THE NUMBERS: THE KEY AND THE BOX

References to LOST's mythical Numbers and the tie to a forgotten metaphor:

The Numbers were stamped on the Hatch door. The Hatch was created in the 1970s before the Purge (around 1979). When Hurley saw the numbers on the Hatch door, he tried to stop Locke from opening it because the Numbers were cursed.

Sam Toomey was a Pacific naval officer who heard the Numbers during his time at a listening post, some 16 years before Flight 815 crashed on the island (around 1988). His widow said that Sam used the Numbers, which brought him bad luck. Eventually, Sam committed suicide.

Around the same time, Rousseau and her crew her the Numbers on a radio transmission. When they were shipwrecked on the island, they traced the transmission to a radio tower near the Black Rock. Soon, Rousseau said her crew got "sick" and died. She went to the tower to change the message from the Numbers to her distress call. She also believed that the Numbers caused bad luck and her pain.

Leonard, a patient at the Santa Rosa Mental Hospital, heard the Numbers from Sam. Hurley met Leonard at the SRMH. Leonard would constantly repeat the Numbers over and over and over again. When Hurley goes to the hospital to tell Leonard that he used the Numbers to win the lottery in 2004, Leonard becomes hysterical, screaming Hurley had "opened the box" and he must get away from those Numbers or it "won't stop."

So, Leonard basically told Hurley that the Numbers were a KEY that unlocked a BOX that would cause a string of BAD events.

The only other major reference to a BOX was when the term was used by Ben to explain one of the secrets of the island to Locke in "The Man from Tallahassee:"

Benjamin Linus: Let me put it so you'll understand. Picture a box. You know something about boxes, don't you John? What if I told you that, somewhere on this island, there is a very large box and whatever you imagined, whatever you wanted to be in it when you opened that box, there it would be? What would you say about that, John?

The man Ben claimed to have delivered from the Magic Box was Anthony Cooper, Locke's father. Cooper said that he was driving along, was hit in a car accident, and then suddenly found himself bound and gagged in the room. Cooper believed he had died, and that they were all dead.

When Locke pressed Ben for more about the Magic Box in "The Brig," Ben snapped back that "the Box is a metaphor, John." Despite this, Ben continued to maintain that by some agency things that people on the island wanted or needed would show up.

Tracing back the Numbers as referenced in the show, the Numbers appear earlier than Rousseau or Hurley's knowledge of them. In the Hatch, the Numbers were used as code to ward off a disastrous event. In ancient cultures, numbers, chants, and spells were keys used to ward off evil spirits.