When Urbaal reached home he received the ugly news that Timna had feared. The priests of Melak had returned to deliver their decision: “The stars indicate that we shall be attacked from the north. By a host larger than before. It is therefore essential to take steps and we shall have a burning of first sons tomorrow.” With a red dye obtained from the seashore they stained the wrists of Urbaal’s son and then directed the farmer to halt the screaming of his wife. Proving by their implacable detachment that there could be no appeal from their decision, they stalked from the house and proceeded to seven others, where they similarly stained the wrists of children from the leading families of Makor.
It was a moment when Urbaal wished to hear no lament from Timna, so he left the house and in the street encountered Amalek hurrying back to town, and when Urbaal saw the look of anguish on the herdsman’s face he knew that Amalek’s son had been selected, too. The two men did not speak, for if either had betrayed any dissatisfaction with the priests’ decision he could have brought disaster upon his household.
The priests of Makor were implacable but they were not cruel. They sponsored no unnecessary barbarity and ordered only what was required to protect the community. They were the only ones who could read, and to Mesopotamia they sent their clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform, while to Egypt they sent messages in hieroglyphic. They knew figuring and astronomy and how to manage the year so that crops flourished. Without their intelligence life in Makor would have been impossible, for they served also as doctors and judges. They supervised the king’s extensive lands, controlled his slaves and managed the warehouses in which food was stored against the day of famine. Only the priests understood the mystery of El rising silently from the earth and of Melak with the fiery throat, and if they now decided that the threat of war could be forestalled only by another burning, their judgment must be accepted. For they were judicious men, and when Makor was last destroyed a surviving priest had explained to the stragglers, “Disaster came because for the past years you have sacrificed to Melak only the sons of poor families, or boys defective.” They blamed the burning of the town on this slackening of dedication and reasoned, “If the respectable families of Makor refused Melak their first-born, why should he bother to protect them?” The logic was self-evident, so in the reconstructed town only the sons of leading families were offered to the god, and from the moment that Timna had borne her child, Urbaal had known that it must go to the fire.
Urbaal spent that night by himself in the room of the four Astartes, and there he entered upon the full conflict of death and life, for in a cradle in a corner slept his son with red-marked wrists, unaware of the ritual which he would sanctify next morning; and death was very close. But above the child stood the new Astarte smiling benevolently, and with her arrival the oil pits in the olive grove had produced their most copious run. Already she was bringing new life to the house, new fecundity, and it was possible that she would bring the tall slave girl, too. In that strange mixture of death and eroticism which marked so much of the thinking in that age, Urbaal lay on his couch listening first to his son’s even breathing, then dreaming of the slave girl whom he yearned for with such passion. Death and life pervaded his thinking, as they did the room and all of Makor.
Shortly after dawn a group of priests in red capes passed through the streets banging drums and sounding trumpets, and it was a mark of Urbaal’s confusion that in spite of the grief he felt over the impending loss of his son, he nevertheless hurried to the door to see if the tall slave girl was marching with the priests. She was not.
When the procession had made several circuits of the town, the drumming ceased, the priests separated, and mothers began to feel the ultimate terror. Finally a knock came on Urbaal’s door, and a priest appeared to claim Timna’s first-born son. Timna began to scream, but her husband placed his hand over her mouth and the priest nodded his approval, carrying the child from the house. After a while the drumming resumed and cymbals clashed. A trumpet blew and excited mutterings were heard in the town. “We must go,” Urbaal said, taking Timna’s hand, for if the mothers were not present it might be judged that they offered their sons with a grudging spirit.
But Timna, who was not of Makor, could not bring herself to attend the terrible rites. “Let me at least stay hidden,” she begged.
Patiently Urbaal took her to the room of the gods and showed her his smiling Astarte. “Last night,” he assured her, “Baal-of-the-Storm came and made sport with the goddess. I watched them. She’s pregnant now, and you shall be too, I promise you.” He dragged her to the door, pulled her hands away as she tried to hold herself to an entrance pillar. Then he lost his patience and slapped her sharply.
“What are sons for?” he asked. “Stop crying.” But when they were in the street he felt sorry for her and wiped away her tears. Matred, his first wife, who had known this day, said nothing but watched from behind. “Let her know sorrow,” she mumbled to herself.
With an aching pain in his chest Urbaal led his two wives along the twisting street to the temple square, but before he entered that sacred place he took a deep breath, set his shoulders and did his best to quell the panic in his guts. “Let us all be brave;” he whispered, “for many will be watching.” But as luck would have it, the first man he saw in the holy area was the herdsman Amalek, who was also trying to control his anguish, and the two men whose sons were to go that day stared at each other in mute pain. Neither betrayed his fears, and they marched together to the monoliths, lending strength and dignity to the ritual.
Between the palace and the four menhirs dedicated to the gentler gods had been erected a platform of movable stones, under which a huge fire already raged. On the platform stood a stone god of unusual construction: it had two extended arms raised so that from the stone fingertips to the body they formed a wide inclined plane; but above the spot where they joined the torso there was a huge gaping mouth, so that whatever was placed upon the arms was free to roll swiftly downward and plunge into the fire. This was the god Melak, the new protector of Makor.
