Sarah's Writing Blog

The past couple days, while the world around me backslides into a fascistic nightmare, I’ve been getting more and more into Gnosticism and other ancient pre-JudeoChristian religions. The Middle and Near East are and always have been fascinating places that give birth to things of great beauty and fear. 

Before the birth of Jesus Christ, before the formation of the earliest churches or temples, there were many gods in the desert, and many of them were angry. The one that sticks out the most in the modern cultural context (besides, you know, Yahweh) is Moloch, a being of great power and even greater wrath.  Passages in the Tanakh describe the Cannanites sacrificing their young children into a blazing fire to spare themselves of Moloch’s divine rage and then go on to condemn the practice. 

Anti-semitic, slack-jawed, cowed and frightened Q-Anon conspiracists have taken this cultural memory and turned it into something very literal. They flock to their chatrooms and top-secret Facebook pages and tell each other that Jeffrey Epstein sacrificed the children born of his trafficking victims to Moloch, they send PMs to each other talking about how  Kris Jenner drinks the  adrenaline-laced blood of little children before an altar to preserve her beauty. They create Whatsapp groups where they try to decode the messages of an all-powerful, red-blooded American called Q that some believe to be Donald Trump and then create grand plans to free trafficked children from furniture warehouses and other stupid shit like that. 

But, as disgusted and embarrassed as these racist, dull, and gullible anti-semites make me feel I have to remind myself that they are the same animal I am. The same urges and desires that I feel, they feel as well. 

They want comfort and warmth.  They want to be held and reassured because they can tell with their primal, vestigial senses that  something is off about the world that surrounds us. Something blue, vital, and beautiful is missing, and its absence frightens all of us, even those of us that won’t let themselves acknowledge that fear. 

And, they are right about one thing, Moloch has returned, and his appetite is more voracious than ever.  

You see, scholars are in disagreement about what, or who, Moloch really was. His status as an actual Canaanite  deity has been a subject of debate since the 1930s, seeing as the word for a child offering was “molek.” Were the authors of the Tanakh condemning child sacrifices to a very real deity, or were they condemning child sacrifice as a practice all on its own?  

Since then, Moloch has evolved within Christian culture to represent evil itself, a specific demon, a specific  Prince of Hell, a specific type of evil, and, under that new skin, I would say Moloch is very real indeed. 

He is alive on message boards, as young white men make games of creating new slurs for other people. He is living in the flat, empty eyes of our politicians as they dispense the grand declarations of violence and dissent. He hides under the masks of cowering men and slithers into the barrels of their guns.  

He was in the street the day that Renee Nicole Good was shot in the head by Jonothan Ross, and came tumbling out of Ross’ mouth as he cursed the woman that he had just murdered as a “fucking bitch.” 

He does not need an altar, such frivolity is beneath him now. He doesn’t need his followers to claim him as their god, he does not need incense or prayers, or the slaughtering of goats. 

He has more than enough, he is well-fed and growing hungrier every minute. And what will his new priests feed him? 

Well, his priests will feed him human beings, like they always have. But the bodies that will tumble into the molek  this time won’t just be infant, they will be of a great variety. 

They will be dark-skinned and dark-haired,  chained at the ankle and wrist. They will be mentally ill, unwanted and unhoused. They will be disabled, male and female, trans and intersex. They will be the bodies of dissenters, bodies of collaborators, the bodies of those who fought for freedom and those that tried to escape. And in the end, when Moloch has eaten in the world, when it seems like there is nothing else to give, the bodies will start to look a lot like you.