Ba'al and Bael and Yahweh: and essay on Anthropological Worship (written for the Trench Crusade community)

 In a recent post, Trench Crusade lore canon states:

Built of rotten wood and tarnished jewels, the Hungering Throne of Gluttony has seen many contenders since Beelzebub abdicated in favour of his ruinous plaguecraft. However, some semblance of stability has returned since Bael, the Uncrowned King of Stolen Land, took the throne. Once a revered Canaanite storm god, Bael’s prophets were humiliated by those of YHWH on Mount Carmel, an injustice unforgiven by the Uncrowned King.

https://www.trenchcrusade.com/lore/the-seven-heads-of-the-serpent

This stuck out to me for one reason: Ba'al is YHWH... according to certain modes of analysis. I'll elaborate more later, but the purpose of this post is to make aware the relationship between reality and fiction. I wish to bring context to the inspiration of the game, and help the community guide the lore, the gameplay, and let Trench Crusade emerge, undefined, out of the mutually exclusive Gaming/Painting/Lore practices.

TL;DR: fiction is reality, God is Dead(named), gods are real and live inside you, mythology is science, luck and vibes are more important than strategy, skittles are worship, and definitions aren't real

Why does this matter? Lore is never designed in isolation to the community. Lore authors and game directors, are part of the Trench Crusade community and absorb our discussion, thoughts, and wishes as they have their own during the design process. I encourage the community to use historical analysis to further develop the game. I found this paragraph the most compelling piece of lore so far. I think our own human history is often overlooked, and the particular blend TC employs can illuminate a lot that we take for granted. This is an awesome avenue into a deeper understanding of ourselves.

How and Why can Ba'al be YHWH? Deities don't "exist" as characters that can factually be mutually exclusive. There is no embodying person to intrinsically inhabit these titles. "God" is a term I might use, but there isn't a meaningful semantic difference between that and "Allah", only a cultural one. In a sense, every "name" for a god emerged as a "descriptor" for that god (like how baal is a common etymology for master). In the same way Allah also is God but isn't. These are incompatible modes of analysis. In the ancient context of these characters, the deities were deeply intertwined in the cultures of their worshippers. To have a different culture and worship different gods were implications of each other. They did not know people through race or nationality, but alignment to a culture. They knew mythology as emergent from the natural world. The respective worshippers of Yahweh and Ba'al both agreed and disagreed on their unity at different points in history. Compare this to Horus and Ra, each whom were very importantly different or the same deity at different points in time. Or Zeus and Jupiter. None of these characters have a cohesive archaeological record and can be isolated from each other.

So whats the story? Early ancient Israelites inherited polytheistic religion from their Canaanite ancestors that worshipped the pantheon of El (including Ba'al Hadad). Yahwism emerged within their cult and introduced a long period of cultural transformation to practice monolatry to Yahweh. They didn't just wish to standardize cultural practices, but localize the worship within their temple of Yahweh, retroactively known as the First Temple of Judaism. The polytheistic to monolatrist merge forced both El and Ba'al, with their worship practices, to be merged into one Yahweh character. This was not to be assumed as just a theological reformation, but importantly a social, economic, and political one. This permitted all deities to be worshiped in the same region simultaneously. Later, the Israelites were exiled by the invading Neo-Babylonians following King Nebuchadnezzar II. The exiled Israelites wrote the Tanakh, for several reasons: they wanted to rationalize their Exile, preserve their culture, and standardize the following of Yahweh's laws, furthering monolatrist reformation.

Its important to shed the Christian understanding of the Old Testament. The Lord characterized in the Tanakh, burdened the chosen people with the responsibility of following the law under threat of punishment. He is characterized by freeing the Israelites from the Pharaoh, only to then force them into a covenant, parallel to a marriage contract. He was never a benevolent shepherd who acquired and rewarded followers through faith. His role wasn't philosophical, but narrative and educational. Like the story of Job illustrates, God operates on his terms. The ancient Israelites weren't broadly concerned about how other cultures worshipped other gods, and the Hebrew Bible doesn't condemn how other gods are worshipped. The point is the chosen people needed to fulfill their contract with their God.

