text: The number of the beast.  GO IRON MAIDEN!!\n\nThe number 666 comes directly from the worship practices of the city of Babylon about he time of the Bible prophet Daniel.  The people of Babylon worshiped gods that were associated with the sun, moon, visible planets of our solar system, and certain of the stars involved with the practice of astrology. The Babylonians were the principle developers of astrology, as we know it today.  In their worship system, they had 37 supreme gods, and one of these, the god associated with the sun, was supreme over all the other gods.  These people believed that numbers in some way had power over the gods they worshiped.  However, they had to create numbers that they could assign to the gods so that they could have power over them.  To do this, they counted their gods and assigned a count number to each of the 36 lesser supreme gods, and then added up all of these numbers (from one to 36) and assigned the sum to the sun god.  The first god they counted got the number one assigned to it, and the second god they counted got the number two assigned to it, and so on up to all 36 lesser supreme gods.  Now, if you have not guessed it by now, the sum of the numbers from one to 36 totals 666, which they assigned to the god associated with the sun.  \n\nHowever, they went further.  They feared these gods and worried that one of them might strike them down sometime, so they made amulets with a 6 x 6 matrix of the numbers one through 36 on them.  Today we call these numeric matrixes magic squares.  The design of the amulets was to achieve a magic purpose, and they evidently believed that wearing a particular god's number would protect one from a specific god striking them down using his power of magic.  Now, the amulets had to be as powerful as possible, so in order to increase its power, they arranged these numbers in such a way that the sum of any given row, column, or diagonal is 111, and therefore the sum of all six rows or all six columns was 666.  This was supposed to provide extra protection, including from the god associated with the sun, since this god's sum was present on the amulet.  \n\nThe practice of creating amulets with this arrangement of numbers as part of astrology appears to have continued well past the time of Jesus. Archeologists have found amulets with Latin Inscriptions, so we know that the Romans were indulging in this practice. \n\nTherefore, the 666 number came about because of the pagan worship practices of the Babylonians and their practice of astrology.