The Angel in Moloch: A Hopeful Howl

Moloch is a bloody, evil God, worshiped by the Ammonites, who demands sacrifices that come with a steep price. Often, he required child sacrifices. Allen Ginsberg invokes Moloch in “Howl” to comment on the present course of America, politically and socially. Moloch’s first appearance in John Milton’s Paradise Lost refers to him as “besmear’d with blood / Of human sacrifice, and parents tears,” as well as a deceiver:

“…Nor content with such

Audacious neighbourhood, the wisest heart

Of SOLOMON he led by fraud to build

His Temple right against the Temple of God”

This passage shows Moloch’s use of guile to make “the wisest heart” help him construct an unholy temple. It is interesting that Solomon is referenced as the duped, considering Allen Ginsberg wrote “Howl” for his friend Carl Solomon who had been institutionalized. Carl Solomon suffered at the hands of a broken system, the same system Ginsberg condemns by conflating it with the figure of Moloch.

The figure of Moloch in “Howl” serves as a Jeremaic warning for what the world is heading towards with the war machine, capitalistic, and tyrannical state of America. The industrialization and depersonalization of America is the steep sacrifice Moloch requires. In the 1927 film Metropolis, we see the outcome of such a sacrifice to Moloch. The protagonist enters the underground industrialized work-place and sees a shrine to Moloch consuming all of the workers. People are faceless commodities mindlessly fed to the machine.

“Howl” paints a bleak picture, saying “[t]hey broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven,” but the “Footnote to Howl” offers a hopeful reading. Ginsberg refers to Burroughs, Solomon, Lucien, Kerouac, Peter, Cassady, and Huncke as all being holy. He goes over all of the cities and seemingly negative spaces and describes them all as holy. Eventually, he comes to the lines:

“Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth / dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!”

These lines suggest that there is a holy and redeeming presence, even in the most horrific of creatures. America still has hope inside of its capitalism, after all, it is where Ginsberg met all of his holy friends. They are able to transcend the physical horrors the political machine has created and seek enlightenment: they find the angel in Moloch by finding “the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!”