welcome to the fest

Oh Pedo In Chief here we go. But all Pedo Bear Epstein and so on aside, who exactly is Moloch...? Weirdly I think I met a Lilith in real life recently.... Then again I didn't have my phone for a week for a second time now. Plenty going on. Hm.

-Russly

Ammorite god. Typically understood to be one to whom human, especially child, sacrifices were offered either as an attempt to avoid some crisis and manipulate future events (stave off calamity, ensure prosperity), or as part of the regular religious calendar.

For more info specifically, I'd recommend Eerdmans, "Dictionary of the Bible".

In modern right leaning political discourse, abortion is compared to sacrificing children to Molech on the analogy of those who seek abortion (i.e. sacrifice their children) to ensure personal welfare or avoid personal catastrophe.

EDIT: Likewise, utilizing the cultic (public) aspects of ancient Canaanite religion, playing on the perception that such sacrifices are necessary to the survival/establishment of some person or group in power, comes the right-leaning political critique of socially buoying abortion as a means to render women more appropriately productive in the workplace and less burdensome on society (i.e. it is financially more expedient for a company to pay for abortion than maternity leave, and all the hiccups in the production cycle associated with rearing children.)

Hm makes me wonder about like, Azazel, Bathsheba, or the Baphomet. But at least the comparison is cleared up, thank you. The good news is I figured out Lilith is one of the One Piece Vegapunk personalities that just showed up. I was like, "hey, I know that name!" Other unusual ones were 'York' and 'Shaka'. Apparently Shaka's the Japanese term for Gautama Buddha.

-Russly

A lot of those sorts of things are taken out of Jewish/Christian tradition and repurposed.

Bathsheba is the lady King David committed adultery with.

Azazel is a Hebrew word referencing the scape goat that would be sent to the wilderness to bear the sins of the people. In some strains of later Jewish tradition Azazel also was assumed to reference a spiritual being, usually demonic, that the losing goat was sent to.

Baphomet refers to an idol supposedly worshipped by the knights Templar in the 1000's, though the origin of the name is unclear.

Lilith comes from some more interesting later Jewish traditions, variously a wife of Adam, a mother of Adam's evil progeny, and a source of curse and affliction and evil generally.

I don't know much about anime, but religious history is my jam.

This will get kind of out there because One Piece covers a lot of religious history in general.... But before I go down that rabbit hole, but if we're talking repurposed, I understand Yahweh is actually a compound word or something? Also Zoroaster often doesn't get the mention haha. Gotta love those unclear ones, the word "wicked" is theoretically still unknown.

Lately One Piece has taken the tact that Kokopelli is a bit of a force. I would also mention where my name is meant as a Russly Russell, as I am called Russ a lot. I maybe mentioned another time or two on the forum about my wondering about Set being ruler of the Red Land. Then again, One Piece has been talked about here before too?

-Russly

Oh I've no doubt a show like One Piece mines a lot of different territory - from the little I've seen of it, it seems like it's got a very broad ranging flavor of inspiration.

Anywho...

"Yahweh" is one of those really fascinating words (just linguistically), that the one thing everyone who writes seriously on the subject seems to agree about is that it is impossible to say for sure what its etymological roots are. It's not really an issue of compounded words, so much as the flexibility and ambiguity of certain word forms in ancient Hebrew - which form of speech in which voice and tense from which root word this name is playing on. There are several possible variations that could amount to the likely heft of that word. The range could be anything from "the one bringing into being" to "the one who causes to fall" to "the one who will be" to "I am that I am" to...you get the picture.

Zoroastrianism doesn't get much billing, true, true. Though it probably gets more subtle billing I think than people realize in a lot of media - just because so many people are unfamiliar with it, they don't recognize it when they see it, or assume that they're dealing with some kind of repurposed Christian/Jewish thing when they do.

When you come across those kinds of 'repurposes', I can't help but wonder what the artistic/authorial intent is in, say, not concocting wholesale your own figure, but drawing upon some feature of some older tradition. Sometimes it's obvious they're doing something neat in ways that make the art a bit more meaningful. Sometimes, I think it's just because they think the name is cool. Sometimes, it's obvious the artists/writers are drawing on third-fourth hand interpretations: like someone who, not knowing much about the stories from which, say, a show like Supernatural pulls things out of, and then takes the lore from Supernatural and repurposes the figures from that show as though from a primary source, without any real awareness that Supernatural very much changed the nature of the stories and figures for its own lore. And, I suppose, evolution of lore leaps forward while burning the bridges to the past.

Art and its creation and recreation is endlessly fascinating in what it does to and with tradition.

Yeah the Zoroaster part is what I only recently found out. There's other weird stuff like where psychedelics kickstart brain development in later age or those guys whose bodies remain even after death without preservatives through some certain meditation ('preservation' or 'emptiness').

Before going down the path of Supernatural or, say, the Lost dog, it may be said that many comic writers have hits and have misses. I guess that is why the internet has terms of service. Kind of. Yay One Piece! Lore evolution!

-Russly