Slaves heaped fresh fagots under the statue, and when the flames leaped from the god’s mouth two priests grabbed one of the eight boys—a roly-poly infant of nine months—and raised him high in the air. Muttering incantations they approached the outstretched arms, dashed the child upon them and gave him a dreadful shove downward, so that he scraped along the stony arms and plunged into the fire. As the god accepted him with a belch of fire there was a faint cry, then an anguished scream as the child’s mother protested. Urbaal looked quickly to see that the cry had come from one of the wives of Amalek, and with bitter satisfaction he smiled. The priests had noticed this breach of religious solemnity, and Urbaal thought: They will remember that Amalek couldn’t control his wife. This year they will choose me.
Seeking to prevent a similar disgrace in his family, which would bring him into disfavor with the priests and lose him whatever advantage he had gained from Amalek’s misfortune, he gripped Timna’s arm and whispered, “Silence.” But four other boys were consigned to the flames before Timna’s son was raised whimpering into the air and crushed down upon the voracious arms. With tumbling turns, as if he were a little ball, the infant dropped into the flames. Rancid smoke hissed from the red mouth and a cry started from Timna’s throat, but with his free hand Urbaal caught her by the neck and preserved the dignity of sacrifice. He saw that the priests had noticed his action and had smiled approval. More than ever he felt the omens were good that he would be declared the year’s winner.
The last child was a boy of nearly three—his parents had prayed that the years had passed when he might be taken—and he was old enough to understand what was happening, so with frightened eyes he drew back from the priests, and when they lifted him to the god he screamed, trying to hold on to the stone fingers and save himself, but the priests pulled away his small, clutching hands, and with a violent push sent him tumbling into the flaming mouth.
As soon as the boy had disappea
red, wailing in fiery smoke, the mood of the temple changed. The god Melak was forgotten; his fires were allowed to die down and his priests turned to other important matters. Drums resumed their beat—this time in livelier rhythms—and trumpets sounded. The people of Makor, satisfied that their new god would protect them, left him smoking by the monoliths and gathered about the steps of the temple itself, where a sense of excitement replaced the terror that had recently held sway. Even the mothers of the eight boys, numb with pain, were moved into new positions, and although they must have longed to flee that place and grieve in silence, they were required as patronesses who had pleased the god with their first-born to remain in locations of honor. They were permitted neither to comment nor to look away, for this was the tradition of their society and would be forever.
When a community like Makor dedicated itself to a god of death like Melak and to a goddess of life like Astarte, the believers entered unknowingly upon a pair of spirals which spun them upward or downward—as one judged the matter—to rites that were bound to become ever more bizarre. For example, during the long centuries when the town confined itself to worshiping the original monolith El, the priests were satisfied if the town praised its god with libations of oil or food set out on wooden trays, for the inherent nature of El was such that he demanded only modest honors. And, when the three additional monoliths were added, their natures required no extraordinary honors; as for the humble baals of the olive grove and oil press, they were satisfied with simple rites: a kiss, a wreath of flowers draped over the pillar, or a genuflection.
But when the god Melak was imported from the coastal cities of the north, a new problem arose. The citizens of Makor were eager to adopt him, partly because his demands upon them were severe, as if this proved his power, and partly because they had grown somewhat contemptuous of their local gods precisely because they were not demanding. Melak, with his fiery celebrations, had not been forced upon the town; the town had sought him out as the fulfillment of a felt need, and the more demanding he became, the more they respected him. No recent logic in Makor was so persuasive as that of the priests after the destruction of the town: “You were content to give damaged sons to Melak and in return he gave you damaged protection.” Equally acceptable was the progression whereby Melak’s appetite had expanded from the blood of a pigeon to the burning of a dead sheep to the immolation of living children, for with each extension of his appetite he became more powerful and therefore more pleasing to the people he tyrannized. What he might next require in way of sacrifice no one could predict, least of all the priests, for when the new demands were announced they would not be something forced down upon the people by the priests: they would be rites insisted upon by the people, who within limits received the kinds of gods they were able to imagine.
Furthermore, the cult of human sacrifice was of itself not abominable, nor did it lead to the brutalization of society: lives were lost which could have been otherwise utilized, but the matter ended in death and excessive numbers were not killed, nor did the rites in which they died contaminate the mind. In fact, there was something grave and stately in the picture of a father willing to sacrifice his first-born son as his ultimate gift for the salvation of a community; and in later years, not far from Makor, one of the world’s great religions would be founded upon the spiritual idealization of such a sacrifice as the central, culminating act of faith. At Makor it was not death that corrupted, but life.
