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'Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites... opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet.'

Resh is the Hebrew letter of value 200, on path 30, connecting Hod and Yesod. Its tarot is The Sun.

Six hundred and sixty-six is the number of the beast, and the most defensible reading of it is also the oldest: the Hebrew letters of Nero Caesar's name give 666, and the shorter spelling gives 616 — precisely the variant found in Papyrus 115 — which is the strongest single argument that the number is a name and not a symbol. The tradition has also read it as Sorath, the spirit of the Sun in Agrippa's table, whose letters סורת sum to 666, and that reading is modern.

Abrasax is the name the Basilidian tradition gives the ruler of the 365 heavens, and the 365 of the name is the number of the days: one heaven for each day of the year, which is the whole system inside a word. The name is carved on stones and spoken in the magical papyri as a name of power, and it survives into modern occultism in the Latin form Abraxas. It is the one isopsephy in this file whose number and doctrine are reported together by an ancient source.

The name of Mithras is given the value 365 in a body of modern writing on the mysteries, and the value requires the epsilon spelling: the more usual ΜΙΘΡΑΣ is 360, the circle of the year without its odd days. That difference between 360 and 365 is the whole question, and the tradition's own iconography of the lion-headed figure does not settle it.

Resh is 'head', one of the seven doubles (r/rh), and the letter of beginning — reshit — and of the head that the tradition's anatomy makes the seat of the soul. Its 200 is the second of the hundreds, and resh is the initial of both rosh and reshit, which the handlists treat as the letter's whole doctrine.

Three hundred and sixty-five is the year and the count of prohibitions: the tradition pairs 248 positive commandments with 365 negative ones so that the 613 cover the body's members and the year's days at once, and the human being becomes a calendar as well as a body. In the Greek world the same number is the value of Abrasax and, in a spelling that supplies an epsilon, of Mithras — which is why 365 is the number where the two traditions meet most visibly.