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It was partially successful. Asherah worship continued in many places, though. It was an incredibly tenacious cult, a throwback to Sumer, that spread itself both verbally and through the exchange of bodily fluids-they had cult prostitutes, and they also adopted orphans and spread the virus to them via breast milk.”

“Wait a minute,” Ng says. “Now you are talking about a biological virus again.”

“Exactly. That’s the whole point of Asherah. It’s both. As an example, look at herpes simplex. Herpes heads straight for the nervous system when it enters the body. Some strains stay in the peripheral nervous system, but other strains head like a bullet for the central nervous system and take up permanent residence in the cells of the brain-coiling around the brainstem like a serpent around a tree. The Asherah virus, which may be related to herpes, or they may be one and the same, passes through the cell walls and goes to the nucleus and messes with the cell’s DNA in the same way that steroids do. But Asherah is a lot more complicated than a steroid.”

“And when it alters that DNA, what is the result?”

“No one has studied it, except maybe for L. Bob Rife. I think it definitely brings the mother tongue closer to the surface, makes people more apt to speak in tongues and more susceptible to me. I would guess that it also tends to encourage irrational behavior, maybe lowers the victim’s defenses to viral ideas, makes them sexually promiscuous, perhaps all of the above.”

“Does every viral idea have a biological virus counterpart?” Uncle Enzo says.

“No. Only Asherah does, as far as I know. That is why, of all the me and all the gods and religious practices that predominated in Sumer, only Asherah is still going strong today. A viral idea can be stamped out-as happened with Nazism, bell bottoms, and Bart Simpson Tshirts—but Asherah, because it has a biological aspect, can remain latent in the human body. After Babel, Asherah was still resident in the human brain, being passed on from mother to child and from lover to lover.

“We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart

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