materialism

Moloch was an ancient semitic god worshipped by Canaanites, early Hebrews, and especially the Phoenicians. Archaeological and documentary evidence of him is spotty, but from what we know he seems to have been a god who demanded sacrifices of live victims, including children.

In our own time the name of Moloch often refers to something which requires costly sacrifices, and in Allen Ginsberg's classic poem of the mid-1950's, "Howl," Moloch has become the worship of material, which in the poet's view has led us to the ultimate sacrifice -- loss of self. After opening the poem with a long description of how he "saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," Ginsberg begins the second part with the question "what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?"

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Even though most inhabitants of our modern industrialized world might express an attachment to one or another of the traditional religions, most of them actually worship material. In doing so they worship not just a false god, but a cruel one. Materialism urges us to spend our lives working ceaselessly toward a vaguely-defined goal which, even when achieved, will leave us feeling empty, for it's at that point we will realize that we have sacrificed our souls, as Faust did, exchanging them for a heap of lifeless objects.

D.B.
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