Episode 199: Moloch’s Summer BBQ Spectacular

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  • From The Dead Past, Isaac Asimov, 1956: The Carthaginians, it seemed, worshiped Moloch, in the form of a hollow, brazen idol with a furnace in its belly. At times of national crisis, infants were hurled alive into the flames. They were given sweetmeats just before the crucial moment, in order that the sacrifice not be ruined by displeasing cries of panic. The drums rolled just after the moment to drown out the few seconds of infant shrieking. The parents were present, presumably gratified, for the sacrifice was pleasing to the gods. Potterley frowned at all this: Vicious lies, he told her, on the part of Carthage’s enemies. Such propagandistic lies were not uncommon: According to the Greeks, the ancient Hebrews worshiped an ass’s head; according to the Romans, the primitive Christians sacrificed pagan children in the catacombs. “Then they didn’t do it?” asked Caroline. “I’m sure they didn’t,” he replied. “Human sacrifice is commonplace in primitive cultures, but Carthage in her great days was not a primitive culture. The Greeks and Romans might have mistaken some Carthaginian symbolism for the full rite, either out of ignorance or out of malice. Could people fight so for a city and a way of life as bad as the ancient writers painted it? Hannibal was a better general than any Roman, and his soldiers were absolutely faithful to him. Even his bitterest enemies praised him. They talk of Moloch, a twenty-five-hundred-year-old canard started by the Greeks and Romans. They had their own slaves, their crucifixions and torture, their gladiatorial contests. They weren’t holy. The Moloch story is war propaganda, the big lie. I can prove it was a lie. I can prove it and, by Heaven, I will. 
• • From Salammbo, Gustave Flaubert, 1862: The temple of Moloch was built at the foot of a steep defile in a sinister spot. The night was gloomy, a greyish fog seemed to weigh upon the sea, which beat against the cliff with a noise of death-rattles and sobs. As soon as the doorway was crossed one found oneself in a vast quadrangular court. In the centre rose a mass of architecture with eight equal faces surmounted by cupolas thronged around a kind of rotunda, from which sprang a cone with a re-entrant curve and terminating in a ball on the summit. Fires were burning in cylinders of filigree-work fitted upon poles, which men were carrying to and fro. Here and there on the flag-stones huge lions couched like sphinxes, living symbols of the devouring sun. Here it was that the Ancients laid aside their sticks of narwhal horn, for a law which was always observed inflicted the punishment of death upon anyone entering the meeting with any kind of weapon. These men were generally thick-set, with curved noses like those of the Assyrian colossi. In a few, however, the more prominent cheek-bone, the taller figure, and the narrower foot betrayed an African origin and nomad ancestors. Those who lived continually shut up in their counting-houses had pale faces; others showed in theirs the severity of the desert, and strange jewels sparkled on all the fingers of their hands, which were burnt by unknown suns. Part of a wall in the temple of Moloch was thrown down in order to draw out the brazen god without touching the ashes of the altar. Then came all the inferior forms of the Divinity: Baal-Samin, god of celestial space; Baal-Peor, god of the sacred mountains; Baal-Zeboub, god of corruption. Before each tabernacle a man balanced a large vase of smoking incense on his head. Masters of the finances, governors of provinces, sailors, and the numerous horde employed at funerals were making their way towards the tabernacles; out of deference to Moloch they adorned themselves with the most splendid jewels. A fire of aloes, cedar, and laurel was burning. The children ascended slowly, their wrists and ankles tied. The appetite of the god was never appeased: He ever wished for more. The faithful came into the passages, dragging their children, and they beat them in order to make them let go. The instrument-players sometimes stopped through exhaustion; then the cries of the mothers might be heard, and the frizzling of the fat as it fell upon the coals.
