“To recognize the vanity of this life is the first step towards the true life. To perceive our ignorance is the first step toward true knowledge; to acknowledge our folly is the first step to true wisdom; to behold our misery is the first step toward true happiness.”
- Ivan Panin, Thoughts
Ivan Panin was born in Russia on December 12, 1855. In his youth, he was a Nihilist and plotted against the Czar and his regime. At an early age he was banished from Russia. After passing much time in Germany furthering his schooling, he came to the United States, where he enrolled in Harvard University. After his college days, Panin became a distinguished literary docent. He lectured on Carlyle, Emerson, Tolstoy, and on Russian literature. During this time Panin garnered attention as a fervid agnostic – so well known that when he abjured his agnosticism and accepted the Christian faith, newspapers carried headlines reporting of his conversion. What follows is an account of how Panin labored assiduously to disinter sevens in the Bible:
“Mr. Panin was casually reading the first verse of the Gospel of John in the Greek – ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with (the) God, and the Word was God.’ The question came to his mind, Why does the Greek word for the precede the word God in one case, but not in the other? Therefore in one column he made a list of all the New Testament passages in which the word God occurs with the article the, and in another column he made a list of all the passages in which the word God occurs without the article. On comparing the two sums he was struck with the numeric relation between them. He then followed the same procedure on the word Christ and on other words, and found amazing numeric facts. This was the beginning of the profound numerical discoveries which are now called the Science of Bible Numerics.
“Since discovering that first feature in 1890 Mr. Panin earnestly devoted his entire life to one definite and specific purpose. He devoted himself so persistently to counting letters and words, figuring numeric values, making concordances, and working out mathematical problems, that on several occasions his health completely failed. Regardless of the tremendous mental and physical strain he has labored faithfully and diligently for the past fifty years. The original manuscripts of his work consist of approximately 40,000 pages. The sevens are strangely out of sight of ordinary Hebrew and Greek readers. [They] are so deeply concealed that special searching and investigation and special counting are necessary in order to find them. Some of the sevens are strangely concealed in the unusual system of numbers – in the ‘numeric values’ of the Hebrew and Greek letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and passages of the text, while other sevens are hidden in other remarkable and peculiar ways. The numerical facts enable us to see before our very eyes an actual scientific demonstration of the divine verbal inspiration of the Bible.
“The sevens were discovered by gematria, using the usual Greek and Hebrew alphabetical system with no variations, and by counting. The sum of the values of ‘God,’ ‘heavens,’ and ‘earth’ is 86 + 395 + 296 = 777, a value which is an exact multiple of seven” (Dudley 104-106).
The pith of sevens, however, is not exclusively confined to mathematics. A signal of King Lear’s madness, for instance, is his failure to appreciate sevens: (King Lear, Act 1, Scene 5):
Fool. The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.
Lear. Because they are not eight?
Fool. Yes, indeed.
Upon discoursing with Edgar, disguised as bedlam beggar Tom, Lear forsakes his identification with the almighty: “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.” Instead of identifying himself with the gods, Lear now identifies with the “unaccommodated man”; the omnipotent king donned in resplendent garb of scene one has become a naked, unprotected man. This metamorphosis brings about the dissolution of his old identity. As Lear attempts to forge a new composite identity, he becomes aware of the decay of society, whose symbol he was as king. Lear’s maturing consciousness of his identity as both king and the “bare, forked animal” endows him with a new perspective on royal power and the human condition. He believes that life is characterized by adversity, inconsistency, and brevity. Man is only entitled to have the sympathy of other men. With the wisdom gained in madness, Lear is fully transformed. His lunatic ravings often make more sense than the behests he made in his saner moments. When Lear exalts, at his apotheosis, “Ay, every inch a king,” he wears the crown figuratively.
Reference
1. Dudley, Underwood. Numerology, or, What Pythagoras Wrought. Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 1997.
