The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers obtained by adding up the two numbers preceding the next number in line. Starting from 0 and 1 the progression results in 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc. For math lovers here is the formula:
xn = xn-1 + xn-2
The sequence was introduced by one Leonardo Pisano Fibonacci around 1200 a.D. along with many other mathematical novelties. Fibonacci stumbled upon that magical sequence while thinking about rabbits. Those were not ordinary rabbits as you shall see. For those not into mathematical formulations, here is a practical equivalent to understand the trick. Fibonacci’s thought experiment begins with two fresh-born rabbits, one male and one female. Rabbits begin to reproduce when they are one month old. The gestation period of a rabbit lasts one month. After reaching sexual maturity, female rabbits give birth every month. A female rabbit gives birth to one male rabbit and one female rabbit. Fibonacci rabbits do not die. Watch out, it does not take much time to fill the known universe with imaginary rabbits.
The idea has often been used in fiction. in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, the mysterious black monoliths reproduce in a similar manner until they fill the planet Jupiter, transforming it into a star; and Charles Williams, in his novel Many Dimensions, imagines a gold bar — the source of King Solomon’s riches — that once cut in half, delivers not two halves but two identical gold bars of the same original size. It is quite likely that God used the trick to pull the whole universe from the depths of a quantically minute speck of energy. You guessed right: the same principle applies but using particles instead of rabbits. Nature is filled with graphic representations of a typical Fibonacci series. Look them up, they are everywhere.
This math-themed prologue only means to introduce you to the following concept:
The big things of God begin very small.
In the account of the Miracle of the Loaves found in Matthew 14:13-21, Our Lord takes two little fish, and five loaves to make enough food to feed a crowd of five-thousand. St John’s account of the same miracle — see John 6:9 — adds that “a little child” provides the original bread and fish. To make the point even more clear, the child provides Jesus with the humblest kind of bread, barley bread. In the end there are twelve baskets filled with leftovers, one for each of the doubting apostles who could not possibly imagine how to feed the crowd. Jesus was teaching his bishops how to the Church would grow.
The least shall become a thousand, and a little one a most strong nation: I the Lord will suddenly do this thing in its time. Isaiah 60:22.
Take for example the very name of Jesus that hints at the Tetragrammaton, the Holy Name of God, beginning with the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the yod. “Jesus” means “Yahweh is Salvation” and since Jesus Himself is the Savior of mankind, it is hard not to notice that the story of our salvation starts with his name. The greatest name ever begins with a letter no bigger than the commas you are seeing on your computer screen when reading this text. In Matthew 1:18-21 we learn about how that name was revealed to St Joseph:
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’
The first news about the mighty task of saving all of mankind that ever was and ever will be … begins with a tiny yod. Now, travel back in time to the day that Blessed Mary was conceived — a moment forever hidden from human eyes by God’s wisdom. Two cells, so small that thousands of them could fit in the dot ending this sentence, were touched by God in preparation for the Mystery of the Incarnation. No one saw it, no one but God knew that a miracle was happening.
Using your imagination, enter in the vortex of time and go back to the days of Genesis 3:15, when God condemned the wicked serpent:
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.
Adam and Eve had inside them the seed of all mankind. From one man and one woman, God was going to make all the men and women that will ever live but one, “the offspring of the woman” was already inside Eve, ready to travel all the way to Calvary. Through Set, and Noah, Shem, Arpachshad, Serug, Nahor, Terah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, Salmon, Obed, Boaz, Jesse, David … thousands of years all the way to the New Eve: Mary of Nazareth the Mother of the promised Messiah. So when you see St Peter’s Basilica, read about the Crusades, or Columbus sailing the ocean blue to find the American continent, to Frank Borman reading from the book of Genesis while circling the moon in the Apollo 8 … you are witnessing a marvel that started long ago in the darkness of Eve’s womb. Who dares to say that Sacred History is boring? Fibonacci never imagined that he had stumbled into God’s toolbox.
Solovyov and the Great Gig in the Sky
Allow me to quote myself for brevity. In The Great Unveiling we read a few weeks ago:
Vladimir Solovyov, a Russian mystic, philosopher, poet, and writer (not associated with Donald Trump in any way) was born on January 28, 1853 and died on August 13, 1900 only 17 years before the apparitions of Our lady of Fatima and the events of the October Revolution. He promoted the reunion of Eastern Orthodoxy with Rome. In his book Three Conversations, he tells a sort of prophetic tale. I do not have that volume and I am forced to quote from memory, I hope to be as faithful to it as possible. Solovyov tells the story of an enormous conflict between Russia and forces coming from the East. During that conflict, a Pope called Peter II succeeds in uniting Protestantism, and Western Orthodoxy to the Catholic Church after a great sign is seen in the heavens, a woman clothed with the sun. Please remember he is writing this in the late 1800’s, decades before the Apparitions of Fatima and the Virgin Mary’s call for the conversion of Russia, that is the return of Russia to the Catholic communion abandoned in 1054, or in other words, the triumph of the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Heart. The catalyst of this great reunification is the Signum Magnum, the glorious vision of the woman in the heavens, the reappearance of the live Ark of the Covenant seen in the vision of St John.
According to Pope Paul VI, this great sign is no other than Our Blessed Mother, Mary of Nazareth. He introduces his Apostolic Exhortation of May 13, 1967 with these words:
The great sign which the Apostle John saw in heaven, “a woman clothed with the sun,” is interpreted by the sacred Liturgy, not without foundation, as referring to the most blessed Mary, the mother of all men by the grace of Christ the Redeemer.
Mary as Signum Magnum is no longer the little girl growing in Nazareth. If we read the story of the Annunciation and we do it like Catholics, following the example of the Fathers of the Church … we will notice a few things. Give Luke 1:26-38 a try and — if you are Catholic — try not to read it as a Protestant, and if you are Protestant, please find out about the Catholic way to read our Bible.