• • From The King James Bible, 1611: Thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy god. Whosoever he be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, that giveth any of his seed unto Molec, he shall surely be put to death. And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people because he hath given unto Molech to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name. And if the people of the land do any ways hide their eyes from the man, when he giveth of his seed unto Molech, and kill him not, then I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go a whoring after him to commit whoredom with Molech. Solomon did evil in the sight of the lord and built a high place for Chemosh, the abomination, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon. And he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech. For this city hath been to me as a provocation of mine anger and they have turned unto me the back, and not the face, and they set their abominations in the house, which is called by my name, to defile it. Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings, O house of Israel? Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch: and [so] I will carry you away beyond Babylon.
• • • From The Cult of Moloch, Jewish Virtual LIbrary, 2017: Evidence concerning Moloch worship in ancient Israel is found in the Bible. The laws of the Holiness Code speak about giving or passing children to Moloch Deuteronomy speaks of “passing [one’s] son or daughter through fire,” although Moloch is not named in the Deuteronomy passage. Some scholars interpret the phrase “pass through” as a reference to a divinatory or protective rite in which children were passed through a fire but not physically harmed. However, the same phrase is found in an unmistakable context of burning in Numbers. Psalms speaks of child sacrifice to the unnamed idols of Canaan; prophetic sources like Jeremiah and Ezekiel speak disapprovingly of sacrificing children to Yahweh. Only in Jeremiah 32 is Moloch mentioned by name, and there he is associated with Baal. As the classical sources have it, the sacrifices of children at Carthage, a colony founded by Phoenicians on the coast of Northeast Tunisia, usually came after a defeat and a great disaster – a religious practice based upon an ancient mythological tradition. The accepted view since Abraham Geiger is that Moloch is a mis-vocalization of the word melekh, for “king.” Since it is unlikely that one particular god who is not especially famous would be singled out for mention while other prominent gods are not mentioned by name in the Torah even once, Molech has been interpreted to mean “lambe” or “vow,” while some scholars understood the term as referring to the human sacrifice itself. The most plausible explanation is, as has already been suggested, that the term means “king of humankind,” and is the epithet of the god to whom the inscription is dedicated. The word “king” was indeed a common attribute of the deities in the Phoenician-Punic sphere.
      • As already indicated above, the sources speak about passing children to Moloch in fire. According to the rabbinic interpretation, this prohibition is against passing children through fire and then delivering them to the pagan priests–an initiation rite.  A similar non-sacrificial tradition, perhaps more ancient, is found in the Book of Jubilees connecting intermarrriage or rather the marrying off of one’s children to pagans with the sin of Moloch. The common denominator of all these traditions is the understanding of Moloch worship as the transfer of Jewish children to paganism either by delivering them directly to pagan priests or by procreation with a pagan woman. This tradition is in keeping with the general rabbinic tendency to make biblical texts relevant to their audiences, who were more likely to be attracted to Greco-Roman cults and pagan women than to the sacrifice of humans to a long-forgotten god. This figurative interpretation was accepted by the fact that Ahaz, who opened the door to Assyrian culture and religion, was the first king to indulge in the worship of Moloch, along with other practices such as the burning of incense on the roofs.  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-cult-of-moloch 
• • From Moloch, Isidore Singer & Geor, Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906: The motive for these sacrifices is not far to seek. Micah says, “Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” In the midst of the disasters which were befalling the nation, men felt that if the favor of Yhwh could be regained it was worth any price. Other tribes worshiped their gods with offerings of children, so in their desperation the Israelites did the same. For some reason, perhaps because not all the priestly and prophetic circles approved of the movement, they made the offerings not in the Temple but at an altar or pyre in the valley of Hinnom. 1 Kings calls Molech the “abomination of the children of Ammon”; it was formerly assumed that this worship was an imitation of an Ammonite cult, but little is known of the Ammonite religion; because child-sacrifice was a prominent feature of the worship of Phoenician gods, Moore seeks to prove that the worship of Moloch was introduced from Phoenicia. Jeremiah declares that Yhwh had not commanded these sacrifices, while Ezekiel says Yhwh polluted the Israelites in their offerings by permitting them to sacrifice their first-born so that through chastisement they might know god’s authority. The fact, therefore, now generally accepted by critical scholars, is that  human sacrifices were offered to Yhwh as King or Counselor of the nation and that the Prophets disapproved of it and denounced it because it was introduced from outside as an imitation of a heathen cult and because of its barbarity. In course of time “Melek” was changed to “Molech” to still further stigmatize the rites. https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10937-moloch-molech 
