Snow Crash (24 page)

“We go to Long Beach. To the Terminal Island Sacrifice Zone. And we buy some drugs,” Ng says. “Or you do, actually, since I am indisposed.”

“That's my job? To buy some drugs?”

“Buy them, and throw them up in the air.”

“In a Sacrifice Zone?”

“Yes. And we'll take care of the rest.”

“Who's we, dude?”

“There are several more, uh, entities that will help us.”

“What, is the back of the van full of more—people like you?”

“Sort of,” Ng says. “You are close to the truth.”

“Would these be, like, nonhuman systems?”

“That is a sufficiently all-inclusive term, I think.”

Y.T. figures that for a big
yes
.

“You tired? Want me to drive or anything?”

Ng laughs sharply, like distant ack-ack, and the van almost swerves off the road. Y.T. doesn't get the sense that he is laughing at the joke; he is laughing at what a jerk Y.T. is.

30

“Okay, last time we were talking about the clay envelope. But what about this thing? The thing that looks like a tree?” Hiro says, gesturing to one of the artifacts.

“A totem of the goddess Asherah,” the Librarian says crisply.

“Now we're getting somewhere,” Hiro says. “Lagos said that the Brandy in The Black Sun was a cult prostitute of Asherah. So who is Asherah?”

“She was the consort of El, who is also known as Yahweh,” the Librarian says. “She also was known by other names: Elat, her most common epithet. The Greeks knew her as Dione or Rhea. The Canaanites knew her as Tannit or Hawwa, which is the same thing as Eve.”

“Eve?”

“The etymology of ‘Tannit' proposed by Cross is: feminine of ‘tannin,' which would mean ‘the one of the serpent.' Furthermore, Asherah carried a second epithet in the Bronze Age, ‘dat batni,' also ‘the one of the serpent.' The Sumerians knew her as Nintu or Ninhursag. Her symbol is a serpent coiling about a tree or staff: the caduceus.”

“Who worshipped Asherah? A lot of people, I gather.”

“Everyone who lived between India and Spain, from the second millennium
B
.
C
. up into the Christian era. With the exception of the Hebrews, who only worshipped her until the religious reforms of Hezekiah and, later, Josiah.”

“I thought the Hebrews were monotheists. How could they worship Asherah?”

“Monolatrists. They did not deny the
existence
of other gods. But they were only supposed to
worship
Yahweh. Asherah was venerated as the consort of Yahweh.”

“I don't remember anything about God having a wife in the Bible.”

“The Bible didn't exist at that point. Judaism was just a loose collection of Yahwistic cults, each with different shrines and practices. The stories about the Exodus hadn't been formalized into scripture yet. And the later parts of the Bible had not yet happened.”

“Who decided to purge Asherah from Judaism?”

“The deuteronomic school—defined, by convention, as the people who wrote the book of Deuteronomy as well as Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.”

“And what kind of people were they?”

“Nationalists. Monarchists. Centralists. The forerunners of the Pharisees. At this time, the Assyrian king Sargon II had recently conquered Samaria—northern Israel—forcing a migration of Hebrews southward into Jerusalem. Jerusalem expanded greatly and the Hebrews began to conquer territory to the west, east, and south. It was a time of intense nationalism and patriotic fervor. The deuteronomic school embodied those attitudes in scripture by rewriting and reorganizing the old tales.”

“Rewriting them how?”

“Moses and others believed that the River Jordan was the border of Israel, but the deuteronomists believed that Israel included Transjordan, which justified aggression to the east. There are many other examples: the predeuteronomic law said nothing about a monarch. The Law as laid down by the deuteronomic school reflected a monarchist system. The predeuteronomic law was largely concerned with sacred matters, while the deuteronomic law's main concern is the education of the king and his people—secular matters in other words. The deuteronomists insisted on centralizing the religion in the Temple in Jerusalem, destroying the outlying cult centers. And there is another feature that Lagos found significant.”

“And that is?”

“Deuteronomy is the only book of the Pentateuch that refers to a written Torah as comprising the divine will: ‘And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, from that which is in charge of the Levitical priests; and it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the L
ORD
his God, by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them; that his heart may not be lifted up above his brethren, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left; so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel.' Deuteronomy 17:18–20.”

