Mary Stewart Relfe



Mary Stewart Relfe was the author of When Your Money Fails (1981) and The New Money System (1982). Her thesis? The number 666 is beginning to appear everywhere, a sign that Satan and/or Satanists are taking over the world economic system.

Her two books are illustrated with numerous reproductions of things like license plates that happen to have 666 on them (which happens every 1 out of 1000 plates), bills and credit card statements showing 666 somewhere on them (such as in somebody's account number), and the new modernized logos for some U.S. government agencies adopted during the Jimmy Carter administration that look like a stylized 666 if you use your imagination and stare at them long enough. The Trilateral Commission's logo also looks like a stylized 666. She also mentions the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the U.K. as hard evidence Satan is taking over, specifically the opening line "I am the Antichrist" which she misquotes anyway (as well as the name of the band which she calls "Sex Pistol.")

Not one to pass up the chance to indulge in Antichrist-naming, she named him in her first book: Anwar Sadat. Oops... he was assassinated later that same year. Also, God personally spoke to her and told her the Rapture would come right smack in the middle of the 7-year Great Tribulation, and not at the beginning as most evangelicals believed.

Most notably, her second book, The New Money System, was the source of the now-widespread belief that the then-new Universal Product Codes contain a hidden 666 encoded in them.

And cable TV lines were being outfitted with death rays built into the cables that would make stray dogs disappear by melting them.

Apparently embarrassed that the Antichrist hadn't yet made everyone take the Mark of the Beast, she completely changed the subject for her third book, Cure Of All Ills (1987), which is a study of Christian revivalism inspired by the work of Charles Finney in the early 1800s. However she since got back into impending-rise-of-the-Antichrist end times mania with "sky is falling" books about Y2K and 9/11.

Her books rely heavily on citations to such credible sources as the National Enquirer, Liberty Lobby's Spotlight newspaper, the books Christ Returns By 1988 by Colin Deal and New Money Or None by Willard Cantelon, the Southwest Radio Church, and televangelist Jack Van Impe (whom she cannot decide whether to spell his last name Impe or Empe).

End Time
While Antichrist doesn't seem to have shown up, Relfe's personal End Time can be precisely dated to August 7, 2011. She was 81.