CB asks: “There is a post on Facebook about the drink called Monster. It claims to have 666 written on the can. According to Snopes.com there is nothing to this claim. Any thoughts?”

The “Monster Energy drinks are the work of Satan” claims have been circulating for at least eight years now. However, in 2014, an author and Christian activist named Christine Weick made a video about the claims which was very convincing. It not only managed to garner seven million hits on YouTube but also revived the rumor.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, Weick and others claim that the claw-like “M” symbol on the can actually spells the numeral 666 in Hebrew. She shows how the Hebrew numeral for the number six, known as the letter “vav”  looks just like the “M” on the can when three 6’s are placed in a row.

The Monster logo also features a cross in the letter “o” which becomes inverted when the can is tipped to drink. An inverted cross is a well-known occult symbol.

Weick also points out that the slogan on the can reads, “Unleash the beast”.

However, Weick’s theory has been debunked for various reasons.

First, the company denies any connection with the satanic in its product imaging or design. In an interview with the Christian Post, a representative of the company’s consumer relations department named Janet (who strangely declined to give her last name) said Weick’s theories were not true. “The M claw represents [the letter] M scratched on the can and doesn’t represent anything else,” she said.

She added that the “unleash the beast” slogan was “just a saying” and that “anybody could represent it the way that they want to.”

Janet did not specifically address the cross in the letter “o” but did say that anything found on the Monster energy drink could be “open to interpretation” which no one could argue with.

While I didn’t find this interview to be particularly persuasive, other evidence against Weick’s theories were more convincing.

For instance, the main premise of her claim is that the “M” in monster is the Hebrew number “666” which she says is written as three “vavs” (a vav is the number 6 in Hebrew). In reality, the number 666 in Hebrew is not written as vav vav vav but as “six hundred and sixty six” which would be spelled סרתו (samech resh tav vav).

Another issue that I couldn’t seem to get around is the fact that Weick has somewhat of a reputation for controversy. She was the woman who managed to get into an invitation-only Islamic prayer meeting which was held inside Washington’s National Cathedral (a controversy in itself at the time) only to disrupt the service and shout, “We have built, and allowed you here in mosques across this country. Why can’t you worship in your mosque, and leave our churches alone?”

While I applaud her for expressing outrage over the event that scandalized Christians across the country, this wasn’t exactly the way to handle it.

I also discovered that she has been living out of her car while touring book fairs and other events touting her book entitled Explain This! A Verse by Verse Explanation of the Book of Revelation.

Having said all this, I must say that the devil can influence anyone and at any time if they let him so he may very well have been influencing people who did the design work for Monster energy drinks. This could easily explain why they chose some of these images for their product. But to imply anything more would be pure speculation.