Mot

There is a moment early in the Baal Cycle when a god gives his two couriers directions, and the directions are more frightening than anything that happens afterwards. Go to the edge of the world. Find the twin hills that sit on the border of the land. Lift the mountain on your hands, raise the hill on the flat of your palms, and go down underneath it, and count yourselves from that moment among those who go down into the earth. Then keep walking, to a city called Mirey, where a pit serves as a throne and the land of the inheritance is Filth. And when you get there, said Baal, do not go near him. He will take you into his mouth like a lamb.

The god at the end of that road is Mot, and his name is simply the word for death. Not an epithet, not a title politely covering something worse. The Ugaritic scribes wrote mt, the same signs a merchant would use for the ordinary fact of dying, and then made a person of it who sat at the bottom of the world waiting for company. He is called the son of El, which puts him inside the family rather than outside it, and he is called El’s Beloved, the Hero, which is the sort of thing that makes the whole pantheon feel less safe rather than more.

Nobody ever describes what he looks like. This is not an accident of the broken tablets, which are broken in plenty of other places; it reads as a decision. What the poem gives instead is a mouth, opened to a size that stops being anatomy and becomes geography. One lip rests on the earth and the other on the heavens. The tongue goes up to the stars. Baal is to go down into it the way a withered olive goes down, the way the yield of the earth and the fruit of the trees go down, which is a strange and domestic image for annihilation and is worse for it. When Mot is asked to describe his own hunger he reaches for animals at water: a lion in the scrubland, wild oxen coming to a pool, a doe at a spring, and something in the sea whose appetite never closes. Whatever he is, he is thirst with a jaw.

The trouble starts with a housewarming. Baal, newly installed in a palace of silver and gold on Mount Zaphon, holds a feast, tours his territory, breaks open a window in the roof and lets his voice out over the mountains. Then he sends Gapn and Ugar down the road described above with a message announcing that he alone is king. Mot’s reply is an invitation to dinner, and the dinner is Baal. The storm god’s answer is one of the shortest lines in the cycle and the most humiliating: hail, son of El, Death, I am your servant, yours forever. He gathers his clouds and his winds and his lightning and his rain, takes his daughters Pidray and Tallay with him, and goes down.

What follows is a funeral for the weather. El comes off his throne, sits on the footstool, comes off the footstool and sits on the ground, puts dust on his head and cuts his cheeks with a stone. Anat searches the hills until she finds her brother lying in a pleasant field on the shore of Death, carries him up to Zaphon on her shoulders, buries him and slaughters seventy oxen and seventy sheep and seventy of everything else over the grave. Athtar is offered the vacant throne and climbs into it, and his feet do not reach the footstool and his head does not reach the headrest, so he goes back down and settles for the earth. Meanwhile the furrows dry and crack. That detail is the whole point of the story.

Then Anat comes for Mot, and the manner of it is the reason this myth is remembered. She takes hold of him and puts him through a harvest. She splits him with a blade, winnows him in a sieve, scorches him in fire, grinds him under millstones and sows him across the open field, where the birds come down and eat what is left. Every verb belongs to bread. The god who ate the god of grain-bringing rain is threshed like grain, and the poem does not pause to explain the joke.

He gets up again, because he would. Seven years later, with the heavens raining oil and the wadis running honey and Baal back on his throne, Mot arrives to itemise the grievance. Because of you I have known the blade, the fire, the millstones, the sieve, the scattering in the field, and he wants compensation in the form of one of Baal’s brothers to eat. They fight on the summit like wild oxen, then like serpents, then like runners, goring and biting and kicking, and the poem keeps repeating that Mot is strong and Baal is strong, which is another way of saying that neither of them can finish this. It ends because the sun goddess Shapash leans down out of the sky and speaks to Mot the way an older relative speaks to a boy about to do something stupid. How can you fight Baal? Your father will hear you. He will pull the supports out from under your seat, overturn your kingship, break your staff of rule. Mot is frightened. He concedes the throne and the poem stops.

That is the shape of his power and the shape of its limit. He can take the strongest god in the pantheon and make him say the word servant, and he can hold the rain hostage for the length of a dry season. He cannot be reasoned with and does not appear to want anything except more. But he is a son in a household with a father in it, he can be threshed, and the thing he does is a cycle rather than an ending, which means his victory is always temporary and always scheduled to come round again. Death at Ugarit is not the end of the story. It is the hungry half of the year.

He did not stay in Syria. A Phoenician version survives only at third hand, in Philo of Byblos, writing in Greek around the start of the second century of our era and quoted centuries later by Eusebius, where a son of El called Muth dies and is deified and gets equated with the Greek Thanatos and with Pluto. In an older and stranger fragment of the same collection, Mot is not a person at all but the primordial mud, or the rot of a watery mixture, out of which every seed of creation came and which then burst open into light and sun and moon and stars. Whether those two are one word doing two jobs is a question the surviving Greek does not settle. In the Hebrew Bible the word keeps its teeth without keeping its throne: death climbs in through the windows in Jeremiah, opens its throat and is never satisfied in Habakkuk, and in Isaiah is itself swallowed forever by someone larger, which is the old Ugaritic image turned inside out and handed to the other side.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Mot in Canaanite mythology?

Mot is the Canaanite god of death, sterility and the underworld, known mainly from the tablets found at Ugarit in northern Syria. He is a son of the chief god El and the chief antagonist of the storm god Baal in the Baal Cycle. His name is simply the ordinary West Semitic word for death.

What does Mot look like?

The Ugaritic texts never describe his body. They describe only his mouth, with one lip on the earth and the other on the heavens and his tongue reaching up to the stars. Mot is written as an appetite rather than a figure, and his own speeches compare his hunger to a lion in the wild and to animals crowding a water source.

How did Mot kill Baal?

Mot invited Baal to a feast in which Baal himself was the meal. Baal submitted, called himself Mot’s servant forever, gathered his clouds, winds, lightning and rain and descended into the underworld, where he was swallowed and later found lying dead in a field on the shore of Death. The rain stopped with him and the furrows in the fields dried out.

How was Mot defeated?

Baal’s sister Anat seized Mot and destroyed him using the tools of a grain harvest. She split him with a blade, winnowed him in a sieve, burned him with fire, ground him with millstones and sowed him across a field, where birds ate the remains. He returned seven years later, fought Baal to a standstill, and finally backed down when the sun goddess Shapash warned him that El would overturn his throne.

Where does Mot live?

Mot’s home is a city called Hmry, usually translated as Mirey or the Swamp, reached by lifting the twin hills at the edge of the world and going down beneath them. His throne is described as a pit and his inherited land as Filth. Baal warned his messengers not to approach him there.

Related Entries

Baal, Anat, El, Asherah, Dagon, Lotan, Hadad, Nergal, Ereshkigal, Hades, Thanatos, Osiris, Hel