Gibraltar's caves and flesh eating demons

Halloween has been and gone again for another year in a flurry of spicy pumpkin soup, home-made toffee apples, face paints, black lipstick and horror movies. It involved lots of sweets and sugar highs and a good deal of fun.

Now I can enjoy the shorter days and dark evenings with a degree of glee - the dark is always conducive to making up scary stories and concocting chilling tales. Today it's the turn of flesh-eating monsters. Not modern, Hollywood versions largely associated with the Walking Dead (quite good to watch but not particularly frightening). Gibraltar's own flesh-eating, horror-inducing demon.

Melqart. That was the name of the Phoenician god that I simply couldn't bring to my lips when I was interviewed for the Gibraltar Stories podcast a few weeks ago. I had been talking about an old story that there was a child-eating demon living in a cave deep in the bowels of the Rock of Gibraltar.

Image by Mark Hultgren from Pixabay 

Grown-ups wanting to be obeyed would terrify the wits out of their kids, pointing vaguely at the steep north face of the Rock, or at the tangled undergrowth stretching upwards from Moorish Castle and tell them that the demon would soar out of the cave, flap into their houses on leathery wings and chew on their thigh bones. Because clearly stories like that would induce sleep. And if you happened to have an especially blood thirsty Llanita great aunt, said demon might not bother with flight but simply instruct the notorious Barbary Apes to steal into your room through the open windows (these were the pre-air conditioning days) and snatch you out of your beds to carry you into the demon's waiting jaws. Okay, so that didn't do my childhood insomnia any good, but...great story!

Demons and bogey-men of many types have been used across the world to try to find a non-physical way of stopping kids misbehaving. Of course, a couple of generations ago, kids would have been subdued by both the rod and the horror story, the horror story being the icing on the cake that would make you choose your Dad's slipper over bone-crunching demons. Neither method commends itself as good parenting and hopefully younger generations will not resort to any of this, but I'm just giving the context for how and why these stories were perpetuated over generations. Despite the many nights of terror keeping watch over my baby sister's cot should a stray ape try to snatch her as fodder for the demon, I think I'm relatively stable. Relatively.

Back to Melqart. It was only many years after hearing these stories that I began to realise that most legends have some distant kernel of truth or a purpose linked to them. Gibraltar had been a stopping point, if not home, to generations of Phoenician travelers. The Phoenicians were sea traders and had been so since around 3000 BC, travelling and settling areas from the Eastern Mediterranean coastlines of Europe and North Africa heading west, through the Strait of Gibraltar and beyond. The main cities of origin of the Phoenicians were Byblos, Tyre and Sidon. Melqart was the chief god of the Phoenician pantheon of the city of Tyre.

Statuette of Melqart from the Temple of Melqart in Cadiz (photo from Wikipedia)

Of course, as with things so ancient and with little documented records to go by, the religion of the Phoenicians is swathed is mystery. What is known is that Melqart was an important figure of worship, associated with the sea, with colonisation, with monarchy and conquest and with commerce. As an important deity, he had temples dedicated to him - the one at Tyre dating back to around 1000 BC - armies of priests organising worship and an annual feast day, a day in which he was the focus of a festival of resurrection. In line with one of his titles, "fire of heaven", a sacrifice would be made with a figure of the god ritually burnt. As human beings, we still like to get together in groups and burn effigies - think the English sacrificing of Guy Fawkes on Bonfire Night, 5th November. Even in the twenty-first century there are apparently indelible links to the beliefs and fears of our ancestors.

Because he was an important figure of worship, Melqart would be invoked at particular times of danger such as during war, or a natural disaster. Ceremonies were held and to appease the god and appeal for his intercession, there were human sacrifices, and these were known to be largely children who would be ritually killed at a sacrificial altar and whose remains were usually cremated and buried in tombs nearby.

Gibraltar was probably too small and difficult a terrain for a temple, especially with Phoenicians busy trading around Spain and Morocco where more readily accessible sites could be found; there was a temple to Melqart in Cadiz. But we do know from archaeological discoveries in and around our caves, such as the Gorham's Cave Complex, that religious worship was important to the peoples that lived on or traveled to and from Gibraltar. That the Phoenicians might have brought their most important beliefs and rituals with them is pretty likely. That one of the caves in the upper Rock might have been the site of human, and particularly child sacrifice is just as likely.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay 

Hence the story. No demons - are these real anyway? But death, horror, bloodshed in terrifying rituals - I believe there probably were. In fact, that children were sacrificed by adults to appease a deity is far more horrific a thought to me than anything 'supernatural'. As my Grandmother used to say - and she was fond a few horror stories herself - "deberiamos tener mas miedo de los vivos que de los muertos, que los muertos no nos pueden tocar."

So, a demon god Melqart lurking in the upper Rock - there must be a plethora of good horror stories right there!


First image: by SzaboJanos from Pixabay