• • From Ancient Carthaginians really did sacrifice their children, Oxford University Press, 2014: A collaborative paper by academics from institutions across the globe, including Oxford University, suggests that Carthaginian parents ritually sacrificed young children as an offering to the gods. The paper argues that well-meaning attempts to interpret the ‘tophets’ – ancient infant burial grounds – simply as child cemeteries are misguided. In the 1970, scholars began to argue that the theory was simply anti-Carthaginian propaganda, but Dr Josephine Quinn of Oxford said: ‘It’s becoming increasingly clear that the stories about Carthaginian child sacrifice are true. This is something the Romans and Greeks said the Carthaginians did and it was part of the popular history of Carthage in the 18th and 19th centuries. But in the 20th century, people increasingly took the view that this was racist propaganda against a political enemy and that Carthage should be saved from this terrible slander. What we are saying now is that the archaeological, literary, and documentary evidence for child sacrifice is overwhelming and that instead of dismissing it out of hand, we should try to understand it.’ The city-state of ancient Carthage was a Phoenician colony located in what is now Tunisia from around 800BC until 146BC, when it was destroyed by the Romans. Children – both male and female, and mostly a few weeks old – were sacrificed by the Carthaginians at locations known as tophets. Dr Quinn said: ‘People have tried to argue that these archaeological sites are cemeteries for children who were stillborn or died young, but quite apart from the fact that a weak, sick or dead child would be a pretty poor offering to a god, and that animal remains are found in the same sites treated in exactly the same way, it’s hard to imagine how the death of a child could count as the answer to a prayer. It’s very difficult for us to recapture people’s motivations for carrying out this practice or why parents would agree to it; perhaps it was out of profound religious piety, or a sense that the good the sacrifice could bring the family or community as a whole outweighed the life of the child. We also have to remember the high level of mortality among children.” The backlash against the notion of Carthaginian child sacrifice began in the second half of the 20th century and was led by scholars from Tunisia and Italy, the very countries in which tophets have been found. Perhaps the very reason the people who established Carthage and its neighbours left their original home of Phoenicia – modern-day Lebanon – was because others there disapproved of their religious practices. Child abandonment was common in the ancient world, but child sacrifice is relatively uncommon. Perhaps the future Carthaginians were like the Pilgrim Fathers leaving from Plymouth, so fervent in their devotion to the gods that they weren’t welcome anymore. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children 
• • From Child Sacrifice and the Greek Legendary Tradition, John Rundin, Journal of Biblical Literature, 2004: The Athenians, as punishment for their killing of King Minos’s son, periodically sent young men and women to Minos in Crete, where they were turned over to the Minotaur to be devoured. It has long been conjectured that the legend of the Minotaur reflects Semitic child sacrifice. Minos’s story itself connects him with the Phoenicians; legend has him as the son of Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king. Crete, then, might well be a place where such rituals were practiced. Furthermore, the preadult status of the victims sent to the Minotaur recalls the young age of the children sacrificed in those rites. But the connection between the Minotaur and child sacrifice does not end there: The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures speak of Molech or Moloch, who has been erroneously thought to be a god to whom children were sacrificed. Interestingly, medieval and modern sources represent Molech as a calf-headed, human-bodied bronze or copper idol; this tradition has no foundation in extant ancient Jewish or Hebrew sources; Moore traced it back only as far as medieval Jewish commentaries. In his view, this portrayal of Molech derives from classical sources which describe a bronze idol of Cronus at which children were sacrificed in Carthage. Moore suggested that Molech’s calf-head derives from the Minotaur of Greek legend.  