Even as the Tanakh was translated into Greek and Latin and German and English, remnants of polytheism from the ancient Hebrew remain. Part of the reformations of the Law, attributed to Yahweh, is rejecting the idol and depictions of Yahweh. The letters of YHWH is called the Tetragrammaton, which does exist in the Torah, but Orthodox Jews refuse to speak aloud or write. The rejection of Ba'al idolatry was also a rejection of Yahweh idolatry and depictions of. Even the term Jehovah comes from changing the vowels of YHWH to allow reference without speaking or writing. Many various depictions of God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam originates from the rejection of specific depictions.

El and Ba'al at ISAC at UChicago

This is a big claim that doesn't align with peoples' ideas of religion. Christian theology and doctrine often offers the Old Testament as being a literal account of the historical record, but this was never asserted by the Tanakh or the Talmud (thousands of years of Rabbinic commentary). Jewish consensus is that the Tanakh contains fiction. Scholarly and archeological consensus asserts the Moses was one of these fictional stories. Its very clear in textual analysis. There is disagreement about whether Israelites had a notable ancestor group enslaved in Egypt, but the Exodus story doesn't line up with archeology, and archeology doesn't support the story.

What is referenced by Mount Carmel is Elijah (translated from "my god is Yah") mocking the followers of Ba'al for worshipping incorrectly, not whatsoever. When Moses climbs Mount Sinai to retrieve the Ten Commandments, the followers erect a Golden Calf which angers the Lord for being worshipped incorrectly, as previously a Bull was a symbol for Yahweh (pre-Exile with archeological evidence). Bull is a masculine word in ancient Hebrew grammar. A calf is not only an infantilized form of a bull, it also is grammatically feminine. Being forcefully destroyed and ingested by the Israelite people in punishment, this was a humiliation of the Canaanite forms of worship: cultural context not present in the Bible. The rationalization of the literal Exile was that the Israelites were being punished for worshipping too many gods and they needed to re-prioritize their pantheon. King Saul had many sons, two were: Yonatan (gift of Yah) and Ishba'al (man of Ba'al) which was later edited to Ishbosheth (man of shame). That doesn't need to strictly imply Yah and Ba'al are the same deity, but it demonstrates the motivation to erase these symmetric relationships of Ba'al in the texts.

Originally this Canaanite Pantheon was inhabited by El, the lord above all, often called El Elyon (a term the Tanakh uses), his wife Asherah, and his son Ba'al Hadad (colloquially Ba'al). This relationship is unintentionally preserved by later Greek theologians as the Holy Trinity (El -> El Elyon -> The Father; Ba'al -> Yahweh -> Yeshuach -> Iesus Christos -> Jesus the Christ -> The Son) trying to rationalize these earlier edits and lack of context. Importantly, Ba'al is Yahweh through the same manner that Yahweh *before* the exile is the same Yahweh as *after* the exile. The character and religion underwent dramatic reinvention to the point that it had less in common with pre-exile Yahweh worshippers than it did with Ba'al worshippers. They were the same guy, the book even says so.

El tells Moses his ancestors knew him as a different El and was YHWH the whole time

In Exodus, God tells Moses that his ancestors knew him under a different name, and he was Yahweh the entire time. The Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob) are also metaphors for the origination of the Israelite people, as Jacob is even renamed to Israel. Elohim is another common depiction of God with etymological origin in pre-Israel Canaan of El as God Most High or literally Man On The Mountain. El and Ba'al both merged into Yahweh to the point that there is not origination of Yahweh and an archeological character without the context and presence of the Ugaritic El and Ba'al. Ba'al is present in his own independent Ugaritic texts including his own myth, the Ba'al cycle, where is father El foretells: "I will have a son, name him Yah". Ba'al was an older, more popular deity, that Yahwists needed to appeal to in efforts of conversion. We shouldn't apply a standard of theological congruency to analyze the situation.

Ugaritic works of Ba'al and El in an artifact named KTU

The Big Assumption is that Bael is Baal and not Bael - the Demon or Bael the Demon. Bael is a name used in European Demonology, a practice of theology from the Middle Ages, or perhaps earlier, to present. Bael was popularly reimagined in Occultism, a post-Renaissance idealization of being antithetical to Christian theology and the war on paganism. Some of these were or were inspired by pagan mythology being laundered through the Christianization of Europe, yet all of these were real belief systems of the same importance and validity as Canaanites employed. Now Bael, the Uncrowned King of Stolen Land, is a demon, who sits on the Hungering Throne of Gluttony. He is a member of the Infernal War Council. Some think Bael is Bael. Others think Baal is Bael. I think Bael is Baal. Whose to say? This same character underwent millennia of cultural transform before he even became Latin. Everything that came after is a direct lineage of cultural transformation. Claiming these characters are the same or aren't doesn't have a material basis; or does it?

