Ba'al

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System Lord Ba'al

Earth Culture of Origin

Semites, Canaanites

Alternate names / Spellings

Belus, Baalzebub, Beelzebub (one of the fallen angels of Satan). Baal means “master” or “owner”. See also Belus.

Presides Over

Fertility, agriculture

Personal Symbols

The sun

Earth Mythological References

Baal was the son of El, the high god of the Caananites. His annual death and consequent rebirth celebrations included human sacrifice and temple prostitution. Baal’s providence extended over the protection of livestock and crops to such a degree that when droughts and other natural disasters occurred, his worshippers would engage in frenzied obeisance to gain his favor.

Baal has been associated with the dark god Moloch. Savage worship rites included self-mutilation, dancing, chanting and the burning of offerings which included first-born children.

Also adopted by the Phoenicians, the cult of Baal spread far and wide due to their extensive travels by sea and included the Moabites, the Midianites and the Israelites.

Baal’s chief consort was Ashtoreth or Astarte, who was equivalent to the Greek goddess, Aphrodite.

Stargate References

YU:
Do not accept gifts from Baal.

DANIEL:
They have a habit of exploding, especially when he feels he has been slighted. He wiped out the inhabitants of two star systems, sixty million lives, rather than lose them to Sokar in a territorial dispute.

At a summit of the System Lords, Baal was introduced as one of the seven remaining Goa’uld chiefs in the wake of the death of Apophis. This meeting of rival Goa'uld was an historical event requiring a great deal of special security measures to ensure their safety and secrecy. The Tok’ra sent Daniel Jackson, posing as the lo'taur or most trusted personal servant of Lord Yu, in among the System Lords as an assassin to take them all out at once with a special poison created by Tok’ra scientists which would act only on the symbiotes.

However, upon discovering that another, unknown Goa’uld was launching successful attacks against the System Lords, Daniel chose to let them live and remain squabbling among themselves rather than destroy them and leave the universe under the control of the heretofore unknown Goa’uld, Anubis. Baal was among those who voted to allow Anubis to return to the inner circle of the System Lords, in exchange for the destruction of the Tau'ri at Anubis’s hands. He is the only one among them not bound by the Asgard Protected Planets Treaty. (5.15 "Summit Part 1" and 5.16 "Last Stand Part 2")

Some months later, the Tok’ra sent one of their own, a symbiote named Kanan, into Baal’s ranks to spy on him. Kanan used Baal’s lo'taur (most trusted personal servant), a young woman, to get into the Goa’uld’s personal quarters to gather information. Kanan then left her behind when his mission was completed. After the death of his host, the Tok’ra symbiote was implanted into Col. O’Neill, who was dying of an unknown disease contracted in Antarctica after the discovery of an Ancient woman frozen in the ice (6.04 "Frozen").

Kanan healed O’Neill of his illness but then took the colonel back to Baal’s secret base to rescue Baal's lo'taur Shallan, whom Kanan had loved, used, and left behind. Though the Tok'ra accepted sacrifice and loss as an inevitable conseuquence of war, Carter and Jonas Quinn believed Kanan was influenced by O'Neill's code of honour, particularly his commitment to not leaving his people behind.

The escape was foiled and O’Neill was killed, later to be revived in Baal’s sarcophagus. The System Lord repeatedly tortured Jack to death and resurrected him in an attempt to retrieve information imprinted on O'Neill's mind from the symbiote, which fled the colonel’s body during the escape attempt. Baal had developed anti-gravity technology on the secret base where Jack was held captive and Kanan had passed this information along to Tok’ra operatives.

Jack was saved when the location of the secret base was revealed to Baal's rival Lord Yu by Teal'c, inspired during kel'no'reem by the ascended Daniel. Yu, greedy for the new technology, promptly attacked the base with the motherships necessary to breach its defences. During that attack, Jack managed to escape successfully with Baal’s lo'taur. (6.06 "Abyss")

Lord Yu, who had voted against the inclusion of Anubis among the ranks of the System Lords, led the combined fleet of the Systems Lords in the battle against his rise to supremacy over them all. When Yu, the oldest of the Goa'uld symbiotes, began to exhibit signs of paranoia and senility, Teal'c and Yu's First Prime Oshu turned to Baal, finessing him into taking Yu's place.

