Atlantis Baby Killing Writing Prompt
Pursuing Moloch through time and space
This is an excursive-imaginative-thought-experiment-timeline thing tracing the spirit of child slaughter through time and space. It may end up as the basis for a larger work, or it may move no farther than this.
If this timeline inspires anything in you, please feel free to use it in its entirety or in part. I’d love to see lots of exploration of this idea.
The world, and therefore history, is a war between the cult of death and the cult of life. It is a war between baby killers and baby savers.
Atlantis, like Númenor, is a center of human sacrifice and child slaughter. Moloch lives with the Atlanteans and feasts.
Jehovah resolves to destroy the high towers of Atlantis. Moloch is nearly drowned in the flood, then nearly starves for lack of human blood. He becomes a shade of himself.
Eventually Moloch and his many lordlings, his several baals, take up residence in Canaan. They are hungry, and begin to foster baby killing.
Jehovah reminds his people which side of the war he is on through his horribly real theater with Abraham and Isaac.
After Egypt, the Hebrews head into the Holy Land and enact Jehovah’s ban, slaughtering the baby killers who live there.
The baby killers still surround the Holy Land, along the coastal Levant and north of Israel.
Moloch seeks vengeance for the fall of Canaan. The people of God themselves become a focal point for the war. More than once, Hebrew children are offered to Moloch, and even to Yahweh himself.
Some of the baby killers begin to repent (perhaps due to action similar to Jonah’s in Nineveh). There is a great Tyrian/Phoenician civilizational civil war, and the orthodox baby killers are largely banished from Levant, leaving behind many scars (tophets).
Moloch leaves with the losers of the civil war, and Carthage is established as a haven for the baby-killers.
One of the greatest scars left by the war is the tophet outside Jerusalem, called Gehenna, which Jesus would later compare to hell. Ezekiel preaches to a symbolic valley of dry human bones; whether he had a real place in mind or not, there was a valley of such bones surrounding Jerusalem on the west and southwest, so that the Hebrews needed not imagine such a thing. Having been made forever unclean, Gehenna is turned into a garbage dump.
The baby-killing Phoenicians visit America and propagate ritualistic child sacrifice, complete with pyramids and piles and high places. Moloch moves to the Americas.
The Romans crush the Carthaginians. The story of Dido’s death is a last poetic echo of their human sacrifice and baby killing. Roman and the Greek historians document profusely the Phoenician habit of killing babies and offering them to their gods.
Jehovah pursues Moloch to the Americas. The Spanish crush the Maya.
The spirit of baby-killing flees north. Jehovah pursues.
Today Moloch lives in Albuquerque, seeking whom he may devour. His devotees are many.
Each of the mini-prompt items in the list above will bear fruitful research. Let me know if you, dear reader, do anything with this.