Up to date on your demonology? Did you know Hell has ambassadors to different countries?

France, England, Italy, Russia, Turkey and Switzerland get a guernsey from various princes of hell. Belphegor, Mammon, Belial, Rimmon, Hutgin and Martinet, respectively.

Reason I ask stems from a couple of recent oddities. Started with the series Prime Target and movie Tuner, where Leo Woodall plays mathematical and musical savants. One’s an espionage thriller about encryption codes and prime numbers; the other, safecracking and piano prodigies.

I also stumbled onto Belphegor’s Prime, a mirror-image number with a 1 at the start, then 13 zeroes, 666 – the Number of the Beast – another 13 zeroes and a final 1.

Pronounced one quintillion, sixty-six billiard, six hundred billion and one, it’s 31 digits, which is 13 backwards. Awful fierce bad luck, as the Hibernians say.

This palindrome can only be divided by one and itself. It was discovered by number-cruncher Harvey Dubner and named for Belphegore by author Clifford A. Pickover; even has its own symbol, an upside down pi.

Belphegor

Next, Armstrong Creek’s academic Dzavid Haveric dropped me a message.

Dzavid, author of Australia in Muslim Discovery, says Persian polymath Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi plotted a map of Australia’s north coast back in 824AD.

Al-Khwarizmi also founded algebra, and worked in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, where Woodall winds up in Prime Target, researching a prime codebreaker villains will happily kill for.

Baghdad’s House of Wisdom

Dzavid, yeah with a ‘Z’,  has another discovery. He’s been studying Macassan sailors who traded with northern Aboriginal communities from the 1400s exchanging trepang, sea cucumbers, destined for China.

He argues history has largely overlooked the Islamic dimension of these encounters, focusing only on trade and fishing.

Citing archaeological, anthropological and oral evidence, he suggests Sufi-influenced Islam blended with Aboriginal Dreaming in shared rituals, language and art, inter-marriage and simple mosques.

In short, he says Indigenous identity is intertwined with Islamic heritage, and urges a rethinking of Australian history. Might put a different light on welcome to country for the Reconciliation agenda.

Devilishly hard to know who else was hanging about back in the day. Geelong’s late Ken McIntyre’s Secret Discovery of Australia argued long and hard that the Portuguese made it to Corio Bay in 1522.

A 1496 Italian painting of the Madonna and Child, Madonna della Vittoria, by Andrea Mantegna, features a mysterious sulphur-crested cockatoo over Mary’s head, suggesting Euro visits to Oz predating the Poms, Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish.

Stories also persist of kangaroos in China’s imperial zoo back in 338 BC, knowledge of the boomerang, and missions to find marsupials in a distant southern land, even if they fall more into the category of legend.

Tricky stuff. Thinking I might have to defer to Belphegor. He is, after all, the demon of discoveries and inventions. Maybe if Hell had an ambassador to Australia ….

Closest I’ve found suggests AC-DC’s Bon Scott, which seems a bit harsh. His Highway to Hell was more was more impish than diabolical. Besides, it’s Angus actually sports the horns.

So does Kylie, come to think of it, but shhh don’t tell Albo.

This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 21 July 2026