The Cult of the Rite

From Wikipedia:

In the specific context of Greek hero cult, Carla Antonaccio has written, “The term cult identifies a pattern of ritual behavior in connection with specific objects, within a framework of spatial and temporal coordinates. Ritual behavior would include (but not necessarilly be limited to) prayer, sacrifice, votive offerings, competitions, processions and construction of monuments. Some degree of recurrence in place and repetition over time of ritual action is necessary for cult to be enacted, to be practiced”^[1]2

To what extent can we view the 20th, and now 21st century, practice of recreating, performing, and witnessing The Rite of Spring, this faux ritual suicide, as a cult? How does our 100-year practice of reenacting this mythical rite (or refusing to reenact it by changing key aspects of the original libretto) satisfy Antonaccio’s criteria for cult worship?

The latin root of the word cult, cultus, means “care” or “adoration.” Lovers adore/care for one another every day in countless gestures. Similarly, worshippers care for the values they hold dearly by practicing devotion to deities or other forces that embody or otherwise represent these values.

Note to self:  could easily devote multiple sets of 12 to this topic. Non-stop writing for 12 minutes at a time is a mainstay of my current writing practice.  Is it devotional? Let’s ask Antonaccio.

1 Antonaccio, “Contesting the Past: Hero Cult, Tomb Cult, and Epic in Early Greece”, American Journal of Archaeology 98.3 (July 1994: 389-410) p. 398.

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_(religious_practice). I like the brief etymology presented here. Would be good to cross reference with some others.

What’s in a name?

[this entry is in process]

The piece with many names.

The original Russian name was not used at the world premiere of this piece.  I’m curious how Diaghilev and his collaborators landed upon the particular translation they used in French, and at what point they began referring to it by its Russian name. I wonder how they referred to it among themselves. Go back to the Diaghilev biography for clues in their correspondence between Stravinsky and Diaghilev. Of course the name could have changed monikers at any point and probably at many points in its life even within this one company: after Nijinsky, during Massine’s tenure, after Diaghilev, etc. And of course different people likely referred to it with different names. At the time the collaborators were mostly Russians fluent in French and thus fully aware of the different implications of its differing names in those two languages. How fluent in French were they actually?

Other than Paris the only other place that the original piece played was London, thus requiring an English name. I wonder how they came up with the English translation and how fluent the translators were both with language and with the piece.

German: Fruhlingsopfer

Opfer in Google translate…

noun
		victim	Opfer, Geschädigte, Verunglückte
		sacrifice	Opfer, Opferung, Verzicht, Opfergabe
		offering	Opfer, Gabe, Opfergabe, Kollekte, Vorstellung
		oblation	Opfer, Opfergabe
		prey	Beute, Opfer, Raub
		casualty	Opfer, Unfallopfer, Verletzte, Todesopfer, Verunglückte, Verwundete

Wearing a Suicide Vest

I found three intriguing stories of women and girls wearing suicide belt/vests.  Somehow all three of these individuals survived their ordeals, perhaps intentionally to sow fear by publicizing such events rather than actually performing them. Performance for the media rather than in actuality.  The third event below raised questions in the blogosphere about whether it might have been staged by Jordan officials.

• Sohana Jawed, 9 year old kidnap victim in Pakistan:  http://www.indianexpress.com/news/9yearold-pak-girl-forced-to-wear-suicide-vest/806402/1

• Rania, 15 year old in Iraq:  http://adjunct.diodon349.com/Attack_on_USA/dramatic_moment_a_15year_od_iraqi_suicide_bomber_gave_herself_up.htm,
  and http://www.odt.co.nz/news/galleries/gallery/19537/iraqi-girl-caught-with-bomb-vest

• Sajida Mubarek Atrous al-Rishawi, Iraqi native who is reported to have survived her attempt to bomb a wedding in Jordan: http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/2005/11/vested-interest/

This AP photo of Rania was released by Iraqi police and published in the Otago Daily Times, 26 Aug 2008.

Iraqi police released this image of what seems to be a suicide vest and which they claim was worn by Rania in a suicide attempt. Her story conflicts with the official story.

It is important to me to include here the names of these individuals, to personalize their stories.  Divorced of their names, such stories become abstractions and all the easier to fear and to exaggerate.  Including the names helps me focus my attention on their material reality, and helps me focus on the experience of these individuals and on their particular circumstances.