Ba'al was later a common etymological motif in demonology following a theological interpretation that Ba'al strictly wasn't Yahweh, and instead a representation of Satan or The Devil or El Diablo or Lucifer or one of his agents. None of these characters are literally present in the Old Testament, and these are strictly Holy Roman Church interpretations in origin. This etymology governs Trench Crusade today, as well as all of the reference materials, and appears in other demons such as Beelzebub, Belphegor, or Baal-Berith. The ambiguity and confusion is the point. The Holy Roman Church also wanted to standardize a diverse set of cultures and mythologies into one Christian theology, and utilized demonology as a way of unifying the practices they disliked. The ambiguity served a social function, inspired directly from Ba'al in the Bible. They were motivated to respect pagan belief systems in efforts to convert them.

Ba'al worship, and other Satanic activities, were often accused of Jews and used to justify their oppression. Ba'al worship already had a sensitive history within Judaism that predates Christianity, and external pressures constantly encouraged them to erase and hide the polytheistic origin. Theorizing the connection between Ba'al and Yahweh is a heresy according to Christian doctrine. Satanic worship was often accused of pre-Christian paganism in Europe or Byzantium. We have several thousand years of motivated Ba'al erasure and transformation, with the blood of perhaps millions of victims of persecution, inquisition, and crusade.

Every god was someone else's idea first

A certain paradigm permeates the origination of religions and was never the case: an intentional author writes a text he believes in and forms an audience that practices their beliefs. All religious worship comes from an salient interpretation of religious material through context and combination with the existing beliefs or conclusions of the audiences. Religions form through the collection, unification, and pruning of cultural practices and beliefs. Different stories that may or may not be related with ambiguous incongruencies describe every religion. You might say nobody believes in the characters of Trench Crusade. The authors might not, but its not necessarily true that Occultism authors believed in their creations. Other people did. To this day, there are people who would look at Trench Crusade as a work of the devil. It doesn't matter if it is Satanic in origin, it mimics Satanism enough for those believers to respect its power.

There are two competing asserts that require their own form of analysis.

• Ba'al Hadad is not Yahweh
  • Theologically: we don't know the origins of these characters, but their active worshippers intentionally merged them as the same god with theological motivation.
  • Materially: they have different names, different cultures, different worships; they are different gods.
• Ba'al Hadad is Yahweh
  • Theologically: their worshippers eventually believed they were the same, whether originated that way or not. and latter people who worshipped different gods may have disagreed.
  • Materially: there is a direct physical lineage of their cultural forms that combine. Different names, cultures, and worships alone cannot distinguish them any more than you can distinguish various Yahwehs or Els or Jehovahs or Adonais.

Here lies the asymmetry of existence and non-existence: people believing it to be true creates its own validity because its existence is within the ontology of belief and practice. You cannot determine two gods are different universally, and a definition of a god cannot require universality to exist. If people believed they were the same at one point in time, that makes it true. Ergo, Ba'al Hadad is necessarily Baal is necessarily Bael, and every incarnation after the fact, as well as being Yahweh (who is also El Elyon and Elohim). Even though their different names and different cultures differentiated them. What is a sandwich? What they sell at the sandwich shop.

Is Zeus a God or an Allah or a Superman?

Trench Crusade does not strictly adhere to the same bible or historical facts that generated it. It already exempts itself from all of the contradictions within. That is the nature of all art though. With every word and picture, Trench Crusade either aligns or diverges with reality, never inhabiting the same space as reality. It is reality insofar as it mimics reality. Thus YHWH (TC) is the same as Yahweh in the Tanakh, except for when it isn't. Whether that is the same Yahweh falls outside the scope of a yes or no questions and depends on the context of analysis. There is no truth.