For in the case of Astarte things were different. To begin with, she was a much older deity than fiery Melak and perhaps even older than El himself, for when the first farmer planted wheat intentionally he bound himself like a slave to the concept of fertility. Without the aid of some god to fructify the earth the farmer was powerless. It was not what he did that insured prosperity, but what the god chose to do; and it required only a moment’s reflection to convince men that the force behind fertility must be feminine. Even the crudest representation of the female form could be recognized as a symbol of fertility: her feet were planted in the soil; her legs carried the receptacle into which the seed must be placed; her swelling womb reflected the growth that occurred in the dark earth; her breasts were the rains that nurtured the fields; her bright smile was the sun that warmed the world; and her flowing hair was the cool breeze that kept the land from parching. Once men took the cultivation of their fields seriously the worship of such a goddess was inevitable. In principle it was a gentle religion, paralleling man’s most profound experience, regeneration through the mystery of sex. The concept of man and goddess working hand in hand in the population of the world and in the feeding of it was one of the notable philosophical discoveries, both ennobling and productive; of only a few religious patterns could this be said.
But ingrained in this enchanting concept was a spiral more swift and sickening than any which operated in the case of Melak, the god of death. The homage that Astarte demanded was so persuasive, so gentle in its simplicity, that all were eager to participate. Once a goddess guaranteed a town’s fertility, certain rites became inevitable: flowers rich with pollen were placed before her, white pigeons were released and then lambs which had finished weaning. Beautiful women who wanted children but were denied them came to seek her intervention, and maidens who were to be wed gathered to dance seductively before her. Her rites were especially attractive because they were conducted by the fairest citizens of the town and the strongest farmers. A spell of beauty encased the goddess: she saw only the largest bunches of grapes, the most golden barley, and when the drums beat for her their rhythms were not martial. The spiral of Astarte was a succession of the loveliest things man knows, except that any sensible man could see where it must end, for once Makor gave itself over to worshiping the principle of fertility it became inevitable that the rites must finally be celebrated in the only logical way. And sooner or later the citizens would insist that this be done publicly. It was neither the priests nor the girls nor the men involved who demanded these demoralizing public rites: it was the people, and the inevitability of this sickening spin was about to be demonstrated anew in the person of Urbaal the farmer, who had just offered his first-born to the flames and who would, in any normal society, have been burdened with grief, as his wife was at that moment.
But in Makor, Urbaal switched easily, almost with joy, from death to life, waiting for the next celebration which had been cunningly arranged by the priests for that purpose. With mounting excitement he listened as the drums beat joyously, accompanied by a flurry of trumpets which brought the music to a vivid crescendo. It was halted by a priest who came from the temple, raising his arms above his head and crying, “After death comes life. After mourning, joy.”
A group of singers, including both old men and young girls, began chanting happily of the seasons through which the year passes. Their words spoke of growth and the fertility of animals which abided in the fields. It was a song as pristine in thought as one could have devised and it summarized in ideal form the basic elements of the fertility rites: man was able to live because the earth and things thereon increased, and anything that spurred this increase was automatically good.
The priest now spoke directly to the parents whose sons had died to protect the town: “It does not matter at what age a male dies to defend his community. The infant of months”—and here he looked at Urbaal and his wife—“is as notable a hero as the general of forty. Men are born to die gloriously and those who do so as children achieve greatness earlier than we who grow older. For them we do not grieve. They have fulfilled the destiny of males and their mothers shall feel pride.” It was an inspiring theory, and to some it brought inspiration, but not to stubborn Timna, who knew instinctively that an evil thing had been done: her son of six months had had before him the great years, and to cut him off for the good of the town was reprehensible. “But in the hour of death, even the death of a hero,” said the priest, “it is obligatory to remember life. To those whose children died to save this town Astarte, goddess of fertil
ity and life, offers new life, new children, new fields and new animals grazing upon those fields. Now, in the hour of death, life is born again!”
The drums exploded and the songs of the singers rose to heaven as two priests from the interior of the temple led forth a priestess clothed in white. It was the moment that Urbaal had been awaiting—for this was the slave girl, tall and most radiantly beautiful. Standing at the edge of the temple steps, she kept her hands folded and her eyes downcast while the priest signaled for the music to cease, whereupon priestly hands began taking away her garments, one by one, allowing them to fall like petals until she stood naked for the approval of the town.
She was an exquisite human being, a perfection of the goddess Astarte, for no man could look at her provocative form without seeing in her the sublime representation of fertility. She was a girl whose purpose was to be loved, to be taken away and made fertile so that she could reproduce her grandeur and bless the earth. Urbaal stared with unbelieving eyes as the naked girl submitted herself to the crowd’s inspection. She was much more beautiful than he had imagined, much more desirable than he had guessed when he watched with such hungry eyes her infrequent appearances. The priests had been right in predicting that if they exhibited their new slave sparingly they could build up to the excitement that now throbbed in the crowd.
“She is Libamah,” the priest in charge announced, “servant of Astarte, and soon in the month of harvest she will go to the man who has this year produced the best, whether it be barley or olives or cattle or any growth of the soil.”
“Let it be me,” Urbaal whispered hoarsely. Clenching his fists he prayed to all his Astartes, “Let it be me.” But his rational-minded second wife, Timna, seeing this extraordinary thing—that a man who had just lost a son could be lusting so quickly after a slave girl—thought that he must be out of his mind. She saw his lips forming the prayer, “Let it be me,” and she felt sorry for him that his sense of life should have been so corrupted.
The Source: A Novel Page 16