Perhaps on Friday’s performance of Embodying the Rites, 1.3 I should stage a fashion show for the cameras like that staged for Jordanian television featuring Ms. Rishawi and the explosive belt she is alleged to have worn in a botched attempt to blow herself up at a wedding.

Suicide Belts

Now collecting information on suicide belts in preparation for performance in Moscow on January 25, 2013.

This new iteration of Embodying the Rites will include a belt that I make from the following models, both of which are available for sale on the internet: http://www.inertproducts.com/suicide_vests_belts.

And here is a film prop that was used in the TV series Caprica, and is up for auction on eBay:

The fakes above are much cleaner looking than those found in news articles about actual suicide bombs, although images of “real” bombs are not necessarily working bombs either, at least not successful ones.  The ones that get photographed are those that fail to detonate or which are intercepted before detonation. Here is bomb vest that is alleged to have been worn by Rania, 15 year old Iraqi girl who police say intended to blow up a school. It could very well have been lethal. We don’t know.

Iraqi police released this image of what seems to be a suicide vest and which they claim was worn by Rania in a suicide attempt. Her story conflicts with the official story.

The Wicker Man Gender Bender

The 1973 horror film The Wicker Man bends theme of virgin sacrifice to the sun around a male sacrifice.  A late 20th century community has lured a detective to their remote island for the purpose of sacrificing him in tribute to the sun so that their harvest may be more bountiful than in previous years.  The chosen one is burned in the wicker form of a human, in a gesture reminiscent of Druid battle practices.

I am curious whether any of the articles emerging from the three-day conference (hosted in 2003 by the Crichton Campus of the University of Glasgow in Dumfries and Galloway) discuss the relationship between this story and The Golden Bough. Must get my hands on the two collections of articles which emerged from this conference.

Poster for British horror film The Wicker Man, 1973.

Lal Bibi, a dead person seeking life

Sometimes we humans sacrifice young women as atonement for crimes they have nothing to do with — not just on stage, but in real life.

The New York Times labels an almost identical photograph as Lal Bibi and her mother. The men in the background are unidentified. Is this more of her family? This young woman seems to be surrounded by family and concerned other people. We don’t seem able to consider her without considering her entire family and community (image source).

According to her family, 18 year old Lal Bibi was abducted from her home in northern Afghanistan by five local police officers and then raped and beaten for five days before being dumped back at her family’s home.  Her suffering seems to have been meant as payback for the actions of her cousin, which seem to have involved the daughter of one of the policemen’s brother.  Some reports claim that this other young woman was also raped; some reports claim that Lal Bibi’s cousin fell in love with and attempted to elope with this policeman’s niece.  In any case, the cousin absconded and thus the girl’s family could not punish him directly, as their anger at his relationship with their daughter might have demanded.

In Afghan tribal custom families sometimes agree to settle disputes with payment of livestock, money, or a bride.  Such a settlement is known as badal.  The policeman’s family seems to have extracted its payment of badal by force, and Lal Bibi’s family has responded with the rare step of seeking justice through governmental channels and going public with their story.  In many instances her family would simply have killed her as a now tainted blot on their family honor that would endure for generations.  Lal Bibi has reportedly said that she will kill herself if the government does not restore her honor by punishing her abductors: “They took me by force… If I receive justice, that’s good, otherwise I’m going to burn and kill myself.”  Her own mother has also threatened to sacrifice her daughter if justice is not served: “Either you deliver us justice, or the blood of my daughter will be on your hands,” she said. “Either you burn my daughter yourself, or I will throw petrol over her and burn her to get justice.”

Death by fire is an powerful statement of sacrifice. It is a dramatic gesture that does not simply end a life, but ends it with excruciating pain that endures over time. If victims do not succumb to smoke inhalation, death can take as long as 2 hours.

It seems that according to tribal custom, Lal Bibi’s life ended when she was forcibly married and raped. But that other events might restore that life. Her life has already been sacrificed to atone for that of another young woman. None of the reports I have found mention the welfare of this other young woman, although the most recent report indicates that the amorous cousin is currently in custody along with four of Lal Bibi’s alleged kidnappers.

