What The Shadow Shows

Facing Our Shadow
Judith Fein

Visiting Ancient Altars Where Children Were Sacrificed

A few [years] ago, travel editor Judith Fein and her husband Paul went to Tunisia, in North Africa. The airport they flew into, Carthage-Tunis, is named for the Phoenician outpost, the legendary enemy of Rome and home of the mighty general Hannibal. Carthage is also home to the Tophet cemetery, with its 20,000 urns filled with the remains of sacrificed animals and children. "The soldiers of Carthage were made courageous, in part, by the fact that their older siblings had been sacrificed on a pyre," says Fein. To her, "Tophet cemetery is a place where the human shadow is directly in front of us. It is a place to be reckoned with, always, and perhaps especially now." On her return she fled this report.

We visited the Tophet cemetery with one of the top guides and historians in Tunisia. I asked the guide to speak slowly, so I could absorb every syllable he was saying. The funerary stelae were everywhere, all around us, some sticking straight up, some lopsided, eroded, some almost swallowed up by the earth. The engraved stick figures on the stelae bear silent testimony to the god Baal-Hammon and his consort Tanit. Under each engraved stump of stone are a baby's remains in an urn. And, the guide told us, along with the ashes is a glass vial that contains the mother's tears. It was part of the ceremony. The Phoenician mothers buried their grief with their children.

The guide showed us the altar. To a passerby, it looks like slabs of stone. To someone interested, like me, it was a butcher block. How did they do it? What was the mood, the feeling? I had read that ceremonies were performed at night, with a fire raging in a huge pit, accompanied by music.

The most startling element of the Tophet cemetery, for me, was a large stone cave called the Tunnel of the Holocaust. We entered, and it took a while for our eyes to adjust to the dark. When we could see, there were tombstones deep in the grotto. Our guide explained that when the Carthaginians were losing the war with Rome, they thought it was because the gods were angry that they had stopped sacrificing their first-born sons. So they rounded up their grown first-borns, now teenagers or adults, and slaughtered them. It was Punic penance for having neglected their duties.

The horror of the place is almost unimaginable. Such stories can't be true. But they are. In the museum of Carthage, where the objects recreate the life of the Phoenicians, we saw a dark stone stela. Chiseled on it is a man — perhaps a father, perhaps a priest — who carries a small son to be sacrificed. The stone is not an ancient legend; it is tangible, real, you can touch it, feel it.

The stelae reminded me of the biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac. God told Abraham to take his precious son to be sacrificed, and he obeyed. That is the Hebrew version of the story. The Muslim version is that God told him to take his beloved son Ismael. Abraham climbed to the high place, bound his son, and was about to lower the knife when his hand was stayed by an angel of God. A ram ran out of the thicket at that moment, and Abraham sacrificed the sheep on the altar instead. One interpretation of the story is that it marks the shift from human sacrifice to animal.

But the story is more than metaphor. What about the experience of the many Isaacs who went to "high places" to do their grim duty? Four years ago Paul and I went to Petra, a mirage-like ancient Nabatean city, carved out of stone, rising in majesty out of the Jordanian desert. We gaped at public buildings, irrigation systems and sculpted façades, and I saw a small sign that said "High Place," with an arrow pointing upward. I grabbed Paul's arm. It had never occurred to me that the high places of the Bible still existed, or that I could visit one.

We followed the arrow and began climbing among the stones. It was a steep, arduous ascent and I was soon out of breath. I can walk the proverbial million miles, but because of allergies I have a hard time climbing. Ordinarily, I might have turned back, but this time I bore the discomfort, the lack of air. I climbed, climbed, slowly, pausing, catching my breath, thinking. It was no casual matter to ascend to a high place. It was a pilgrimage. Isaac undoubtedly knew they weren't going for a stroll in the hills. He knew exactly where his father was taking him, and why. It was a practice performed in innocence, out of devotion to God. Only those who condemned it or didn't participate saw it as horrific.

After an interminable climb, we reached the high place. It seemed as though we were at the summit of the world, close to the heavens, where God, if he were watching, could see us. At the very top was a large, raised stone altar. I looked away for a moment, ashamed of being human.

Two years later I had the same experience in Jerusalem, in the vast, verdant Valley of Ben Hinnom, also known as Gehenna — a word that became synonymous with hell. It was a place where Jews sacrificed their children, sharing the bloody ritual of their neighbors. Down we climbed, down into the ancient place. Gone was the noise of Jerusalem. The air, the stones, the earth felt so sad, so still, so frozen. As though the valley were in perpetual grieving, its mouth gaping open in horror like the figure in Edvard Munch's painting, The Scream. All we could do was stand still, in silent contemplation. And then, slowly, we began to pick blossoms from the trees in the valley. Our hands were full of petals. One by one we scattered them in the valley of death, speaking words of consolation to the ancient children. We said we were sorry for their pain and ordeal by fire. I thought, once again, of the story of Abraham. There had been so many Abrahams, so many Isaacs, with no ram to interrupt the religious rites that required human blood.

The practice of human and then animal sacrifice was so widespread, and so important to peoples' devotions, that it became the metaphorical basis for the crucifixion of Jesus. He is called the sacrificial Lamb of God. He took on our sins and expiated them for us. We are bathed in the blood of the lamb. It is all there before us — the Jesus story, the Abraham story, Gehenna, the Tophet cemetery. There are incinerated infant skeletons rattling in our human closet. Do we close the door in horror, or do we look? When we look, we come face to face with another aspect of our humanness and our history. We get to measure whether we have evolved and progressed. We get to think about what or who God is, and what the divine spirit requires of us. Our desire to connect to Spirit and achieve grace is so strong that we are willing to sacrifice anything — even our most precious children — to achieve it.

Whew. Things are different now... or are they? The parents of suicide bombers rejoice that their children have died for Allah. Parents of every faith send their young sons to wars in the name of God. Where, I wonder, are we, as a civilization, situated on the scale of human development?