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Mot — Description

Don't ask why, but I suddenly found myself with the need to draw Mot, the Insatiable Hellmouth. No, there will not be further explanation. This is my statement that I well and truly am not here for the clicks but rather the euphoric anarchy of just starting a conversation with another fucking human being, or you know the robots who are steadily replacing human beings these days.
The Hebrew word “mavet” meaning “death” appears in the Bible, in some form or another, upwards of 300 times. I'd love to give you an exact number but it's going to depend on the translation and I can't be bothered to go through the whole damn Leningrad Codex and count every single instance. This word descends from a fairly stable Proto-Afroasiatic root “*mawVt-” meaning “to die” or “to kill”. This is the same ancient root you see in the name of the Egyptian goddess Ammit (more recognizable here under the alternative spelling “Ammut”), which means “Devourer of the Dead”. Ammit is the hideous crocodile monster who eats the hearts of those deemed unworthy of the afterlife, dooming them to be forgotten to time for all eternity and making the whole human life that person lived absolutely meaningless. As you can probably tell from this personification, the peoples of the ancient Near East had very… dysfunctional views about death, perhaps to be expected when you live in the middle of the relentless desert.
The Bible is a notoriously thanatophobic document. The Book of Job lumps Death in with Abaddon (whose name means “Destruction” as beings who have merely heard of "wisdom" in whispers and rumors, while Job's former friend Bildad states that Job's fate as a wicked man in the hope-abandoned pits of Sheol is that death “eats away parts of his skin. Death’s firstborn devours his limbs. He is torn from the security of his tent and marched off to the king of terrors”. King Hezekiah in the Book of Isaiah laments to God that “The grave cannot praise you, Death cannot sing your praise”, which calls to my mind Odin's callous advice that “a limping man can ride a horse, a handless man can herd, a deaf man can fight and win. It’s better even to be blind than fuel for the funeral pyre. What can a dead man do?” in Hávamál 71. Perhaps least surprising, we can extract some of the most traumatizing language from the Books of Jeremiah and Habakkuk, each describing prophecies relating to the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem and the following diaspora in 587 BCE. Habakkuk says of the Babylonian Empire, “They are greedy as the grave and like death is never satisfied” while Jeremiah witnesses “Death has climbed through our windows and has entered our fortresses; it has removed the children from the streets and the young men from the public squares”. See, this is exactly the kind of talk that turns people like me into former Christians. Shit I worship a delightful death goddess now and I still have massive anxiety about the eternal, unfeeling blackness. The fuckin toll your exes take on your psyche man.
You're not here to listen to all the reasons I desperately need a therapist though, you're here cause you wanna know where in the blue fuck this particular rendition of death comes into play. The insatiable hellmouth on your screen is the god Mot, the personification of death from the broader Canaanite pantheon in which ancient Judean society first emerged. Just like his counterpart in Biblical poetry, this Death is neither a benevolent host nor a sympathetic psychopomp. He is “greedy as the grave”, equal parts distended and emaciated, perpetually hungry, and wasting no energy on such trivial human things as “empathy”. According to the Phoenician author Sanchuniathon, Mot was the result of the Primordial Chaos fucking itself. No like for real. The text says that in the beginning there was just this “thick air” which became enamored with its own formless abstractness and then had a child with itself, thus creating Mot, the seed of all creation. That may seem backwards, but it sounds like Sanchuniathon was working with the idea that there were two Mots. This one he believes has a name meaning “mud”, or more specifically a sort of putrid, watery mixture which I might be tempted to call “primordial soup”, from which the first animals and stars are said to spring, which… I'm not gonna lie, much like real biology, is actually quite an elegant cosmology, if gross. The second Mot, rendered here as “Muth”, is explained later as being the son of “Cronus” and “Rhea” (Greek substitutions for who are probably the Phoenician gods El and Asherah). Muth is the most beloved child of El, but tragically dies in infancy, so El makes him king of the Underworld, which to be fair is more than I'll ever have. I've seen it suggested that these two stories aren't necessarily incompatible as, after all, since the infant Mot died in the first place there must've already been some force of death which El then had replaced with his son, but idk that's a pretty clumsy explanation and it doesn't explicitly say that in the text. Our main problem here is that Sanchuniathon's account only survives to the modern day as a quotation of a quotation in the 4th century monk Eusebius's retelling of another otherwise lost summary by Philo of Byblos, and we're just too many layers of “a friend of a friend of a friend” down here to suss out anything more concrete.
If we wanna get a better idea of what the people of the region themselves believed, then we have to switch over to the Baal Cycle, probably the most famous body of Levantine epic poetry outside of the Bible. It's also extremely intimidating. The bulk of the Baal Cycle is recorded on extremely fragmentary clay tablets written around 1500 BCE and preserved in the libraries of the city of Ugarit, which means we have so many gaps in the meat of the story, rendering it somehow dense yet obtuse at the same time. Luckily, I don't have to go over the whole damn thing today, just the part where the god of Death gets involved, when the embodiment of oblivion and drought squares off against the tumultuous thunderstorm who boldly brings the people fertile rains just to assert his dominance over the natural order.