“So the deuteronomists codified the religion. Made it into an organized, self-propagating entity,” Hiro says. “I don't want to say virus. But according to what you just quoted me, the Torah is like a virus. It uses the human brain as a host. The host—the human—makes copies of it. And more humans come to synagogue and read it.”

“I cannot process an analogy. But what you say is correct insofar as this: After the deuteronomists had reformed Judaism, instead of making sacrifices, the Jews went to synagogue and read the Book. If not for the deuteronomists, the world's monotheists would still be sacrificing animals and propagating their beliefs through the oral tradition.”

“Sharing needles,” Hiro says. “When you were going over this stuff with Lagos, did he ever say anything about the Bible being a virus?”

“He said it had certain things in common with a virus, but that it was different. He considered it a benign virus. Like that used for vaccinations. He considered the Asherah virus to be more malignant, capable of being spread through exchange of bodily fluids.”

“So the strict, book-based religion of the deuteronomists inoculated the Hebrews against the Asherah virus.”

“In combination with strict monogamy and other kosher practices, yes,” the Librarian says. “The previous religions, from Sumer up to Deuteronomy, are known as prerational. Judaism was the first of the rational religions. As such, in Lagos's view, it was much less susceptible to viral infection because it was based on fixed, written records. This was the reason for the veneration of the Torah and the exacting care used when making new copies of it—informational hygiene.”

“What are we living in nowadays? The postrational era?”

“Juanita made comments to that effect.”

“I'll bet she did. She's starting to make more sense to me, Juanita is.”

“Oh.”

“She never really made much sense before.”

“I see.”

“I think that if I can just spend enough time with you to figure out what's on Juanita's mind—well, wonderful things could happen.”

“I will try to be of assistance.”

“Back to work—this is no time for a hard-on. It seems that Asherah was a carrier of a viral infection. The deuteronomists somehow realized this and exterminated her by blocking all the vectors by which she infected new victims.”

“With reference to viral infections,” the Librarian says, “if I may make a fairly blunt, spontaneous cross-reference—something I am coded to do at opportune moments—you may wish to examine herpes simplex, a virus that takes up residence in the nervous system and never leaves. It is capable of carrying new genes into existing neurons and genetically reengineering them. Modern gene therapists use it for this purpose. Lagos thought that herpes simplex might be a modern, benign descendant of Asherah.”

“Not always benign,” Hiro says, remembering a friend of his who died of AIDS-related complications; in the last days, he had herpes lesions from his lips all the way down his throat. “It's only benign because we have immunities.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So did Lagos think that the Asherah virus actually altered the DNA of brain cells?”

“Yes. This was the backbone of his hypothesis that the virus was able to transmute itself from a biologically transmitted string of DNA into a set of behaviors.”

“What behaviors? What was Asherah worship like? Did they do sacrifices?”

“No. But there is evidence of cult prostitutes, both male and female.”

“Does that mean what I think it does? Religious figures who would hang around the temple and fuck people?”

“More or less.”

“Bingo. Great way to spread a virus. Now, I want to jump back to an earlier fork in the conversation.”

“As you wish. I can handle nested forkings to a virtually infinite depth.”

“You made a connection between Asherah and Eve.”

“Eve—whose Biblical name is Hawwa—is clearly the Hebrew interpretation of an older myth. Hawwa is an ophidian mother goddess.”

“Ophidian?”

“Associated with serpents. Asherah is also an ophidian mother goddess. And both are associated with trees as well.”

“Eve, as I recall, is considered responsible for getting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, from the tree of
knowledge
of good and evil. Which is to say, it's not just fruit—it's data.”

“If you say so, sir.”

“I wonder if viruses have always been with us, or not. There's sort of an implicit assumption that they have been around forever. But maybe that's not true. Maybe there was a period of history when they were nonexistent or at least unusual. And at a certain point, when the metavirus showed up, the number of different viruses exploded, and people started getting sick a whole lot. That would explain the fact that all cultures seem to have a myth about Paradise, and the Fall from Paradise.”

“Perhaps.”

