A monster of a problem

Apparently, it's easier than I thought to give your soul to Satan.

You don't have to attend a Black Mass, or hold a séance, or even wear an upside-down crucifix.  Nothing that flashy, or even deliberate, is necessary.

All you have to do is drink the wrong energy drink.

I am referring, of course, to "Monster," that whiz-bang combination of sugar, vitamins, caffeine, and various herbal extracts of dubious health effect, which misleadingly does not list "demons" on the ingredient list.

At least that's the contention of the also-misleadingly named site Discerning the World, which would be more accurately called Everything Is Trying To Eat Your Soul.  This site claims that the "Monster" logo, with its familiar trio of green claw marks on a black background, is actually a symbol for "666" because the individual claw marks look a little like the Hebrew symbol for the number six:

Which, of course, is way more plausible than the idea that it's a stylized letter "M."  You know, "M" as in "Monster."

But no.  Every time you consume a Monster energy drink, you are swallowing...

... pure evil.

Now lest you think that these people are just making some kind of metaphorical claim -- that the Monster brand has symbolism that isn't wholesome, and that it might inure the unwary with respect to secular, or even satanic, imagery -- the website itself puts that to rest pretty quickly.  It's a literal threat, they say, ingested with every swallow:

The Energy Drink contains ‘demonic’ energy and if you drink this drink you are drinking a satanic brew that will give you a boost... People who are not saved, who are not covered by the Previous Blood of Jesus Christ are susceptible to their attacks. Witchcraft is being used against the world on a scale so broad that it encompasses everything you see on a daily basis – right down to children’s clothing at your local clothing store.

So that's pretty unequivocal.  Never mind that if you'll consult the Hebrew numeral chart above, the logo looks just as much like "777" as it does like "666."

Or, maybe, just like a capital "M."  Back to the obvious answer.

Unfortunately, though, there are people who think that the threat is real, which is a pretty terrifying worldview to espouse.  Not only did I confirm this by looking at the comments on the website (my favorite one: "It is truly SCARY that all the little kids who play their Pokemon and video games are being GROOMED to enter this gateway to hell.  Satan wants to devour our young and he will do it any way he can."), a guy posted on the r/atheism subreddit just yesterday saying that he'd been enjoying a Monster drink on a train, and some woman came up to him and snarled, "I hope you enjoy your drink IN HELL," and then stalked away.

What, exactly, are you supposed to say to something like that?  "Thank you, I will?"  "Here, would you like a sip?"  "Yes, it fills me with everlasting fire?"  Since quick thinking is not really my forté, I'm guessing that I'd probably just have given her a goggle-eyed stare as she walked off, and thought of many clever retorts afterward.

"It's damned good."  That's what I'd like to say to her.

Not, of course, that it would be the truth, since my opinion is that Monster tastes like someone took the effluent from a nuclear power plant, added about twenty pounds of sugar, and let it ferment in the sun all day long.  But that's just me.

And of course, there's my suspicion that the owner of the Monster trademark is probably thrilled by this notoriety -- they pride themselves on being edgy, and their target advertising demographic is young, athletic, iconoclastic rebel types, or those who fancy themselves as such.  So no doubt this whole demonic-entity thing fits right into Monster's marketing strategy.

Convenient for both sides.  The perennially-fearful hell-avoiders have something else to worry about, and the Monster people have an extra cachet for their product.  One hand washes the other, even if one of them belongs to Satan, who (if he were real) would probably approve wholeheartedly of capitalism and the profit motive. 

A linguistic analysis of the Antichrist

Despite the fact that I scour the internet daily for weird news, sometimes I miss good ones.   I try not to fret about these oversights, however -- because one characteristic of woo-woos is that they never, ever let a claim die.  So if I miss a crazy, outlandish story, no worries; it'll be back.

Again and again and again.

One such bizarre claim, that I missed on its first go-round but which is recently repeating its circuit of ultra-religious right wingers (I've seen it posted on Facebook twice in the last week), is a story that contends that Jesus actually revealed the name of the Antichrist in the bible.  Never mind that wackos who are way too fond of the Book of Revelation have tried before to pin that title on various world leaders; Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope Benedict XVI, the Emperor Nero, and Ronald Reagan, for example, all had their supporters as being Satan's Right-hand Man.  (As for Reagan, his candidacy came about when someone noticed that his first, middle, and last names all had six letters -- 666, get it?  But my vote goes for Pope Benedict, who looks just like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.  I mean, can't you just picture him throwing lightning from his fingertips, and vaporizing protesters who support marriage equality, all the while cackling maniacally?)

But they're not the ones that the End Times crowd are after these days.  The whole thing apparently started with a 2009 YouTube video that claimed that the biblical passage "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from the heavens" (Luke 10:18) was actually encoding the real name of the Antichrist.  Here's the excerpt that's been making the rounds recently:

When I started doing a little research, I found the Greek word for 'lightning' is 'astrape,' and the Hebrew equivalent is 'baraq.'  I thought that was fascinating...  And I wondered what the word 'heights’ is, and I looked it up in the dictionary, and it’s 'bamah...'  If spoken by a Jewish rabbi today, influenced by the poetry of Isaiah, he would say these words in Hebrew … 'I saw Satan as Baraq Ubamah.'

 Righty-o.  Obama is the Antichrist.  Not that we have any kind of political agenda here, of course.

The only problem is, don't use a linguistic argument when there are lots of linguists around who are smarter than you are.  An expert in Hebrew and Aramaic, Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, weighed in on the contention in an article in Salon, and he said that there are several problems with it.  First, Ehrenkrantz says, the Hebrew root "bamah" doesn't mean "heights" as in "heavens," it means "heights" as in "hills."  Sticking a "u-" prefix on the word is consistent with Hebrew morphology, but doing that alters stops to continuants -- in this case, changing the /b/ to a /v/.  So, it would be "uvamah," not "ubamah."  And even so, the "u-" doesn't mean "from," it means "and."  So "baraq uvamah" means "lightning and hills."

The actual phrase "from the heavens," Ehrenkrantz says, should be "min ha-shamayim."  So the passage "lightning from the heavens" would be "baraq min ha-shamayim."  Which doesn't sound like much of anything except Hebrew.

Couple that with the fact that Obama's first name, Barack, does come from an Aramaic root, but it isn't "baraq," it's "barak," which means "blessing."  It's a cognate to the more common name Baruch.  So, if you're really trying to pull some apocalyptic linguistic analysis on the president's name, you would probably be more justified in concluding that Obama was sent to Earth by god as a blessing, and is undoubtedly going to kick some satanic ass while he's here.

Because the problem with twiddling around with language is that two can always play that game.  Linguistic coincidences and peculiarities in word root structure abound.  So let's have some fun, okay?  Let's start with the Hebrew word "rosh," which means "head, chief, or leader."  ("Rosh Hashanah" means "head of the year.")  And we all know the Latin word "limbo," the ablative form of "limbus," meaning "the edge, or outer circle, of hell."  So:  "the chieftain of the outer reaches of hell" would be "Rosh Limbo."

Hey, maybe this stuff works, after all.