kabala thing. Anyway, Armageddon as you’re probably aware is not the end of the world per se, but the place in Israel where the Final Battle between Good and Evil is supposed to take place.
Yeah, well, I’ve been there. Seen the fire in sky, felt the chill up my spine, seen the Angel of Death in his black, flowing cloak, flitting across the ancient rubble. It was a couple days before New Year’s, 1999, and the world was supposed to end soon. Herald photog Garo Lachinian and I had been killing time up in the Golan, then the subject of peace/giveback chatter, high above Galilee, where the locals, including babies in prams, don’t seem to notice the 16-hour-a-day window-rattling artillery practice at the range across the road, while at Maj-del-Shams on the slopes of Mount Hermon you can watch the other locals yell family news at each other from hillsides across the barbed wire and minefields that separate Israel from Syria.
It was verging on twilight when we pulled up at Tel Mediggo, the ancient 16-layer pile of leveled cities. When John of Patmos was having his weird vision, Armageddon must have seemed like a logical place to end it all. Commanding the pass between Galiliee and the sea, it had been the scene of many final battles. Tel Mediggo was closed but we showed our Israeli press passes and importuned and the caretaker let us in. Caught the sky afire with brilliant sunset. A V-flight of large squawking birds passed across the sky, shifting ominously to form an aleph over our heads.
“Look,” I told Garo. “A for Armageddon.”
“No, those are cranes, and they’re headed east. That’s A for Armenia.”
Hang around any Armenians long enough, and you’ll soon figure out that everything is about Armenia. Anyway, we had one problem with our plan to write something about the end of the world for a quick millennium feature. Gates closed, tourists gone, and there were no End Timers up there doom-and-gloom mongering for us to quote or shoot. This had been a problem at a number of holy or otherwise significant spots, where the End of the World 2000 was turning out to be a bust.
But that’s when, in the gathering gloom, we saw a dark figure at some distance, coming in and out of sight, black flowing hair and black cape, leaping from ancient tumbledown stone to ancient tumbledown stone. We perked up.
“Check it out, Garo. It’s the Angel of Death. Let’s go get him!”
We chased him for a while, lost him, and suddenly, unexpectedly, came upon him nestled in among what was left of some walls. He had taken the form of Vince, a bearded, heavily tattooed carpark attendant from Albuquerque.
“I’ve read the Bible 12 times. From the interpretation I get, at this time, the angels will come down and take the world back from Satan.” he said. “Satan has been loose in the world for 1,000 years and now it is going to end.”
“A lot of people back home thought I was coming here to commit suicide. I said no, it’s just to see the angels take back what was once God’s.”
A couple of days later we saw in the Jerusalem Post that Israeli cops had hauled Vince away. As you know, the world didn’t end. There wasn’t even a Y2K hiccup. I’m no slouch as a sinner but gnashed my teeth for nothing more than annoyance. The millennium, for End Timers and tabloidistas who want to be around when it all finally goes down the pipes, was a big letdown.
No flies on Vince’s scholarship, though. The Bible’s a complex book, open to a wild swath of interpretation, nowhere more so than Revelation. Maybe Vince’s timing was off. The whole millennium thing was a good tutorial in world-ending panics. Though more likely, as Vince noted, even as we squatted on the old stones up on Tel Megiddo in the quiet of the evening, the cars whizzing by on the highway below, the lights coming on in modern Mediggo a mile away and old Nazareth lighting up on its hill across the Galilee, the battle was raging all around us, as it had been for some time. We just couldn’t see it.
Topics: Alpha, Omega, everything, money, nothing, pols
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:50 am Comments (1) on Tuesday, September 30, 2008
One Response to “777”
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September 30th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Don’t tell Boeing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777
Cheers