## **Allen Ginsberg’s “Moloch” and the Logic of Sacrifice** ### **Excerpt from Howl (Part II)** > _What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?_ > _Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!_ > _Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!_ > _Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!_ > _Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows!_ > _Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!_ > _Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!_ > — _Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” (1956)_ _(Full text:_ [_Poetry Foundation_](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl)___)_ --- ### **1. The Figure of Moloch** In _Howl_, Ginsberg reanimates the biblical deity [[Moloch]]—traditionally associated with child sacrifice—as a metaphor for the coercive structures of mid-century modernity.  The catalogue of images (“cement and aluminum,” “pure machinery,” “running money”) fuses industrial architecture, mechanised warfare, and economic abstraction into a single consuming intelligence.  The repetitive anaphora of “Moloch!” produces the effect of litany or exorcism rather than sermon, situating the poem within a prophetic rather than a didactic mode. --- ### **2. Historical and Cultural Context** Written in post-war America, the section reflects the atmosphere of McCarthyism, nuclear anxiety, and the ascendancy of corporate capitalism.  Ginsberg’s depiction of Moloch as “the vast stone of war” and “stunned governments” encodes the military-industrial complex and the bureaucratic paralysis of the Cold War state.  The poem’s hallucinatory rhythm parallels contemporary jazz improvisation and exemplifies Beat attempts to recover spontaneous expression within a mechanised society. --- ### **3. The Continuing Relevance of Moloch** Modern critics have read Moloch as a flexible archetype of systemic sacrifice.  In an ecological register, the same logic appears in economies that consume planetary life for continued growth.  The industrial “sphinx of cement and aluminum” becomes the infrastructure of extraction; “blood running money” can be read as the flow of fossil capital.  The poem’s imagery thus anticipates the entanglement of technological progress and environmental degradation without explicitly naming it. --- ### **4. Conclusion** Rather than a moral injunction, Ginsberg’s Moloch functions as an analytic device—a figure through which the poet exposes how social systems require continual offerings of human and natural vitality.  Its endurance as a symbol lies in this structural insight: that any civilisation may construct, and be consumed by, its own Moloch. --- Would you like me to format a companion paragraph comparing this section’s rhetoric to Blake’s _Urizen_ or Eliot’s _Waste Land_ imagery, to situate Ginsberg within a broader lineage of modern prophetic poetics?