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In the days of the emperor Arcadius, long after the rest of the region had been thoroughly Christianized, the city of Gaza remained proudly, defiantly, faithful to the Old Ways, its eight temples daily thronged with worshipers.

At the heart and center of pagan Gaza stood the Marneion, the marble-clad temple of Zeus Marnas, famed for its size and beauty. Though latterly identified with the Greek Zeus, the god of this temple (Aramaic Mâr-nâ, “our Lord”) was none other than the old Canaanite Thunderer, Ba'al Hadad himself, god of that place for more than 3000 years.

So few Christians were there among the Gazans that, when the city's newly-appointed bishop, Porphyrius, arrived to take charge, he could find only a handful in a city of several hundred thousand inhabitants.

In those days, when a new bishop rode into his city for the first time, it was customary to give him a triumphal welcome, the road before him strewn with branches and palm fronds, the air perfumed with incense. On March 21, 395, however, the people of Gaza gave Porphyrius a satirical entry instead. They strewed the road before him with thorns, fouled the air with burning cowpies, and met him with jeers instead of the expected hymns.

Porphyrius burned hot with anger, but the emperor would brook no interference with the city or its ways. Gaza was a wealthy city, and paid its taxes faithfully, fattening the imperial treasury with its annual revenues.

Porphyrius soon ingratiated himself with the empress, predicting that she would soon bear a son. When she did so, after the child's baptism, he was finally given the permission he had long sought to destroy the temples of Gaza.

Imperial troops entered the city on May 12 in the year 400. The plunder and rapine continued unabated for twelve days and nights. When they were finished, pagan Gaza was no more.

The Sun goes away. The Moon goes away. What do you do?

Obviously, you make fire magic. That's the logic underlying Hanuka.

We hear much of the pagan roots of Christmas; rarely, if ever, do we hear of the pagan roots of Hanuka. But that doesn't mean that they're not there.

In most years, the Jewish Festival of Lights spans the dark of the Moon closest to the Winter Solstice. Dark of the Sun, Dark of the Moon. So we make light to bring back Light, every night more light, until the Moon comes back and we know that the Cycle has been renewed.

Whew.

Rabbinical accounts make it clear that, as is usual with Jewish holidays, the holiday itself came first, with the historical etiology—the Maccabees and their trick oil cruet—added later to “sanctify” the old nature holiday.

Though I can't prove it, I suspect that what we see in contemporary Hanuka is the latter-day descendant of an old pan-Mediterranean Winter Solstice celebration. If we could travel back 3500 years to the temple-palace of Knossos at the time of the dark Moon nearest the Winter Solstice, I'm guessing that in the House of the Double Ax, we'd find oil-lamps in the windows and bonfires in the courtyards. Probably there would have been garlands of greenery decking the courts and doorways as well, since this was pretty much de rigueur for any special occasion in those days.

Chances are that they would have been eating fried foods as a special festival treat. The olive harvest, the last harvest of the growing season, would then have been newly finished; with the pressing of the olives would have come the year's greatest abundance of new oil.

So, probably, in additional to the usual singing and dancing, we'd have been eating some sort of fried holiday goodie similar to the banuelos of Sfardic Jewry: deep-fried dough soaked in honey syrup, and dusted with crushed almonds. The gifts of the olive: richness and light.

In Which, After Experiencing an Infestation of Flies, Our Intrepid Blogger Muses on the Old Ways, the New, and What the Abrahamics Just Don't Get

Beelzebub, arch-demon of the Bible.

In Hebrew, that would be Ba'al Zvûv: literally, Lord Fly, or Lord (of a) Fly. Usually, of course, this gets translated, “Lord of the Flies,” which strikes me as rather gratuitous. Insofar as an individual can stand for a kind, I suppose it's marginally acceptable as a tertiary—not to mention counter-intuitive— rendering.

(Bear in mind, though, that I'm a speaker of modern, not biblical, Hebrew, so my ear is not necessarily attuned to every nuance of older forms of the language.)

One of the things that's endearing about the Old Hebrew writers whose works were later compiled into what we know as the bible is that many of them are inveterate punsters. Ba'al Zvuv is one such pun.

In fact, it's what's technically known as a cacophonism: an intentionally nasty deformation of a name. (Like, say, Ronald Rump.)

In fact, it's a pun on Ba'al Zvûl: Prince Ba'al. (In Old Hebrew and Canaanite mythology, El—Heaven—is King of the Gods, Ba'al—Thunder, his junior colleague—Prince.) Here we see one of the decidedly un-endearing sides of the Old Hebrew writers: their sheer, unremitting nastiness when it comes to other people's sacredness.

He's not Prince Ba'al, he's Lord of the Flies! Well ha very ha.

Over Yule this year (the solar year begins at the Winter Solstice, so I can say that), I had a household infestation of flies. Well, in the pagan world, you're never more than a half-step away from the sacred: the Otherworld—call it Faerie, if you like—is always speaking to you from just behind your shoulder.

So it is that I find myself thinking about the Lord of the Flies.

To those nasty old Abrahamics, of course, this was a major diss. Not being pagans, naturally, that's exactly what they would think.

As a pagan, though, I can appreciate our kinsman Fly for the honorable (and necessary) work that he does. As a pagan, I can see the beauty of decay.

Imagine a world in which there was no decay. (Go ahead, just try.) Eventually, we'd all be buried in our own waste. End of story.

Thanks to Lord Fly, the end of the old story becomes the beginning of the new. Thanks to Lord Fly, the Wheel keeps turning. Thanks to Lord Fly, the Eternal Return.

Forget the Maccabees.

This time of year, the press goes into overdrive about the Temple in Jerusalem, miracles, and trick oil cruets.

Don't believe them.

The Jewish year 5775 begins at sundown tonight (Wednesday). In Hebrew, “new year” is r'osh ha-shana: literally, “head [of] the year.” Interestingly, the Arabic term for “new year” is the same: r'as as-sana. Clearly this expression goes back a long, long way, possibly even to Proto-Semitic times. In any event, the phrase long predates monotheism. One should probably posit an Arabic—possibly Moorish—origin for the Italian word for “new year,” capodanno. Three guesses what that means literally.

“New Moon” in Hebrew is r'osh hodesh, literally (you guessed it) “head of the month.” Why would the head of something come to mean its beginning?

I can think of two possibilities.