This shocking story is stimulating an overwhelming international demand for justice.  Certainly notions of justice here are complex and perhaps inscrutable to outsiders.  The Afghan government is working to mollify an overwhelming sense that local police forces are lawless and out of control. On the level of national politics this event is a public relations problem, which points to major defects in local governance and civil rights.  A young woman is ready to take her own life because she has been raped. A young man sensed danger and fled, leaving his family to suffer the revenge of an angry father for whatever transpired between him and another young woman.

What seems to be unique here is not that an innocent young woman is sacrificed in payment for the sins of another, but that she and her family are seeking an outcome other than her inevitable death.  And as a result her plight has become international news.  Cases of young women offered as badal are common — how common is unclear. The righteous indignation of outsiders at this inscrutable practice is common.  How can we understand the logic that demands the death of an innocent for the death of another innocent? How can we understand our insatiable hunger for such stories?  Do we not consume these stories with an obscene voraciousness that rehearses and perpetuates their violence (Time magazine cover story, August 2010)?  Can our righteous signing of international petitions actually restore life for a young woman who considers herself dead (“I am already a dead person“)?  Does external condemnation of a system of justice not serve to strengthen that system — particularly when that condemnation comes from an untrusted occupying force? What is the nature of a self that considers itself dead when it has been offended?  What is the nature of agency in a system where families rather than individuals seek justice on behalf of family representatives, and where family representatives can atone for sins of other family members?  How do conflicting systems of justice coexist and influence one another?

Read more:

• http://www.rferl.org/content/rape-case-tests-afghan-justice/24604549.html
• http://alaiwah.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/18-year-old-lal-bibi-raped-in-afghanistan-by-the-police/
• http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/28/world/asia/afghan-rape-case-turns-focus-on-local-police.html?pagewanted=all

[Note to self:
Consider this story in light of social theorists writing about sacrifice (scapegoat, ending cycle of violence etc)].

The Giving of Oneself Altogether and Finally

Wendy Perriman traces the intimate relationship that novelist Willa Cather had with concert dance in the early 20th Century. The chapter “Shadows on the Rock: The Giving of Oneself Altogether and Finally” describes Ballets Russes works that Cather attended and which influenced her writing, including the Rite of Spring.

Willa Cather and the Dance: “A Most Satisfying Elegance”

Sacrifice’s Distributed Selfhood & Radical Asymmetry

I presented the following paper in December 2011, as part of a symposium on Practice as Research hosted by University of California Davis:  Performance and Social Change. This paper weaves through and alongside my choreography, “Embodying the Rites 1.o,” which I also presented in the symposium as “Embodying the Rites 1.1”.

Choreography by Hilary Bryan: "Embodying the Rites 1.0" Performed at CounterPULSE, San Francisco, November 2011. (If link fails, copy/paste the following into a new browser window: http://vimeo.com/32887046)

________________
Sacrifice’s Distributed Selfhood & Radical Asymmetry
Notes toward the dissertation: Embodying the Rites of Spring – 100 years of human sacrifice

I. Distributed Selfhood

I’m every woman. It’s all in me. 
~Chaka Khan

In her 1978 hit R&B single, Chaka Khan asserts her total selfhood, incorporating every other woman into her unique form and (super)human ability (Khan, Ashford and Simpson).  She suggests not just a connection with or similarity to other women, but equivalence, a coincidence of her being with all other female beings outside of time and place.  Khan locates within herself every manifestation of woman, with a claim that reaches farther than incorporation of each woman that is, was, or ever will be.  It is not “they” that exist inside of her, but “it” – not a multiplicity of selves, but an abstract notion of collective being.  Khan distributes and abstracts her particular self to a general principle.  Khan’s distributed and all-encompassing selfhood cum abstraction suggests a divine principle, the sort of which might manifest in multiple different forms, and which might engage a community of believers at various levels of abstraction.  Such a multivalent capacity to shape shift allows participants to interact with such a divine principle in different ways at different times and for different purposes.

