6/6/06: A Date with the Devil?

Once every century comes such a day as Tuesday, June 6, which translates loosely this year into "666," the number associated with the Antichrist and the apocalypse.

But instead of dire warnings, a wave of skepticism is mounting over the other-worldly date that laymen and churchmen say has been hijacked by movie producers, book publishers and rock music promoters.

"It's marketing, marketing, marketing," said Bob Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University.

Millions are likely to turn out for the second coming of the horror flick that planted the notion of 666 as synonymous with Satan's spawn in the public consciousness 30 years ago.

Deliberately aimed by 20th Century Fox for a June 6 opening is "The Omen," a remake of the 1976 movie of the same name that starred Gregory Peck and Lee Remick as the unwitting parents of the devil-child Damien, whose scalp bore the triple-6 birthmark.

Meanwhile, clergy from polar opposite perspectives agree 6-6-06 has nothing to do with the warning in the Bible's Book of Revelation that the "number of the beast" is 666.

"The date has no significance," said Mark Hitchcock, a biblical scholar and pastor of Faith Bible Church in Edmond, Okla.

A biblical literalist, Hitchcock believes in the doomsday scenario of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, describing the rise of an Antichrist who enslaves all of humankind save for those who depart to heaven.

In fact, Hitchcock, an evangelical Christian, believes the end "could be very soon." How soon he can't say, noting the Bible sets no date. The apocalypse is looming, but the notion that something evil comes this way on Tuesday is "just a lot of superstition," he said.

"Numbers are just numbers," said Peter Gilmore, high priest of the Church of Satan, which was founded in San Francisco in 1966. "And June 6 is just a day like any other."

Satanists, who revel in individualism and earthly pleasures, are "amused by Christians superstitiously being afraid of this number, as well as the date," Gilmore said in an e-mail from New York City.

But aside from some media reports of pregnant women belaboring the prospect of giving birth Tuesday, there is little evidence anyone fears the date.

"It's nonsense," said the Rev. John Cushman, pastor at Church of the Roses in Santa Rosa.

Just back from a tour of the violence-torn Mideast, the Presbyterian pastor said 666 is a distraction "so people don't have to worry about the truly big things."

The original movie "Omen," known for its stunning, slow-motion decapitation scene, burned an aversion to 666 into the nation's psyche, Thompson said. There it lies, he said, embedded with the instinct to walk around a ladder or avoid flying on Friday the 13th.

U.S. Highway 666, nicknamed "Devil's Highway" in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, was renamed U.S. 491 in 2003, shedding the demonic association noted in news reports, cartoons and movies.

When chip manufacturer Intel introduced the 666-megahertz Pentium in 1999, it was marketed as the Pentium III 667, a rounding-upward that defied the company's usual naming scheme.

"It might not be evil, but it's certainly confusing," Government Computer News, a trade publication, said at the time.

Fear of 666 is known, not widely, as hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.

But fascination with the devil's number has prompted endless exercises in gematria, the counting of a numerical equivalent for each letter in a word or name. Depending on the numbering scheme, people have made Hitler, Kissinger and New York add up to 666, and counting the number of letters in Ronald Wilson Reagan's first, middle and last names also yields three sixes.

Which is all bunk, according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, noting one could "connect most if not all names to the evil number" by manipulating the rules.

Hitchcock said the Antichrist will not be known until it's too late, after the righteous have been carried off to heaven.

"I don't think there's any reason for anybody to be trying to figure out who he is," he said.

For that matter, Tuesday isn't really 666, Thompson said. It is 6-6-06, or 6-6-2006, and dropping the extra digits is disingenuous.

"You've really got to stretch," he said.

But for the movie, books and rock albums coming out on Tuesday, it's a match made in, well, not heaven.