

This is not as old an article as its low number might suggest: the number became available due to the deletion of an older article, and I jumped on it.

While reading about the religion of the ancient Carthaginian culture (why, how do you spend your afternoons?) I came across references to child sacrifice. Specifically, it seems to have been their practice for parents to sacrifice their own children. The scholarly consensus is still out on how prevalent this was, but there you go. I'm the father of two wonderful young children, so this practice struck me as the most repugnant and awful thing imaginable.

To make it work as an SCP article, I wanted to play up the psychological horror. The concept here isn't merely that a child is being painfully murdered- rather, the concept is that the child's parent has to do it. What's worse, this isn't a case where the parent who is committing the murder is insane, or indoctrinated as some kind of demon-worshiper, or under some kind of outside compulsion. Rather, the parent has been put in the position of having to choose to do this, for the greater good. I think that at some level, the ancient Carthaginians went through the same process.

But for the Carthaginians, they thought that their sacrifice was necessary in order to obtain the favor of the gods and avert a crisis affecting their own society. It seemed to me that as an SCP article, the sacrifice would be made even more poignant if the crisis were on the other side of the world, so to speak. The point of the sacrifice wouldn't be to save the mother's own society, but that of a bunch of strangers.

Photosynthetic, in the discussion pages for the article, correctly figured out the redacted events that are described in the addendum: the Great New Orleans Fire of 1788 (destroyed virtually the entire city), the Taiping Rebellion (to which tens of millions of deaths in mid-19th century China are attributed), and the 1970 Bhola cyclone in Bangladesh (one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern times). The 1951 volcanic eruption is nothing specific— the whole point is that there's nothing in particular that anyone remembers about such an event, because the prompt sacrifice to the Tophet solved the problem. I'm not going to say anything about the "ongoing" event.

My first draft of the piece involved a somewhat more complicated sacrifice (based on the historic sources) involving turtledoves, cattle, etc. in addition to the human. But my first draft was poorly received, and for good reason- the lengthy discussion of various animal sacrifices distracted the reader from the intended gut-punch of the child sacrifice.

My next draft only involved sacrificing the child… and was also poorly received.

For my third draft (which is what you're reading here), I simply re-organized the article and buried the lead. Specifically, I moved the wham line ("For each locution event, SCP-089-A is a healthy, unblemished human infant or child between eight months and six years of age, and SCP-089-B is that child’s natural mother.") further down the article.

It seems to work.

Yes, at its heart it's an "evil idol demands sacrifice, or else" concept. I think it's the presentation that actually sells it, and I'm delighted that the article has been well-received. Djoric featured it in his Mary-Ann and Salah tale series.

The inscription on the back is a quotation from Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl". Maybe I'll delete the quote- it's intended more as an easter egg.