Moloch - the evil God and the evil machine

A couple of days ago @nyarlathotep mentioned Moloch - an evil God who set the imagination of both the romantics and the modernists on fire.

It was this digital painting of mine that reminded him. An endless line of people waiting to voluntarily go into the sacrificial fires of Facebook, Twitter and WeChat. (The image was made as a hommage to the federated networks, another technical approach to a free decentralised social media).

A detail from the digital painting, "Alternatives" made by... me.

So what is Moloch?

Moloch is a God mentioned in the the Torah and the Old Testament. Like all foreign Gods, he is scorned as despicable idolatry, but there is one more feature to this God: he craves child sacrifices. The Greeks and Roman writers had similar stories of the Cartage God, Baal Hammon. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus even described, and that is the subject of this article, a sort of mechanical statue where the children were placed in the palms of the bronze statue and then rolled into a burning fire.

The first time I read about this was in the French cartoonist, Jacques Martin's comix about Alix. The album was called: Le tombeau étrusque, - The Etruscan grave (Yes, I have a lot of knowledge from comic books).

Image from the Danish Comicwiki

Martin envisioned the Statue in a very spectacular way. With complex mechanics and rather large!

Image from: Le tombeau étrusque. Found here.

This horrible custom and the convincing historical references in the comic fascinated me as a child, but it was not until I had almost reached puberty that i should find out where the inspiration for this came. When I was 11-12 I were with my family in Southern France on holiday. Here, on a market I bought a French comic called Salammbô, by Phillipe Druillet. I couldn't read French but even though the comic contained Spaceships and strange psychedelic images I was not in doubt that it was the same story.

The sacrificial statue in Druillet's vision.

Now I had a name, Salammbô, and I could, after a visit to the library finally pinpoint the inventor of the modern version of this horrible, but also exiting story: Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert

The novel, Salammbô, was Flaubert's move away from the realism of his Opus Magna, Madame Bovary, and into the colourful eroticism and vivid style of the late century romanticism. It was both criticised and loved. Three composers, Mussorsky, Rachmaninov and Ernest Reyer planned to make it into an opera (only Reyer succeeded). But beside all that he also invented the strong motif that is the subject of this article: A machine used to sacrifice children.

"Then further back, higher than the candelabrum, and much higher than the altar, rose the Moloch, all of iron, and with gaping apertures in his human breast. His outspread wings were stretched upon the wall, his tapering hands reached down to the ground; three black stones bordered by yellow circles represented three eyeballs on his brow, and his bull's head was raised with a terrible effort as if in order to bellow."

Excerpt from Salammbô

This is obviously the vision that Jacques Martin had tried to visualise.

And this bring us to the reference that @nyarlathotep mentioned: the Moloch of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

A machine that eats children... and a God that eats children. For the artists of the early twentieth century, where the abuse of the workforce in the industrialisation had become a major point of social critique, the Moloch took a whole new meaning. No longer an exotic and perverse escapism and historical entertainment, but a strong image of a machine society that eats its own children. Here is the sequence from the film where the son of the industrialist dictator (the wet dream of the fascists) realise the horrid ways of his own society.

The fantastic images of Lang and the word, Moloch!

The same motive is to be found in the poem by the German expressionist Georg Heym called, Der Gott der Stadt. In this poem the whole modern city is an ancient God eating its inhabitants. Sitting on the roofs of the houses of the working class slum, he feeds of the fires in the cheap tenements.

He stretches into darkness his butcher's fist.
He shakes it. He chases a sea of fire
through a street. And the hot smoke roars,
and he devours it until late in the morning.

My translation of the last verse.

So Moloch is obviously a monster of our own time. Like Cthulhu by H.P.Lovecraft who embodies the angst and alienation we feel in front of the endless universe that science has revealed to us (read a fine introduction to Cthulhu here, by @steevc) , Moloch is the image of the abusive society, a false God to whom we sacrifice our children.

These days Moloch is called: Facebook - Twitter - Wechat -Google

P.S.

I recently made a collage based on the poem: Der Gott der Stadt

Here it is: