The Number of the Beast is 666

A great winged body fills the darkness. Fire rises from its central head, smaller faces crowd around its shoulders, and stars glimmer on the broad membranes stretching towards the edges. Below, a pale horned figure throws its arms apart. William Blake's The Number of the Beast is 666 makes a relationship between bodies immediately compelling, even before its title sends the viewer to the Book of Revelation. The watercolour belongs to the Rosenbach in Philadelphia and is dated about 1805. ^[1]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2001 exhibition checklist describes the sheet as watercolour with pen and black ink over traces of graphite. That combination matters to its effect. Blake gives the monsters firm contours and carefully articulated muscles, then sets them within washes of colour that make the surrounding space difficult to measure. The figures possess a sculptural solidity within a shifting, unstable landscape. ^{[1] [2]}

A body that occupies the sky

The upper figure appears at once immense and tightly compressed. Its wings extend far beyond the reach of its bent arms, filling almost the whole width. Long ribs divide their surfaces into spreading sections, while the scalloped outer edges cut deep hollows into the darkness. The stars embedded in these membranes seem to place a piece of the night sky inside the monster's own anatomy. ^[1]

Within this enormous frame, the torso twists. One arm crosses the chest, and a rounded knee projects below it. The head turns upwards towards the orange flare. Other heads emerge beside the principal face, their profiles and curling horns interrupting any smooth outline. Blake makes the creature crowded within itself: the eye moves between features that belong to a single commanding presence but resist being understood as one ordinary body. ^[1]

The difference between expansion and contraction gives the pose much of its force. Wings spread across the sheet, yet arms and legs fold back towards the centre. The contorted body seems capable of overwhelming the space. Scale, density and the pressure of the surrounding wings establish its menace. ^[1]

Colour contributes to that pressure. Warm brown and orange flesh occupies the middle of a violet and brown darkness, with the strongest orange concentrated above the heads. The flare draws attention upwards, but the bent limbs keep returning it to the body. The darkest passages between the wing ribs make the orange flesh advance towards us. ^[1]

The figure below

The lower figure changes the rhythm. Pale flesh stands out against the rock, and its back is turned towards us. The shoulders and arms spread into a broad, uneven V, answering the larger wings above. One hand points towards the left edge; the other grips a long dark staff topped by a bright gold, flame-like form. These diverging gestures draw the eye sideways just where the upper body has pulled it inwards. ^[1]

Its anatomy is also emphatically muscular. The spine, shoulder blades and rounded haunches carry the light, while deep shadows divide the limbs. Small horns rise above its head. Blake gives this hybrid being enough human structure to make its pose legible, then disrupts that familiarity through the head and the crowded forms around it. The pale figure occupies the foreground with extraordinary clarity, although the exact relation of all its limbs to the rocky ground remains strange. ^[1]

A small sheep-like head appears beside it on the left. The contrast is striking: soft animal features sit close to the strongly modelled human back and the fierce upper apparition. The picture repeatedly brings different kinds of creature into close contact. Horn, muscle, wool, wing and flame meet without the intervals that would let each form settle into an independent portrait. ^[1]

The rock provides a rough division between the figures, but it offers little sense of shelter. Its sloping ridges carry attention towards the upper monster, while the staff connects the lower region with the space beside its knee. The composition feels bound together by overlapping gestures and contours. Looking from top to bottom becomes an experience of following power through the picture. ^[1]

Small human heads crowd the lower edge, far beneath the enormous winged body. Their reduced scale brings another kind of vulnerability into the scene. The principal figures fill the available space, while these faces press into a narrow strip at its foot. They give the fantastic encounter a human margin: the viewer can recognise beings who occupy the world over which the larger powers loom, even though the picture does not securely name them. ^[1]

Dragon, sea beast and earth beast

Revelation supplies a sequence of distinct beings. In chapter 12, a great red dragon threatens a woman and her child. The child is taken to God; war in heaven follows, and the dragon is cast down. The text identifies him as the Devil and Satan. At the chapter's end he turns against the woman's other offspring. His continuing violence belongs to a being who has already suffered defeat. ^[3]

Chapter 13 extends that conflict through delegated authority. A beast rises from the sea, combining features of leopard, bear and lion. The dragon gives it power, a throne and authority. People worship both the dragon and the beast; the beast speaks blasphemies and makes war against the saints. The narrative is concerned with the establishment and exercise of power as much as with extraordinary appearance. ^[3]

Another beast then comes from the earth. It possesses horns resembling a lamb's, but speaks like a dragon. It exercises the first beast's power in its presence and compels the world to worship it. Miracles contribute to the deception, including fire brought down from heaven. An image of the first beast receives life and demands worship on pain of death. The chapter draws these agencies together while keeping their functions distinct. ^[3]

That sequence helps the Rosenbach picture without turning every painted shape into a securely named diagram. The huge winged figure recalls the dragon, while the pale horned being below invites comparison with the beast from the earth. Their relationship can be read against the chapter's account of power exercised through a second agent. The force of the picture lies in the visible connection: the foreground figure performs its expansive gestures beneath the larger presence. ^{[1] [3]}