"The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity" - From Hell

What is real? What inarguably exists as the only form of these characters are encodings. The practices of Ba'al worship encoded their understanding of the character as an orientation of neurons in their brains. This orientation lived in their brains and was invoked and decoded as an expression of worship. Depictions existed to facilitate the transference of these encodings, but those external encodings are subject to the context of the audience and can never fully represent the internal encoding. What has existed is a lineage of these encodings, constantly transforming in and with each person, in configurations of neurons and synapses. This is the only real embodiment of these gods that ever existed, the only thing you can externally evidence to characterize them, and something that is still happening when I play Trench Crusade. These are the same thousands-of-years-old characters that humans have been invoking and playing with the whole time. Just their mere mention connects them together. The fact it could be a reference means it is valid textual analysis because not even the authors control the orientations of these creatures in their or our brains. These configurations is the only thing that makes them real.

They live here

We scoff at the ancient science of mythology. We laugh that it doesn't work and the mechanisms are poorly understood. We never acknowledge when it does work. The fans of the Buffalo Bills collect in parking lots on gameday to leap off trucks and crush their spines and folding tables together. Does it help the Bills win games? YES! The mirror neurons, evolved in primates over millions of years, fire when we formulate our senses to specific familiar shapes i.e. other primates expression emotions and behaviors. Our psyches respond involuntarily, releasing hormones and neurotransmitters, affecting the action potential of our nervous system. It affects emotions, reactions, decisions, response times, stresses, digestions, anything else this intricate web of flesh does. If you held the banner of your patron god to defend your homeland and way of life, it made a difference in the physical bodies of people who had their encoded neurological configurations involuntarily decoded. It motivated, energized, reminded, radicalized, prepared, and much more. Or you were scared, frightened, and not all too keen on your homeland. People could be anxious, angered, disgusted, or whatever else too. We are the ones applying these limited semantic slices onto a corpus of human history after the fact without even noticing the colors of our lenses.

The narrative of Trench Crusade invokes these configurations too. Every name, symbol, motif that reminds you of reality is a reference to reality from your perspective independent to the intent of the author to do so. While we would love to say definitively what the authors meant for these characters to do and be, they will die and we shall never know, because their little colored semantic slices are all we will have. In this sense we worship Ba'al too, in the sense of performing a material reality. The original worshippers of Ba'al would have done things we would not understand as worship, and we do things they would understand as worship, and they would likely tell us we are worshipping wrong (a very common theme!). While the Bible might specifically be referenced in Trench Crusade, you can't audit that as being a closer or farther reference than Ars Goetica or Dante's Inferno or the Quran or any other grimoire. Trench Crusade came from Occultism which came from Christianity which came from Yahwism which was likely influenced by Zoroastrianism which came from Assyrian revival of Babylonian revival of Akkadian revival of Sumerian mythos. Its all a network of motifs that cannot be made discreet and disconnected from the substrate of imagination and the continuous fabric of anthropological activity. Trench Crusade, nor any of its authors or moderators, ever get to decide factually whether this character is actually that character or not, because it is within an anti-factual context to resolve. It will be remembered as how the audience chooses to remember it whether its true or not.

Remember when Batman killed someone in his second issue? Me neither!

Is tossing a dice to resolve an attack different than augury or haruspicy or cleromancy or divination? In a sense, I don't have a faith in the dice to perform a destiny or reveal a truth, but in another sense, neither necessarily did the augur or haruspex or cleromancer or diviner. Its a tremendous assumption that people performed these practices as a belief in a religion. Its an assumption that the authors were worshippers, or that worshippers were authors, or the either were believers. Its an assumption that they cared whether god would care whether their mythos was true rather than useful. Many forms of worship revolved around offering and praise, not professing or proselytizing or arguing. Worshippers knew they couldn't access what was true, their intent was to find what worked, and thus mythology was an ancient form of science. If I see my characters and their symbols, and it excites me to take it seriously and play better, there are two forms of analysis to rationalize what happened: my psyche was perturbated in a way that stimulated my nervous and endocrine systems and yielded better performance; Bael was pleased with my offering and representation, invigorated my capability, and turned the tide of the dice. These may be incompatible, but only one mimics the truth better through semantic alignment with my audience. Neither are factual reality, just semantic slices. Nobody would play Pokemon if they didn't have pictures on the cards.

