Laundress and Star (AEG spoilers)

John Watkins · 20 Oct 2008, 15:36 · from 2008-October.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:36:53 -0400
Subject: (urth) Laundress and Star (AEG spoilers)
In-Reply-To: <9886.72.171.0.143.1224507381.squirrel at brunians.org>
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Excellent reply.  Thanks.  I did in fact get the bit about Ba'al--in
fact, I'd known that and forgotten it from long ago.  Once you know
that "Beelzebub" means "Lord of the Flies" or "Prince of Flies" it's
actually quite intuitive that "Ba'al" is just "lord" or "prince"--a
title, rather than a name.

I'm also fairly surprised that I missed that Wolfe, by connecting
Cthulhu to Phoenician deities, was only following Lovecraft--it's not
as though I haven't read The Shadow over Innsmouth, and, heck, even
Buffy the Vampire Slayer made the connection.

Perseus was Greek in all the senses that count, right?  His mother was
almost the mother of Greece, as the Greeks are the Danaans.  I suppose
people thought he was from Serifos.

I'll look into The Highest Altar, it sounds fascinating.  And thank
you for the word "aniconic."

On 10/20/08, brunians at brunians.org <brunians at brunians.org> wrote:
> > Of course--I'm not using Chesterton as gold-star history here.  The
> > question is whether we can infer that Wolfe had the sacrifices to
> > Phoenician false gods in mind when he threw that "Cassiopeia weeps for
> > her children" bit in.  It's certainly an interesting thought.  The
> > Squid God is already Cthulhu layered with Cetus and sort of the pulp
> > notion of a human sacrifice to quiet an angry volcano or storm.
>
> I read a *way* interesting book about this, which does happen, in this
> instance among the Mapuche of Chile. What actually is done (or was done in
> this case) is that there is a disaster, volcano, storm, tsunami or
> whatever and after the fact the sacrifice is done. The book is called 'The
> Highest Altar': I have a copy around here somewhere.
>
> The Mapuche are *very* traditional and their religious practice completely
> non-Christian (altough there are Catholic and Protestant Mapuche (the
> Incas never conquered the Mapuche, the Spanish never conquered the
> Mapuche, the Chileans worked out an agreement with them)). Further north,
> in the region around Lake Titicaca, the author investigates similar
> practices which have become more or less syncretic and (here it becomes
> very interesting) which the practitioners very consciously correlate with
> European derived occult practices and Satanism.
>
> >                                                              Are
> > we meant to also take him as the deity honored by human sacrifice
> > around the southern and eastern side of the Mediterranean?
>
> That's his nephew Dagon.
>
> >                                                               I don't
> > know if this points toward any other interpretive clues, although it
> > is interesting that what we typically consider a Greek myth is set in
> > what is now Israel.
>
> Who was Cadmus? Where did he come from? And Danae?
>
> Where did people *think* that Perseus was from?
>
> >                     That's rich turf--I doubt Wolfe would leave it
> > fallow.
>
> Wolfe is one of, like, three people I've met who really understands this
> stuff.
>
> > Or maybe it's just Wolfe's guess at the origin of the Cetus myth.
> > Ultimately the myth is about a queen trying to sacrifice her daughter
> > to a monster, and the heroic foreigner who stops the sacrifice.
>
> On one level. I don't think I would say 'ultimately'.
>
> >                                                        Maybe
> > Wolfe takes the myth as in part chiding by the Greeks of the
> > child-sacrificing practice of their neighbors?
>
> I doubt it, but maybe.
>
> Maybe I was unclear about the Ba'al bit: all of these Kana'anim, Bni
> Israel, Phoenicians, the lot of them, had lots of gods and one in
> particular who was in charge of where you lived, addressed as Creator and
> Master (or Creatress and Mistress) of the World, worshipped aniconically,
> etc. Who it was varied on what city you were in. The Bni Israel, in the
> time of David and Solomon, addressed YHWH as ba'al. Later on, the language
> changed, the title confused with a proper name and applied only to the
> other gods of other western Semitic cities.
>
>
>
> .
>
>
>
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