• • In fact, the medieval figure of Molech probably derives from a tradition that intermingles not only Cronus of Carthage and the Minotaur but at least two other source: One is the legend of Talos, a creature made of bronze, [often imagined as a giant] but referenced in at least one source to be a bull. The other obvious tradition that feeds into the image of Molech comes from the Greek city of Acragas in Sicily, which lay close to Punic settlements and where a notoriously cruel tyrant roasted his enemies alive in a bronze bull. The particular association of the Minotaur with child sacrifice gets further support from evidence involving rites on ancient Cyprus in the second and first millennia B.C.E. There, Shawn O’Bryhim has argued, bull-masked priests sacrificed children. It is tempting to speculate why bull imagery might play such a prominent role in child sacrifice. Unfortunately, bull iconography is so common in ancient Near Eastern religion that false hypotheses can easily find support. The Scriptures of the Hebrews call god the Bull of Jacob, and in Exodus Aaron has a golden calf made, while Jeroboam enshrines two golden calves in 1 Kings, identified as the gods who led the Israelites out of Egypt. Could these bulls have been images of Yahweh? These narratives, as we have received them, reflect a hostile tradition that accuses the Israelites of apostasy. That may not be how everyone would have seen these events however, which may reflect a tradition of Yahweh worship that involved images of bulls that later scriptures opposed. 
• • From Howl, Alan Ginsberg, 1955: What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! down on the rocks of Time! Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
• • From Moloch Malarky: Does Fox News Know Anything About Fox News? Daniel Walker, 2019: Fox News host and ambulatory combover Todd Starnes nattered about “the pagan god Moloch” and the ye old ritual human sacrifice schtick on Monday and the only ones surprised by this were his employers at Fox News, and when “Moloch” starts trending on Twitter that’s as close to an actual Bat Signal as I’m personally ever going to get, so far be it for me to look a gift bull in the mouth. If you’ve never heard of Todd Starnes before, he’s the author of the 2009 book They Popped My Hood and Found Gravy On the Dipstick. That’s not a joke, that’s the real title. He also blames school shootings on Satan. That’s not a joke either, chiefly because it’s not at all funny. Until very very very very recently Starnes had a Fox News radio show, which until very very very very recently featured Rob Jeffress as a guest. And If you’ve never heard of Rob Jeffress, he’s a Baptist preacher who thinks Catholics are Satanists, which is most of all offensive for giving me something in common with Catholics, in that we both hate Rob Jeffress. He’s also on the White House’s Evangelical Advisory Board, which for some reason is a thing that exists. On Monday, Starnes and Jeffress were yucking it up on the radio about their common interest in marrying their sisters in law and converting modern currency into talents of silver…or whatever, I don’t listen to evangelical radio, I have no idea what they talk about. Then Jeffress succumbed to his compulsions and said of Democrats, “the god they worship is the pagan god of the Old Testament Moloch, who allowed for child sacrifice.” Starnes did not actually agree with this statement in so many words, but neither did he question how long his guest had stared directly into the sun that morning, and since that’s pretty much the only normal thing to say at that juncture Fox decided to fire him. I know what you’re thinking, and yeah, I didn’t know you could actually get fired from Fox News either. Starnes also once got fired from Baptist Press for inventing quotes and claiming the Secretary of Education said them, which I assume is how he qualified for the Fox job. Also surprised: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who pointed out that people saying conspiratorial religious bullshit is the only commodity Fox News really has, so why was this supposedly bad? “How was he supposed to know this was below their standards?” she quipped on Twitter. 
• • She’s probably just kicking Starnes’ soft, pale underbelly while it happens to be showing, but the truth is this is a very good question. If you ask me, the firing makes Fox News look incredibly out of touch. Talk about shadowy baby-eating cults and devilish pagan gods is EXTREMELY common with the absolute freaks in their audience. If they don’t realize this, you’ve got to wonder what the “news” part of Fox News even does., #Qanon quacks used to burn up the bytes all night with talk of “elite Satan worshippers [sic] who sacrifice children to Moloch.” As a non-elite Satan worshiper I guess I wouldn’t know; the biggest sacrifice I’ve made this month is eating a single Impossible Burger to combat climate change and also to prove that the burger is paradoxically possible. Dailywire editor Josh Hammer beat Jeffress and Starnes to this verbatim Moloch malarky by nearly a month. But Hammer was just nailing down the impossibly named Erick Erickson’s identical comments, while LifeSite was saying it on the exact same day as Starnes’ broadcast. In 2013, serial blackboard abuser Glenn Beck even wrote a fever-ridden novel about “a shadow war waged by an elite cabal of tyrants” led by a “trillionaire” George Soros stand-in. His title: The Eye of Moloch. Pushing this hustle to the masses, Beck declared, “Soon this will be a history book, and then it won’t be so enjoyable.” In 2014, the apologetics site CARM wrote of supposed Moloch worship, “I can’t help but compare today’s abortion massacre to the sacrifice of children by these ancient pagans.” Why, did women have to drive across three states to see Moloch too? The Wanderer, a Catholic newspaper calls Democrats “the Party of Moloch,” which actually sounds like a hell of a rave. Charisma News, the pity fuck of Christian blogs, says the same thing. So does the US Pastor Council. Bill Mitchell, the conspiracy asshole who looks like a deep fake of Benedict Cumberbatch with David Lynch’s hair, regularly raves on Twitter that “Democrats worship Moloch.” And Catholic anti-abortion group Human Life International was flogging this pony as far back as 2007, which in Trump years was roughly the 17th century ago. If the execs at Fox News are not broiling in the juices of baby-eating religious conspiracies 19 hours a day, they’re going to very shortly become the only ones. https://www.satanicbayarea.com/2019/10/07/fox-news-moloch-starnes/ 
• • From Mark Twain Did Not Sacrifice Babies to Moloch, T. Adler, Urban Fictionary, 2019: In 2000, Alex Jones filmed a documentary titled Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove, supposedly revealing the suspicious happenings in The Bohemian Club in California. He claimed he had proof that some of the most powerful men in America were part of a secret cabal of Satanists running a global government. These claims are ridiculous, but the Bohemian Club maintains enough secrecy that it is difficult to disprove. The club was founded in in the 1870s, but soon after, wealthy politicians and businessmen took control of it. Nowadays, the Bohemian Club is almost entirely made up of well-connected, wealthy, primarily white, conservative, Christian men. A new member can only be inducted after a vote by a panel and an induction fee affordable only to the wealthy. The club hosts a two-week retreat once a year, called an “encampment,” where members hike, perform plays, and give presentations called “Lakeside Talks.” Members have included Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Mark Twain, and Walter Cronkite. It begins with an opening ceremony called the “Cremation of Care” in front of the camp’s totem, a large cement owl. The Cremation of Care is a play written by one of Bohemian Grove’s founding members, James T. Bowman. More reliable sources describe it as an odd play. Jones claims that members sacrifice an effigy of a child to the Biblical child-eating pagan god named “Moloch,” and take part in orgies, and sex trafficking. Members of the club do in fact, burn an effigy, although not of a child. Instead, they burn an effigy of “dull care,” symbolizing that they are releasing their anxieties about the outside world. Mary Moore, lifetime activist and longtime protester of the Bohemian Club, claimed that while the Satanist, baby-murdering conspiracy theories are “all bullshit,” she fears that politicians and business executives use the club to make political decisions and influence public policy without transparency. It seems unusual that a popular conspiracy theory about Republican politicians is advocated by Alex Jones, a leading proponent of conservative causes. Many people see politics today as a war for the heart of the country. They may be less willing to damage the reputation of their own party through conspiracies and more willing to villainize the opposition. Bohemian Grove conspiracy theories might be dying out, but a contemporary version has taken its place, signaling that paranoia of elitist conspiracy is alive and well, in the QAnon conspiracy, where the names have been updated, the opposition has been villainized, and the message is still the same.