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My flatmate's ex-boyfriend came over and we debated gender politics for a while.
This was a good moment:
Kate - "Are you a feminist?"
Chris - "I love women if that's what you mean."
I think that's a good answer. Anyone who loves women should consider themselves a feminist.
So I found this article in Wikipedia about Ba'al Hammon. Dad told me once years ago that our last name was the name of a small village in the Mid-East. I think it's cool that we might be from a village in present day Lebanon where children were sacrificed to the god Hammon.
Here's the interesting part of the article: The worship of Ba`al Hammon flourished in the Phoenician colony of Carthage. Ba'al Hammon was the supreme god of the Carthaginians and is generally identified by modern scholars either with the northwest Semitic god El or with Dagon, and generally identified by the Greeks with Cronus and by the Romans with Saturn.
The meaning of Hammon or Hamon is unclear. In the 19th century when Ernest Renan excavated the ruins of Hammon (Ḥammon), the modern Umm al-‘Awamid between Tyre and Acre, he found two Phoenician inscriptions dedicated to El-Hammon. Since El was normally identified with Cronus and Ba‘al Hammon was also identified with Cronus, it seemed possible they could be equated. More often a connection with Hebrew/Phoenician ḥammān 'brazier' has been proposed. Frank Moore Cross argued for a connection to Khamōn, the Ugaritic and Akkadian name for Mount Amanus, the great mountain separating Syria from Cilicia based on the occurrence of an Ugaritic description of El as the one of the Mountain Haman.
Classical sources relate how the Carthaginians burned their children as offerings to Ba’al Hammon. See Moloch for a discussion of these traditions and conflicting thoughts on the matter. Such a devouring of children fits well with the Greek traditions of Cronus.
Scholars tend to see Ba’al Hammon as more or less identical with the god El, who was also generally identified with Cronus and Saturn. However, Yigdal Ydin thought him to be a moon god. Edward Lipinski identifies him with the god Dagon in his Dictionnaire de la civilisation phenicienne et punique (1992: ISBN 2503500331). Inscriptions about Punic deities tend to be rather uninformative.
In Carthage and North Africa Ba’al Hammon was especially associated with the ram and was worshipped also as Ba’al Qarnaim ("Lord of Two Horns") in an open-air sancutary at Jebel Bu Kornein ("the two-horned hill") across the bay from Carthage.
In reality our name probably derives from Hammon, Oklahoma. The population was 469 people at the 2000 census. But the town is a little more than 35 percent Native American, so that makes sense.
I'm home again and in the Central Valley for the weekend. My LA phone is now up 310.770.2110 and working. I love you guys!