In Hindu religions Kali, Durga, and Parvati, are all aspects of the Great Mother Goddess, Mahadevi, who both nourishes and destroys.  In Hindu Tantric texts, śakti is the radiating power or energy that saturates the entire cosmos and all that is in it: “She the primordial Śakti is supreme, whose nature is unoriginated joy, eternal, utterly incomparable, the seed of all that moves or is motionless.” (Urban 792, ) Śakti’s linguistic root, śak, to be able, fits Khan’s portrayal of her all-encompassing self as infinitely capable.[1]  Here the same name is used for both the abstraction and for its corporeal manifestation as anthropomorphic and anthropopathic deity.  Khan abstracts her human self to one of divine and ubiquitous proportions with an ease and confidence that suggests that this infinite capability is not hers alone, but available to and inherent in any of us.

Such distributed and all-encompassing identity resembles the Hindu notion that we and everything else in the universe are all incarnations of atman, the immortal aspect of mortal existence, the hidden selfhood which is shared by every material object, animate and inanimate.(hinduwebsite.com)  The implications of this shared selfhood for The Rite of Spring is is complex: if all beings share a common self, then death of the sacrificial victim implies death for everyone.  Fellow villagers participating in the ritual on stage and audience members participating as voyeurs from beyond the fourth wall, we all die along with the chosen one.  By participating in the ritual, we commit suicide along with her.  She is our surrogate, taking a hit for the team, giving her life for our survival; and through that process we die with her.  And yet simultaneously we don’t.  We are the ones who carry her lifeless body off the stage, and we are the ones whose mortal existence survives to participate in this ritual again.  Same time next year.

This conflation of sacrificer and sacrificed is particularly potent in a sacrificial rite where death must be self inflicted.  This ritual includes no mediating priest who lops off her head with a single blow from a sacred ax, no administration of soporific drug before abandoning her on a mountain top, no physical restraint while ripping out her heart.  Nor is this suicide a momentary act of self immolation, as jumping off a cliff or stabbing oneself in the chest might be.  The Rite of Spring’s “Sacrificial Dance” demands a sustained process of self directed physical violence intended to exhaust one’s own body beyond capacity.[2]  The chosen one simultaneously fulfills the roles of both sacrificer and sacrificed, embodying both cause and effect.  The protraction of time allotted for this multivalent process demands that she continually renew her commitment to both roles.[3]

II. Beyond Gender
Khan’s emphasis on her incorporation of all things female (or on general female incorporation of everything), limits the reach of this “all” that is in her.  Her self encompasses only things feminine, rather than all things. But why stop there? In “Embodying the Rites, 1.2” I sing Khan’s refrain without enunciating the word “woman,” so as not to limit my collective beingness. (Bryan)  Of course, audience members familiar with these popular lyrics will likely supply that limit mentally, as they fill in the missing word, and as they consider my female form.  I welcome this conflation. If this mythic Rite requires the death dance specifically of a woman, and if that woman begins the ritual dressed identically to and moving in unison with the other women on stage (as she does in re-imaginings of this piece throughout out the 20^th century), then that woman seems to stand in for all the others.  She takes a hit for the team, representing all the other members of that team. (Nijinsky, Bausch, Bejart, Preljocaj)

Khan is a product and exponent of 20^th Century gender struggle, as are the choreographers who have reinterpreted The Rite of Spring over the past 100 years, and who (mostly) agree that the Chosen One is specifically a Chosen Woman.  Is there some 20^th century Western understanding that predisposes us to limit ourselves, as Khan does, to gender specific co-incidence, as Rite of Spring choreographers (mostly) do? If our collective survival depends on our nourishing the sun with female flesh, then all that femininity might encompass is on the chopping block in a way that masculinity is not.  And as the group that enters and exits this ritual intact, the masculine, enjoys an integrity and stability that the feminine does not.

In another version of gendered sacrificial violence, Georges Bataille’s description of Aztec sacrifice requires that sacrifice to the sun be gendered male. Indeed, Spanish sketches of Aztec sacrifices portray uniquely male victims, held down by male acolytes assisting immolation by male priests.  In Bataille’s description of Aztec cosmology, both the warrior’s death on the battlefield and the male prisoner of war’s ritual murder are required for the sun to continue its daily journey across the sky. (Bataille)  By contrast, Western movement artists and their 20th century audiences satisfy the sun’s thirst for blood with female sacrifice.  The function of sacrifice is the same, yet the responsibility/privilege to die as a martyr has shifted from male to female.  Roerich and Stravinsky set this precedent by scripting female sacrifice into their libretto; and over the past 100 years of re-imagined Rites, we have continued to support this choice, that what is appropriate to destroy is woman.[4]  The asymmetrical relationship of this destruction is disturbing.

III. Asymmetry

I continue to be troubled by the radical asymmetry that exists between the sacrifice and the sacrificed [priest/little girl], or between those who call for sacrifices and those who bear the costs [UC chancellor/UC students].
Bruce Lincoln (Lincoln)

The violence inherent in blood sacrifice attracts theorists who seek to understand its prevalence and persuasive power in human activity.  Their explanations often serve to normalize extraordinarily violent human action.  How does one entity destroy another? How is it that participants buy into an asymmetry that implies their own destruction?  The contemporary trope of the suicide bomber raises these ancient questions with a new contemporary edge.  We, the ones who consider ourselves external to this trope, devour psychological studies of the suicide bomber and behind the scenes glimpses into their process.  We seek explanations that might calm our horror.  French ethnologists and sociologists Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss sing the efficacy of sacrifice for community building. (Hubert and Mauss; Girard)  Cultural theorist and literary critic René Girard explains the necessity of sacrifice for redirecting innate human aggression, which would destroy the fabric of society without this safety valve. (Girard)  Anthropologist Clifford Geertz points out the function sacrifice serves in helping a highly regulated community acknowledge the random and offensive unfairness of life. (Geertz)

Lincoln is worried not only about the sacrificial victim, but about what he calls secondary sacrificial victim, or all those who are exploited by the asymmetrical social hierarchy that the sacrifice is designed to reinforce.  The very nature of sacrifice is asymmetrical in that one entity benefits from the event, while another is destroyed. This asymmetrical arrangement, built in as it is to the structure of sacrifice, serves to reinforce social hierarchy in general.  Some benefit, while others sacrifice.  Various processes of persuasion and mystification allow certain discourses to become hegemonic. And the quality of transcendence that they acquire through ritual sacrifice makes this hegemony seem not only inevitable, but necessary and desirable, even for the mass segments of society who are victimized by them.  Thus those who might otherwise perceive themselves as suffering from social asymmetry seek not to overturn it, but rather respect, expect, and worship that very asymmetry which locks them into disadvantaged social status.

Lincoln’s statement inspires me like a call to action, and even a research methodology.  I seek to approach each of these troubling Rites of Spring with this goal of seeking the underlying system of cosmological speculation through close reading of its details and central sequences.  My interest extends beyond close reading to “close feeling” of these details by experiencing them through my own body.  Though of course if Patrick Anderson is correct, this will teach me nothing about what was, but only about what is.  Of course, this is the same essential truth about LMA and what we can know about another by moving the way they do.  All we can know is how it feels for us to move in that way.  We do not know what it is for them.

In many Rites we see very little social stratification or differentiation at all.  The represented hegemony is so general as to disappear.  Uniform costuming, gesture and spacing suggest an equality in the community.  There is of course the stark contrast between men and women.  And the convention that the victim be chosen from among the women.  But within those two gendered subgroups, there is general uniformity.  In Bausch’s Rite, the one standout male character is the seer or priest who Bausch presents us 2 figures who stand out from the crowd, one male and one female.  The asymmetrical power structure reveals itself in the power this male figure holds over all the females – it is he who selects the victim, he who marks her as chosen, he who physically thrusts her into her the sacrificial dance.

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share : An Essay on General Economy. New York: Zone Books, 1988.

Bryan, Hilary. Embodying the Rites, 1.2. 2011. Performance and Social Change Symposium, Davis.

Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Daedalus 101.1 (1972): 1-37.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

hinduwebsite.com. “Atman – the Soul Eternal”.  Hinduwebsite.com. November 12 2011. <http://www.hinduwebsite.com/atman.asp>.

Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. [Chicago]: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

Khan, Chaka, Nickolas Ashford, and Valerie Simpson. “I’m Every Woman.”  Chaka. Burbank, Calif.: Warner Bros., 1978. 1 sound disc (44 min.).

Lincoln, Bruce. Death, War, and Sacrifice : Studies in Ideology and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Urban, Hugh B. “The Path of Power: Impurity, Kingship, and Sacrifice in Assamese Tantra.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69.4 (2001): 777-816.