“You told me that the Essenes thought that tapeworms were demons. If they'd known what a virus was, they probably would have thought the same thing. And Lagos told me the other night that, according to the Sumerians, there was no concept of good and evil per se.”

“Correct. According to Kramer and Maier, there are good demons and bad demons.‘Good ones bring physical and emotional health. Evil ones bring disorientation and a variety of physical and emotional ills. . . . But these demons can hardly be distinguished from the diseases they personify . . . and many of the diseases sound, to modern ears, as though they must be psychosomatic.' ”

“That's what the doctors said about Da5id, that his disease must be psychosomatic.”

“I don't know anything about Da5id, except for some rather banal statistics.”

“It's as though ‘good' and ‘evil' were invented by the writer of the Adam and Eve legend to explain why people get sick—why they have physical and mental viruses. So when Eve—or Asherah—got Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, she was introducing the concept of good and evil into the world—introducing the metavirus, which creates viruses.”

“Could be.”

“So my next question is: Who wrote the Adam and Eve legend?”

“This is a source of much scholarly argument.”

“What did Lagos think? More to the point, what did Juanita think?”

“Nicolas Wyatt's radical interpretation of the Adam and Eve story supposes that it was, in fact, written as a political allegory by the deuteronomists.”

“I thought they wrote the later books, not Genesis.”

“True. But they were involved in compiling and editing the earlier books as well. For many years, it was assumed that Genesis was written sometime around 900
B
.
C
. or even earlier—long before the advent of the deuteronomists. But more recent analysis of the vocabulary and content suggests that a great deal of editorial work—possibly even authorial work—took place around the time of the Exile, when the deuteronomists held sway.”

“So they may have rewritten an earlier Adam and Eve myth.”

“They appear to have had ample opportunity. According to the interpretation of Hvidberg and, later, Wyatt, Adam in his garden is a parable for the king in his sanctuary, specifically King Hosea, who ruled the northern kingdom until it was conquered by Sargon II in 722
B
.
C
.”

“That's the conquest you mentioned earlier—the one that drove the deuteronomists southward toward Jerusalem.”

“Exactly. Now ‘Eden,' which can be understood simply as the Hebrew word for ‘delight,' stands for the happy state in which the king existed prior to the conquest. The expulsion from Eden to the bitter lands to the east is a parable for the massive deportation of Israelites to Assyria following Sargon II's victory. According to this interpretation, the king was enticed away from the path of righteousness by the cult of El, with its associated worship of Asherah—who is commonly associated with serpents, and whose symbol is a tree.”

“And his association with Asherah somehow caused him to be conquered—so when the deuteronomists reached Jerusalem, they recast the Adam and Eve story as a warning to the leaders of the southern kingdom.”

“Yes.”

“And perhaps, because no one was listening to them, perhaps they invented the concept of good and evil in the process, as a hook.”

“Hook?”

“Industry term. Then what happened? Did Sargon II try to conquer the southern kingdom also?”

“His successor, Sennacherib, did. King Hezekiah, who ruled the southern kingdom, prepared for the attack feverishly, making great improvements in the fortifications of Jerusalem, improving its supply of drinking water. He was also responsible for a far-reaching series of religious reforms, which he undertook under the direction of the deuteronomists.”

“How did it work out?”

“The forces of Sennacherib surrounded Jerusalem. ‘And that night the angel of the L
ORD
went forth, and slew a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; and when men arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies. Then Sennacherib king of Assyria departed . . .' 2 Kings 19:35–36.”

“I'll bet he did. So let me get this straight: the deuteronomists, through Hezekiah, impose a policy of informational hygiene on Jerusalem and do some civil-engineering work—you said they worked on the water supply?”

“‘They stopped all the springs and the brook that flowed through the land, saying, “Why should the kings of Assyria come and find much water?” ' 2 Chronicles 32: 4. Then the Hebrews carved a tunnel seventeen hundred feet through solid rock to carry that water inside city walls.”

“And then as soon as Sennacherib's soldiers came on the scene, they all dropped dead of what can only be understood as an extremely virulent disease, to which the people of Jerusalem were apparently immune. Hmm, interesting—I wonder what got into their water?”