The Ancient Hunger

To really understand the darkness we see in high places today, we have to look back. Way back. Before Rome, before Christianity, before the modern world mapped every inch of the globe. We need to look at the burning sands of the ancient Near East and the civilization of Carthage.

They were masters of the sea. The Phoenicians and their colony Carthage controlled trade, money, and power. But their society was built on a debt. They believed that the gods who gave them this power demanded something terrible in return. They demanded the future.

This wasn't just a myth or some slander invented by their Roman enemies. For a long time, historians tried to say it was just propaganda. They wanted to believe people were incapable of such things. But the shovels of archaeologists told a different story. When they dug up the Tophet of Carthage, they didn't find animal bones. They found thousands of urns. And inside those urns were the charred remains of babies and small children.

Twenty thousand urns.

Think about that number. It wasn't a rare event. It wasn't something done by a crazy cult in the hills. This was state policy. This was the engine of their civilization. The rich, the powerful, the generals and the merchants were the ones doing it. They believed that to keep their wealth, to win their wars, and to keep their power secure, they had to give up their firstborn children to the fires of Baal Hammon and Tanit.

The most shocking part is how they did it. It was a festival. There were flutes and drums beating loudly. Not to celebrate, but to drown out the screams. The parents couldn't show sadness. If a tear fell, the sacrifice was considered flawed. They had to stand there, stone-faced, and watch their own bloodline turn to ash for the sake of political power.

This was the ultimate transaction. You give the most precious thing you have, and the entity gives you control over the world. It was a test of loyalty too. If every elite family in the city has thrown a child into the fire, they are all bound together. Nobody can snitch. Nobody can judge. They are all complicit in the same nightmare. It creates a brotherhood of guilt that is stronger than any law.

Rome eventually destroyed Carthage. They hated this practice so much that they razed the city to the ground and salted the earth. They thought they had killed the beast. But you can't kill an idea with swords.

The families who ran these networks didn't just vanish. They scattered. They moved into Rome, into banking, into the shadowy corners of the new powers rising in Europe. The rituals changed. They couldn't do it in public squares anymore. So they went underground.

Over the centuries, we see glimpses of it. The accusations against the Knights Templar. The whispers about the Hellfire Clubs in England, where aristocrats would meet in caves to mock religion and indulge in acts that would get a commoner hanged. They called it "debauchery," but it was often something darker. It was a continuation of that same old philosophy. The idea that the elite are a separate species. That the laws of God and man don't apply to them.

They believe that standard morality is a cage for the poor. For the "illuminated" ones, the only law is their own will. And the more taboos you break, the more power you gain.

This lineage of shadow didn't end in the Middle Ages. It traveled across the ocean. It embedded itself in the foundations of the modern financial system. The names changed, the languages changed, but the hunger remained. The belief that power requires a sacrifice of innocence is still the operating system of the hidden world.

When you look at the paintings from those times, or read the diaries of the "mad" nobility, you see the same symbols popping up. The horned gods. The obsession with bloodlines. The need to keep the circle closed. They were protecting a secret that goes all the way back to those drums beating in Carthage.

They never stopped believing that they could buy godhood. They just found new ways to pay the price. And as technology advanced, they realized they could industrialize the process. They didn't need a bronze idol anymore. They could build a network that spanned the entire globe, hidden in plain sight, protected by blackmail and bribery.

The fire never went out. It just became invisible. Until now.