New Antioch players get all the lucky rolls

Did worship work? Rolling the bones to determine the best strategy didn't always yield the best strategy in a sense, but rather offered many other advantages, particularly in Game Theory. Game Theory is studying the mathematical structure and consequences of decision making in an environment with other decision makers. An important result is the Prisoner's Dilemma, demonstrating the idea of a Nash Equilibrium, a result where even when everyone is doing their best, the outcome is still the worst for everyone. I will rely on Game Theory very loosely here, but an important result is that optimal play sometimes requires randomness. Take for example, Rock Paper Scissors. Being a symmetrical game, the best you can hope to do against an optimal opponent is 50% win rate. The best you can hope to do against a random opponent is 50%. The best a computer can do against a human is much higher than 50% because, with some sample size, it can start to predict certain patterns that we inevitably show and aren't even aware of. In this instance, predictability is death, random is optimal.

Now I just gotta wait until they group up for my Sorcerer's fireball...

Applied to warfare, divination offered something critical: speed and confidence. Its really hard to appreciate the stakes of ancient warfare: information and death. They had very little of the former and too much of the latter. If you march your army three days to the wrong location, that could be a mistake that ends your entire empire. Notably, there are a lot more wrong locations than right ones. There were many ways to die and fail in the ancient world. Sometimes both armies lost a war. Thinking really hard to come up with good strategies often yielded little difference in success because the barrier was always information, not processing time. The ability to avoid days or weeks of trying to collect information and strategize came at the great opportunity cost of action. Just like Trench Crusade, there are two key advantages to speed: deployment and displacement. Its much much harder to lay siege than to survive one. Its much harder to displace a sitting army than to be displaced as one. Its easier to shoot around a wall than to be shot around one. There is a first-mover advantage letting you pick the geography and terms of engagement, and you are avoiding a lot of risks of bad strategy and predictability. Any motivation that came from the trust and faith in the divination process was extra value. These divination practices came from not knowing how to proceed. All the time, I can't pick a restaurant, and instead of deliberating a decision I know I can't make, I flip a coin.

If you have your ritual skittles every time you play, you are increasing targeted cognitive function and memory, reducing the action potential through Pavlovian response to little colorful sweets and sours to unlock the gaming configuration in your brain and perform your best. You are performing a worship through the neurochemical process as the ancient Canaanites did. It doesn't matter what your little habit or ritual is, what matters is you have one and are utilizing the external strings to pull on the marionette of meat in your skull. Getting really excited about Orks and shouting something in public might make you a better gamer.

Where to next? I want to know the Trench Crusade history of YHWH and Bael and the Canaanite Pantheon. Does the Bible of Trench Crusade say El Elyon? Does it have the book of Hosea? Does it say "Call me Yahweh, not Ba'al"? Differentiating the two is a Catholic Doctrine statement, or perhaps an ancient Judean statement, not necessarily a Kabbalistic or Yahwistic one. Is it an Occult statement? I don't know. What is a god doing on the Infernal War Council? Does Bael have divine flesh? Demonic flesh? I doubt he has mortal flesh and can enter Earth. How did the Canaanites come to worship him then? Did YHWH usurp his worship? Did YHWH use King Nebuchadnezzar II? These are hard hitting BCE questions in a fairly AD focused setting. I don't know if they anticipated this type of analysis.

By invoking the Canaanite Pantheon, the authors of Trench Crusade did something they may not have intended to: invoke much more ancient and complicated characters that some of the audience knows. Its too late. These connections are already woven in. I wish the lore team good luck!

Further readings:

• From Hell by Alan Moore (psychological mythologizing)
• God: an Anatomy by Francesca Stravrakopoulou (Canaanite history)
• Misquoting Moses with Dr. Joel Baden
• God's Propaganda by Kipp Davis
• The Early History of God by Mark S. Smith (very technical! I hope you know Hebrew and Ugaritic!)
• Gödel Escher Bach (symbology and logic)
• Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (philosophical firewall of semantic ambiguity and tautological rejection)
• Logicomix (accessibly unifies the previous works)
• Dialectic philosophy (yawn... if you must)
• Game Theory and Strategy by Philip D. Straffin (great intro with lots of applications)
• The book of Hosea translated from Hebrew (a marriage contract with God, a metaphorical polemic against Ba'al, and a prophecy of Ba'al worship)