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Hail! full of grace! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.
Enter the scene, stand there in your imagination. Imago veritas docebit, the image will lead you to the truth. The angel entered the room. Angels had appeared to others before — Joshua, and also Zechariah the father of John the Baptist, for example. From the few angelical apparitions described in Scripture, we know they usually begin calming the fears of the poor sinful human they are visiting. The nearness of perfect holiness causes a natural dread in us sons and daughters of Eve. Mary’s interaction with the angel is different. She feels no fear, and that is a clear indication of her spiritual perfection. Of course that is confirmed by the angel himself when he calls her kecharitomene, full of grace. Mary is a perfect vessel filled to completion with the grace of God. In Nazareth, she was just a little child but that poor maiden of Nazareth will grow in grace to be the Signum Magnum in the fullness of time.
Spiritual perfection contains all the grace that God can give. Notice also that she is not surprised to see the angel. In fact, what intrigues young Mary is the angel’s greeting. We can deduct from this that Mary was familiar with heavenly company. Perfection has its privileges. From Genesis we learn that Adam and Eve could dialog with God when they were perfect. If an angel was to visit me in a similar fashion, I would most likely pay no attention to the greeting. I would be paralyzed by the experience of the numinous. From Mary’s calmed reaction I can deduct that she knew her angelic guardians from infancy. Any princess anywhere has bodyguards to protect her. The future Queen of Heaven deserves no less.
Two-thousand years later, we know one thing: we are closer to the day we will see Mary as the Great Sign in Heaven than we are to her days as a young maid in Nazareth. I for one, hope so. Vladimir Solovyov, who died in 1900, thought the days of the Signum Magnum were approaching fast. How different Mary will look to the eyes of all mankind contemplating her like poor lost children, suddenly seeing their Mother coming to the rescue!
It has happened before for our benefit
Anyone who has studied Holy Scripture seriously, knows very well that God never does anything important without warning us first. He patiently sent prophets to Israel, and history is filled with prophetic types representing various important events. Something like the Signum Magnum surely has to be preceded by a prophetic model.
For the Lord God does nothing without revealing it to his servants the prophets. Amos 3:7.
While I was researching material for my recent book Guadalupe: A River of Light, I noticed many parallels between the present global civilization and the Aztec Empire as it was around the time of the Conquest. The monumental scale and number of the human sacrifices demanded by Aztec religion reminded me of today’s millions of abortions worldwide. The cannibalistic and ritual homosexual practices of the Aztec priests, and their belief that they were responsible for sustaining “the environment” by their murderous ways, look truly modern. Their conscientious worship of demons reminds me of the growing satanic practices of our day. The institutionalization of war, the high taxation, and the state use of terror to control the population did not go unnoticed either but what impressed me the most, was the way that the Aztec Empire ended.
There were old Aztec oracles about the return of Quetzalcoatl, the benevolent deity. All those prophecies pointed at a certain date. Curiously enough, that was the date when Cortez and his men arrived in Mexico, on Good Friday 1519. There were also ominous events: three comets in one year — one of them Halley’s — a strange silent tsunami in Lake Texcoco that killed many unsuspecting coastal inhabitants in their sleep; a big earthquake; and many strange forebodings of a great disaster, including a vision by Princess Papantzin, sister of Emperor Moctezuma who died and resurrected three days later, only to bring her brother the bad news that white bearded men were crossing the sea to conquer his kingdom to put an end to human sacrifice.
Hernan Cortez finally arrived in Mexico and that was the end for the mighty Aztecs. The Spaniards who were barely out of the Middle Ages conquered a civilization that was barely out of the Neolithic. From both nations a new Christian nation was born in a few brief decades.
After the Conquest, ten years of Spanish domination went by when a great sign appeared to a native Chichimeca, a man called Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, “the speaking eagle.” Our Lady appeared to our humble saint and the encounter changed forever the history of Mexico and the Americas. The miracle confirming the apparitions of Our Lady took place on the day of the winter solstice, 12 December 1531. In the skies above Tepeyac Hill the constellation of Virgo and the planets showed something strongly resembling the image of Apocalypse 12:
A Great Sign Appeared in Heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars.
Recently it was discovered that the stars in the mantle of the miraculous image of Our lady of Guadalupe represent the exact position of the main constellations on 12 December 1531.
The Signum Magnum in our age
After the apparitions at Tepeyac Hill there were millions of conversions among the natives. In Guadalupe: A River of Light you can read how the miraculous image spoke to the Mexicans in a way that no Spanish evangelizer could. That was the prophetic type of the Signum Magnum. Are we going to be the privileged generation that will see the realization of that type?
Who has heard of such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall a land be born in one day? Shall a nation be delivered in one moment? Yet as soon as Zion was in labor she delivered her children. Isaiah 66:8
Let us suppose for a second that the scenario imagined by Vladimir Solovyov comes to pass. The great sign in Heaven suddenly appears and draws all Christians to gather around the successor of St Peter. By its very nature, a sign of that kind is sure to cause the conversion of many non-Christians also. What follows is easy to guess because it will resemble the immense education effort that followed the massive conversion of the Mexican people after 1531 when nearly ten million had to be catechized at once. Just imagine the same thing on a worldwide scale.
Something much larger than the Pentecost of 33 a.D. could be approaching. Something as surprising as the miraculous catch of fish described in John 21:1-14. In fact, both the great catch of fish and the conversion of Mexico after 1531 seem to be prophetic models of a larger future event. Will the Signum Magnum trigger a worldwide conversion similar to the repentance of Nineveh described in the Book of Jonah?
Related articles in Emmett O’Reagan’s blog: