Gehenna in Jerusalem became not just hell, but the place where Judas invested his ill-gotten silver pieces and during the Middle Ages the site of mass charnel-houses. Molok (offering) was distorted into the biblical “moloch,” the definition of the cruel idolatrous god and, later in Western literature, particularly in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s fallen angels. Bless him!” These finds may have coincided with the time of Manasseh, implying that the biblical stories were plausible. They bore the letters MLK (as in molok, offering) and contained the burned bones of children and the telling message of a victim’s father reading: “It was to Baal that Bomilcar vowed this son of his own flesh. Yet very little evidence was discovered until the early 1920s, when two French colonial officials in Tunisia found a tophet, with buried urns and inscriptions in a field. Much later, Roman and Greek historians ascribed this dastardly practice to the Carthaginians, those descendants of the Phoenicians. Human sacrifice was long associated with Canaanite and Phoenician ritual. There are hints of child sacrifice in Genesis and Exodus, including Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. He came close to being thrown out of an antiquarian bookshop in the Turl when he casually asked for a first edition of “Paradise Lost.” He tracked down a kindly tutor who knew about buying old books and confided to him that he wanted to impress a girl with a certain kind of present, and was directed to a bookshop in Covent Garden where he spent half a term’s money on an eighteenth-century edition of “Areopagitica.” When he speed-read it on the train back to Oxford, one of the pages cracked in two. He read a biography, and four essays that he had been told were pivotal. He, Beard, that is, memorized passages that appeared to him intelligent and especially sonorous. He fared better with “Paradise Lost” and, like many before him, preferred Satan’s party to God’s. He read through “Lycidas,” “Samson Agonistes,” and “Il Penseroso”- stilted and rather prissy in parts, he thought. He read “Comus” and was astounded by its silliness. A third-year literature student in Beard’s college who owed him a favor (for procuring tickets to a Cream concert) gave him an hour on Milton, what to read, what to think. It did not take long to discover the century to which this man belonged. Someone told him that she had a special interest in John Milton. It is not an allegory, and they don't have the key to it, because there is no key apart from the sympathetic and open-minded understanding of the reader. It seems to me that some critics of mine, from the religious point of view, are treating my novel as if it were an allegory and they had the key to it. If you don't understand it like this, the book won't work." Allegory works because the author says, "This means so-and-so, that means such-and-such, and this can only be understood in such-and-such a way. The way metaphor works is not the way allegory works. But then, that's what we do with metaphor all the time. Finding physical embodiments for things that were not themselves physical was one of the ways I approached what I wanted to say. So it was possible to do, I realized, and with Milton as my encouragement, I launched into this book - which I reluctantly accept has to be called a fantasy. The portrait of Satan, especially in the Temptation scene (I think it's in Book 9), is a magnificent piece of psychological storytelling. Paradise Lost is a great psychological novel that happens to be cast in the form of a fantasy, because the devils and the angels are, of course, embodiments of psychological states. It's not one of those banal fantasies that just rely on somebody having magic and someone dropping a ring down a volcano. Paradise Lost is not a story of people and some other people who've got wings. Which was exactly what, I then realized, Milton had been doing with Paradise Lost. But I realized that I could use the apparatus of fantasy to say things that I thought were true. I hadn't expected ever to write a fantasy, because I am not a great fantasy fan. One thing that I realized early on in thinking about this book, when I found, to my consternation, that I was writing a fantasy.
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