The lamb-like horns are particularly unsettling in this context. Revelation places an apparently gentle resemblance beside a destructive voice. Blake's pale figure likewise combines features that invite recognition with a body whose surrounding world is threatening. Its lighter colour gives it prominence, but lightness alone cannot establish innocence. The scriptural contrast encourages the viewer to look beyond the first impression of a form. ^{[1] [3]}

What the number belongs to

The number appears at the end of a passage about coercion. Revelation 13:16–17 describes a mark imposed on people across distinctions of wealth and status. Buying and selling depend upon possessing the mark, the beast's name or the number of its name. The final verse calls for understanding, describes it as the number of a man, and gives its value as six hundred and sixty-six. The famous figure therefore belongs to a narrative in which worship, violence and access to ordinary economic life become entangled. ^[3]

This makes the title more searching than a general label for evil. The chapter asks how people recognise and submit to authority, how appearances deceive them, and how participation can be enforced. The beasts' fantastic anatomy gives those questions an imaginable shape. Blake concentrates the drama into bodies and gestures, leaving the title to connect their visual force with the final demand for understanding. ^{[1] [3]}

No great numeral dominates the painted scene. The viewer faces flesh, wings, flame and the relationship between the figures. The title offers a textual point of entry, but it does not replace the work of looking. Knowing the number cannot explain why an arm points outward, why the larger creature folds across itself, or why the lower body shines so brightly against the rock. Those decisions make the biblical subject a particular image. ^[1]

The watercolour itself provides no secure basis for identifying the number with a named individual. It is more revealing to follow the actions described in Revelation and the relationships Blake makes visible. The chapter's closing appeal to wisdom remains open within a composition that shows power as impressive, crowded and disturbing. Its authority is made palpable before its claims have been judged. ^{[1] [3]}

A biblical design made within Butts's patronage

The picture belongs to Blake's sustained engagement with biblical subjects around the turn of the century. The editors of the William Blake Archive place most of the New Testament watercolours made for Thomas Butts around 1800–05. Their account identifies eight designs based on Revelation within the wider project. The Rosenbach sheet thus emerged from an extended practice of interpreting scripture through pictures, alongside subjects from the life of Christ and other parts of the New Testament. ^[14]

Blake's letter to Butts of 22 November 1802 explains the artistic ambitions he brought to that relationship. He defends the pictures already made for his patron, discussing colour, light, shade and the grandeur of long, continuous lines. He also insists on the value of his own distinctive manner. His discussion joins practical employment to a deeply personal investment in the work. ^[15]

The letter precedes the watercolour's approximate date and does not explain this particular design. It does help us understand why a small work on paper could carry such monumental bodies. Blake was measuring his pictures against the ambitions of historical painting. In the Rosenbach sheet, broad wing contours and the emphatic arrangement of limbs give the subject that scale of address, while ink and watercolour preserve a delicacy suited to close examination. ^{[1] [2] [15]}

Beside The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea

A comparison with The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea shows how much Blake could change within a related subject. In the National Gallery of Art watercolour, the dragon stands with widely planted legs above a creature emerging from turbulent water. His arms press down beside his body, and the lower beast looks upwards. The Gallery records the work as part of the Bible for Thomas Butts and dates it about 1805. ^[16]

The Rosenbach picture compresses that relationship into a different arrangement. The upper figure folds its limbs across itself, while the foreground being turns its back to us and opens its arms. The sea picture makes the rising beast's upward attention conspicuous; here the pointing hand and raised staff direct attention across the scene. The pointing figure appears to direct events, even while it remains enclosed beneath the wings. ^{[1] [16]}

Both compositions concern relationships of power, but their poses produce different experiences of it. Standing above a dependent creature, the Washington dragon appears to preside. The Rosenbach monster's contracted body and immense wings create an oppressive canopy over the lower action. The comparison rewards attention to what Blake does with the biblical material: a change of stance, viewpoint and gesture can alter the whole encounter. ^{[1] [3] [16]}

An image that keeps demanding attention

When the William Blake Archive published this work in 2012, its editors placed it among Blake's powerful explorations of the apocalyptic sublime. The term describes an encounter with overwhelming forms whose disturbing attraction keeps the viewer looking. Here, the careful delineation of the bodies makes their extraordinary anatomy especially persuasive. ^[17]

The work also appeared in the Block Museum's William Blake and the Age of Aquarius, held from 23 September 2017 to 11 March 2018. The exhibition considered Blake's importance to postwar American artists and the counterculture of the 1960s, placing original works beside later responses to his art and ideas. The Rosenbach loan brought this biblical watercolour into a setting concerned with imagination, independence and resistance to authority. ^[1]

That later setting opens another route back into the image's central tension. The enormous upper figure commands the field; below it, the pale body gestures towards a world beyond the frame. Revelation gives power a chain of agents and demands discernment from those who encounter it. Blake makes that demand visible through a composition in which commanding appearances remain compelling enough to require a second, more attentive look. ^{[1] [3]}