Especially for today - Friday the 13th - Revelation, chapter 13, verse 18:
"Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."
666.
Too many Dennis Wheatley occult novels in my younger days? No: for most of my adult life I have taken a Proctor & Gamble view of "things that go bump in the night": I am a bit of a sceptic.
It is an astonishing fact that some years ago the US conglomerate Proctor & Gamble (turnover of $82.6 billion in 2011, and makers of Head & Shoulders anti-dandruff shampoo, Pampers disposable nappies and Venus lady razors among other things) was accused of following the beast, of Satanism, because of the logo the company was then using.
It consisted of a crescent moon - with an old man's face, long hair and beard - gazing at 13 stars. But despite the 13 stars representing the 13 original colonies that formed the United States, and the stars and the moon being a reference to the fact that Proctor & Gamble started out by making candles, by the early 1980s the legend of corporate Satanism was under way.
No matter what harassed company executives tried to say, the conspiracy theorists had it that three curls of the moon's beard were mirror images of the number 666, that the beard and hair that formed either extremity of the moon's crescent shape were actually Satan's horns, and that the clincher was another quote from Revelation, this time from Chapter 12, verse 1: "And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of 12 stars."
Ah ha! - now this was real blasphemy - adding a 13th star and substituting a man's face in the company logo was clearly Satan's evil reworking of the heavenly symbol referred to above. Deluged by hostile letters and telephone messages, Proctor & Gamble eventually caved in. In 1985 they discontinued the use of the controversial logo. The episode remains an extraordinary, and disturbing, episode of US corporate history.
Across an ocean, a group of us once took to a boat on a lough in County Fermanagh, quite close to the border between Northern Ireland and Eire.
But that autumn day the wily local trout proved stubborn; and so, encouraged by a guide book, we rowed to a small island and tied up our boat with new entertainment in mind - that of exploring the ruins of a sixth century abbey founded by St Molaise.
Now at this point I should point out that I used to have a thing about climbing - hills, cliffs, trees, once some distance up the flagpole at Murrayfield after an international, were all fair game - so it was inevitable that the remains of the abbey's square tower would be irresistible. To shouts of "come down, you idiot!" I was up its crumbling walls in a jiffy.
Breathless, I soon arrived at the stone floored top level of the tower. Open to the sky, it had four arched windows (one of which I had just come through) aligned to the points of the compass. Choosing the one that looked back to where we had left the boat, I leaned outwards and downwards.
"Made it!" I shouted "Told you I would!" And then pulling my head back in, and pausing to take in the ancient solitude of the place - when was the last time someone had been up here? - for some unknown reason I turned my head and looked up at the inside of the point of the window arch directly above me.
There, three quarters of an inch high and in the finest black calligraphy, was the number "666". If I was up that tower quick, then I was down again quicker still.
Of course it must have been kids playing the fool - or someone having a laugh - I knew that. But all the same, great care had been taken writing the number, and unless you knew where to look for it, then you would have been highly unlikely to have found it. Indeed, it was pure and extraordinary chance that I did.
Since then I have given up climbing old towers. And in a rational age I can see that the 666 stuff is all hocus pocus: after all, some experts have translated the number as 616, rather than 666, so the confusion is there to be seen.
Nevertheless - I have never forgotten that sinister find in Ireland. Still, it hasn't stopped me from using Head & Shoulders. But maybe not today, not on Friday the 13th
