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.
