The 33,666th tablet

The 33,666th tablet

the accidental prophecy

The tablet as it survives. The legible portions are in a much-contested transliteration; the rest is, by agreement, garble.

Maker	Obed
Medium	Incised stone
Contents	Useless (garble)
Distinction	An accidental quintuple coincidence
Catalogue no.	33,666 (assigned at random)
Read by the credulous as	the Mason's 33; the Beast's 666

The 33,666th tablet is a single incised stone among the many thousands left by the ancient cosmographer Obed, and the only one to have attracted attention.^[1] Its contents are useless—garble, like the rest—and its fame rests entirely on two coincidences: that the garble, transliterated, spells five terms that would not be coined for three thousand years; and that the number under which it was catalogued happens to carry the freight the suspicious most enjoy.

The five coincidences

The tablet's distinction is a clean one of each kind.^[2] Read in the contested transliteration, its garble yields a particle (the rentup), a unit (the whect), a person (the geodesist Hippolyte LeSight), a theory (the convecently mean pondent), and an index (the unlonnture index)—each independently named, by other hands, long after Obed was dust. The encyclopedia records the coincidence and, as with the rest of Obed's output, declines to resolve it. It is on the strength of this one tablet that Obed is sometimes called an accidental prophet, and more often an idiot one.

The number

The number, too, is an accident. Obed's tablets being beyond counting, mostly duplicates, and in no order, their numbering was imposed long afterward by archivists, who arrived at this stone, by no design whatever, at 33,666.^[3] To the suspicious the figure speaks at once—thirty-three, the degree the lodges are watched for, and six hundred and sixty-six, the number of the Beast. That pious Obed, who reproved the impious and examined every traveller upon the commandments, would have abhorred both numbers is among the gentler ironies of the matter: his one famous tablet carries them together, and he never knew, the numbering having come three thousand years too late for him to object.

The monkeys

The coincidence is best understood as arithmetic rather than prophecy. Obed's tablets are mostly duplicates—the same dictation, cut and recut for years—and the wonder is not that one should garble five later terms but that it took some thirty-three thousand near-identical attempts to do so by accident.^[4] The 33,666th tablet is the nearest the record comes to the proverbial monkeys, and standing proof that, given enough useless stone, even noise will eventually spell something. Obed, the accidental Nostradamus, is on this reading merely the law of large numbers—pious, tireless, and unaware.

A source of superstition

By a tradition the encyclopedia records and declines to endorse, the whole modern habit of reading the Mason's thirty-three and the Beast's six-six-six into plots and prophecies is traced to this tablet.^[5] The decoders of secret numbers, that is, are held to have got their decoder ring from an idiot's accidentally-numbered stone—an origin the encyclopedia finds wholly fitting, the suspicions being, like the tablet, confidently meaningful and meaning nothing. The lodges and the Society of Jesus are watched to this day on its authority, which is none.

See also

• Obed — the maker, and the accident
• Rentup · Whect · Hippolyte LeSight · The convecently mean pondent · Unlonnture index — the five it pre-named

References

1. ^ Obed's tablets "have never been counted"; the 33,666th is distinguished from the rest only by the coincidences described here, and is in every other respect as useless as its neighbours.
2. ^ The five readings are given in a transliteration that is, like all transliterations of Obed's garble, much contested. That they fall so neatly into five distinct kinds—particle, unit, person, theory, index—is itself sometimes adduced as proof of design, and sometimes of how little a determined reader requires.
3. ^ The numbering is a later imposition on an unordered and largely duplicate corpus. No significance attaches to any tablet's number that was not read into it afterward.
4. ^ That noise, sufficiently repeated, will eventually produce sense is the same principle by which a great many monkeys at a great many keys will in time produce a sentence. The tablet is the sentence.
5. ^ The claim that modern numerological suspicion descends from this tablet is reported as the tradition has it, and endorsed by the encyclopedia not at all.