Baal Hadad, He Who Rides the Clouds, is the new hotness on the block. He noogied the sea god Yamm, got El to fork over his crown, and is sitting comfortably in his snazzy new mancave, king of all beneath him. All, that is, except for the Underworld. I'm not sure why Baal's so hung up over a place which he warns his messengers is just a woeful swamp pit with a king who sits on a throne of phlegm, but then again I also don't understand why my completionist friend Megan tortures herself over getting every achievement on hard mode in Soulslike games, so maybe I'm the one that's out of touch. Regardless, Baal sends his homies Gapn and Ugar down there and tells them ahead of time hey butter Mot up a little, this is a man who respects a tender hand job, oh and if you fuck it up, he will swallow you into his endless maw like the T. rex in Jurassic Park scarfing down that entire lawyer in two bites with one one of said bites being simply, intentionally, optional. No pressure.
True to character, when Mot receives the message, the only thing he can think about is food. This polyphagic man-child asks to be invited to dinner in Baal's fancy new house, and when presented with Baal's polite suggestion that Mot peacefully abdicate, Mot responds with “uhhhhh lmao fuck you? You're the guy who slayed the chaos serpent Lotan, so if you want to take my throne, I wanna see you put up the same fight for it, pussy”. Baal is… honestly a little taken aback by this. He might not be that guy, shit. Unfortunately, whatever God of War boss fight that ensued has been lost, but it clearly didn't end well for Baal because the tablet picks up again with Baal crying and cowering in his boots as El, playing referee, declares Baal the loser and tells him to go apologize to Mot in person like a kid who accidentally homerunned a baseball into Mr. Wilson's window. Baal is so reluctant to march his ass all the way down to time out that he takes the time out of his journey to fuck and have a family with a random cow he finds on the Underworld's border. No I will not be explaining further. The surrounding text is completely missing. There is no further explanation. Fuck you.
Hilariously, the next scene the text picks up on is a cold open of Baal's lifeless corpse just tossed out onto the Underworld's porch like the charred shit from an expired ding-dong-ditch. Like the great conqueror of Heaven and Earth, the stormbringer, He Who Rides the Clouds, is just dead as shit out of the blue, full Family Guy pratfall. We don't even get to see what happened to him until Mot lore dumps later in the poem (he… he ate him. Duh. Honestly I don't know what else you expected, it’s Mot, the Insatiable Hellmouth), and that has me in fucking stitches. This news awkwardly reaches the gods, and El is… for some reason… so distraught that his favorite son, the literal god of death, murdered the guy who overthrew him as top dog that El starts ripping off his skin in despair. In all fairness, that's an urge I understand all too well, but I just fix it with that sugar, spice, and everything nice nuzzled straight out of the pillow lips smiling assertively over Charmcaster’s perfect pearly teeth which we call estrogen. Come to think of it… that's actually kinda how the gods fix the problem too.
See, the goddess Anat, the sister of Baal who rode under the horizon with the Sun to bring her brother's corpse home for a proper burial, got absolutely. Fucking. Pissed. Baal was the only thing keeping political order around these parts, no one could fill his shoes, so she decides fuck it, imma go kick Death’s ass myself! She marches downstairs, grabs Mot by the scruff and goes “I'm only gonna say this once, cough up my brother or else”. And then Mot laughs in her face, telling her bluntly, “well lady idk what to tell you, I fucking ate him, it was hilarious”. Anat then drew her sword, unseamed Mot from nave to stern, chopped him up into little bitty bite sized pieces, strained him through a sieve, lit him on fire, ground him into fertilizer, spread half his ashes in the fields and let the other half get eaten by birds. Holy fucking shit, what a woman!
Immediately following this incredibly sexy decimation, El has a prophetic dream of Baal returned to the land of the living, singing Kumbaya and magically healing the Pride Lands of whatever Scar did. El wakes up and is like “well shit Baal's alive again! Dude that's awesome! But uh… where's he got off to?” The answer, perhaps predictably, is that Baal has gone whole hog into round two with Mot, who apparently is able to recover from having his face stepped on like one of those sea sponges they put in a blender for science (though it takes seven whole years in Mot's case). It is now Mot's turn to be fucking pissed. Even smack in the middle of getting his ass personally served to him by Baal, Mot is not about to give up the battle at any fuckin cost. He looks Baal dead in the fucking face and proclaims that “I have been beat on, stepped on, shit on, fucked up, fucked down, shaken up, stirred around, cracked like an egg, had sand kicked in my eyes, had my nose metaphorically ripped off, kissed on the mouth, tucked into bed, drank my orange juice, fell down the stairs, and you know what? I still got up in the morning at 2 A.M. just to kick your fucking ass!” Though Mot ultimately concedes to this particular battle, he vows that he will be back to overthrow Baal, to devour mankind and consume the multitudes of the Earth, symbolizing the continuous and often sporatic struggle between agricultural rains and the encroaching desication of the desert. Sweet Mead of Odin, I know he's out to get me, but I honestly can't help but fall in love with Mot's moxy. Yes I quoted Deltarune instead of the actual ancient poem, which is not that far off to begin with, to make a joke only I will find funny, that's how we got here in the first place. Please for the love of all things human talk to me, I am clinically depressed and traumatically lonely.
Design notes, dudes I pulled this fat bastard out of the fucking ashes, you have no idea. Is it perfect? Hell no, but believe me it could've looked a lot worse considering how doomed from the start this color palette was. I'm so happy I managed to rescue the amount of detail I did. Look at him, he's so gross. This is very much one of those times I had a mental image I got way too attached to and was too deep in to pull out. Can you tell that H.R. Giger is one of my biggest influences when it comes to drawing things relating to death and my unhealthy fear of it? XD Idk there's something so primal and barbaric about the way these monsters process you like worthless biological matter. Like you ain't coming back out of that disgusting hippo maw once you sink into the swamp. I set out to draw the Insatiable Hellmouth, I succeeded, it's time to start preparing for Halloween.