(urth) Laundress and Star (AEG spoilers)

[John Watkins]

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.  Are
we meant to also take him as the deity honored by human sacrifice
around the southern and eastern side of the Mediterranean?  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.  That's rich turf--I doubt Wolfe would leave it
fallow.

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.  Maybe
Wolfe takes the myth as in part chiding by the Greeks of the
child-sacrificing practice of their neighbors?

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 7:43 AM,  <brunians at brunians.org> wrote:
>> Phoenicia, Aethiopia--either way it's where Baal was worshipped,
>> right?  They had human sacrifices, at least according to the Bible.
>
> So did the Bni Israel, at least according to the Bible.
>
> 'Baal' means 'Lord'. That's it. Contrast various names in Kings and
> Chronicles. -baal becomes -bosheth ('bosheth' means 'shame'). Remember
> that the order of books does not correspond to historical order:
> Chronicles is the earlier work.
>
>> Chesterton has a whole bit on it in The Everlasting Man, about how the
>> Phoenician civilization was just about the only thing the Romans and
>> the Jews hated equally.
>
> Chesterton is right a lot of the time, and clever and amusing even when he
> is wrong. Not having read 'TEM' I have no idea which he is being here.
>
>
> .
>
>
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