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[1] I can cast a spell / Of secrets you can tell /  Mix a special brew / Put fire inside of you / Anytime you feel danger or fear / Instantly I will appear

[2] As Stravinsky conducted this work with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in 1962, the “Sacrificial Dance” is the longest of 13 movements and lasts 4.5 minutes.

[3] Ну, и что??

[4] Girard’s theory of redirecting innate human aggression from “bad violence” that undermines the fabric of society, to “good violence” against sacrificial victims – particularly the innocent, the marginal, and the powerless – suggests that our 20^th century habit of sacrificing women is directly related to their marginalization and disempowered status in 20^th century Western society.

Moloch and the circulation of Myth

Moloch (also Molech, Molekh, Molok, Molek, Molock, Moloc, or simply the letter combination MLK) is the alleged name of an ancient Ammonite god with the head of a bull. Worship to this god in the form of propitiatory child and animal sacrifice — particularly by fire — has been attributed to Canaanites, Phoenician and related cultures in North Africa and the Levant.

Awkwardly, accounts of these bloody rituals have been written by enemies of these peoples, thus it seems impossible to know the context of these activities or whether they actually occurred.  Accounts of these rituals are as suspect as the Spanish accounts of Aztec sacrifice during the time when Spanish military officers were trying to gain Spanish support for their activities suppressing the people they encountered in The New World. Subsequent archeological discoveries have made it clear that some sort of human sacrifice was indeed practiced by the Aztecs perhaps even in forms reminiscent of the vivid descriptions in Spanish drawings and written accounts.

Archeological evidence of Moloch worship is much less clear. Read more here:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch

• http://peterjfast.com/2012/02/16/moloch-an-appetite-for-children/

What interests me is the life of such myths and their potency for the people who circulate them.

To do:

• Think about circulation of the Moloch story among the Israelites who published the first written references to this god as prohibitions.  Israelites were specifically told not to participate in such sacrifices. Why? Were they prone to? Or were the authors of the text simply establishing an other against which to define themselves?The Moloch image continues to be repeated as fact and placed in association with contemporary issues to serve various contemporary political agendas:

The ancients would heat this idol up with fire until it was glowing, then they would take their newborn babies, place them on the arms of the idol, and watch them burn to death.  I can’t help but compare today’s abortion massacre to the sacrifice of children by these ancient pagans.  In both, innocent life is destroyed for the gain of the parent.
(http://carm.org/christianity/miscellaneous-topics/moloch-ancient-pagan-god-child-sacrifice)

• Think about circulation of The Rite of Spring. This story is entirely manufactured based on an imagined “pagan Russia” and inspired by the roundly discredited theories of The Golden Bough, which circulated widely in the decades before The Rite of Spring emerged.

We cannot learn about the characters or cultures described in the myth, because the myth does not reliably point to a particular source. But we can learn about those who create, consume and circulate it.

Related:
The Munich Cosmic Circle was a group of writers and intellectuals in Germany associated with the mystic Alfred Schuler.

“They developed a doctrine according to which the West was plagued by downfall and degeneration, caused by the rationalizing and demythologizing effects of Christianity. A way out of this desolate state could, according to the “Cosmic” view, only be found by a return to pagan origins.” (wikipedia)

This urge toward (some imagined) pagan roots similarly motivates both The Golden Bough and The Rite of Spring. These urges also inspired the back-to-the-earth experiments of the artists and intellectuals at Monte Verita, where Rudolf Laban staged his first community movement ritual, Ode to the Sun in 1913.

Aside:
“In writings of the so-called Munich Cosmic Circle the name Moloch was used to symbolize a hostile to life, emotionally cold and intellectualist principle.” (wikipedia citation: Karl und Hanna Wolfskehl – Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Gundolf. Edited by Karlhans Kluncker. Castrum Peregrini Presse, 1977 ISBN 9060340329)

Sacrifice to Moloch copy/pasted from peterjfast.com. Please contact me with any further information about this image: artist, time period, publisher, etc. Thank you.

More Moloch:

http://www.pantheon.org/articles/m/moloch.html
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10443b.htm
http://carm.org/christianity/miscellaneous-topics/moloch-ancient-pagan-god-child-sacrifice
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10937-moloch-molech
http://peterjfast.com/2012/02/16/moloch-an-appetite-for-children/