Baal led the attack on Anubis as his mothership hovered over the Kelownan capital, home of Jonas Quinn. After destroying Anubis' vast mothership, Baal demanded Anubis' surrender, only to find he'd already fled. Although his actions saved Jonas' people from extermination, Baal was made aware of the existence of Kelowna and its valuable naquadriah. He also used his command of the combined fleet of the System Lords into an aggressive and successful assault on his fellow, expanding his empire further and faster than anyone could have predicted. (7.01 "Fallen Part 1" and 7.02 "Homecoming Part 2")

The SGC successfully made him the single biggest Goa'uld threat after Anubis.

Baal's influence was felt again when in a trance, Daniel Jackson was able to remember that Master Bra'tac and Teal'c's son Rya'c were imprisoned in one of Baal's brutal deathcamps. Captured rebel Jaffa were literally worked to death in the construction of ha'tak vessels - Goa'uld motherships. Only Jaffa could stand the intense heat and toxic gases of the blast furnaces fed by underground volcanic systems. Eventually even they succumbed. It was a logical place for Bra'tac and Rya'c to recruit rebels.

When Daniel was able to recall the planet's location and Carter used his memories to unlock the forcefield over Baal's Stargate there, SG-1 went through to Erebus to rescue their captured friends. Carter and Daniel successfully destroyed the mothership Baal's forces were constructing while O'Neill, Teal'c and the others freed the Jaffa and destroyed his labour camp. (7.03 "Orpheus")

Even after getting his new mothership destroyed on Erebus, Ba'al was not to be put down for long. He took every opportunity he could to strengthen his forces. When the SGC tested out a new DHD "computer" virus called "Avenger 2.0" to lock out the stargate on one of Ba'al's planets, Ba'al took the opportunity to attack other System Lords by modifying the virus to shut down stargates on all the planets that he knew. By paralyzing the stargates, he was able to attack with his ships and increase his domain. Carter and the virus' designer, Dr. Jay Felger, had to 'gate to Ba'al's planet and modify the virus to return the stargate network back to its full operational capability and prevent further tampering. (7.09 "Avenger 2.0")

After Anubis' fleet was destroyed by Jack's use of the weapon in the Antarctic Outpost (7.22 "Lost City Part 2"), the System Lords decided to divide Anubis' domain equally among themselves. Ba'al, however, had other ideas and took more than his share, including the Kull Warriors which he reprogrammed to be loyal to himself. The other System Lords sent three of their own to Earth in order to strike up a deal to get rid of Ba'al and return the balance of power to the remaining System Lords. The "negotiations" at the SGC did not go in the System Lords' favor, so they decided to send a mothership to Earth to "test out" the Antarctic defense system, but Ba'al destroyed the ship before it reached Earth. The System Lords went away from the SGC hoping for a chance to fight—all except Camulus, the Celtic god of war, who asked for asylum because he had no more army with which to fight (8.01 "New Order Part 1").

Ba'al was checking out all of Anubis' former bases and spotted SG-1 on P2X-887. He saw that SG-1 was stuck in the stronghold and decided to take advantage of the situation by claiming that he held them captive in order to trade them for Camulus. Jack asked Camulus for something to prove his "loyalty" to the SGC, so Camulus led them to a Zero Point Module (ZPM) which matched that used in the Antarctic Outpost to power the chair that Jack used to activate the weapons which destroyed Anubis' fleet. Camulus, however, had the ZPM booby-trapped to explode as soon as an electrical current was placed through it. The SGC discovered this quite by accident, but decided to use it in their trading of Camulus for SG-1. Jack convinced Camulus to use the ZPM against Ba'al. When the trade-off was attempted, Ba'al took Camulus, but didn't return SG-1, since SG-1 had never been in his custody from the start. SG-1 was able to contact the SGC after freeing themselves and they returned home safely. Jack, never trusting a Goa'uld, had sent Camulus to Ba'al with a dud ZPM and Ba'al, if he discovered Camulus' intent to kill him, most probably killed Camulus, but we are not made certain of this. (8.04 "Zero Hour")

After a year of planning, the Jaffa Priestess Ishta had coordinated the overthrow of her lord Moloc. She had been rescuing female Jaffa babies from Moloc's sacrificial fires for several years (7.10 "Birthright") and finally had gathered enough support among the Rebel Jaffa within Moloc's ranks to see an end to his reign of terror. Teal'c tried to convince her that they should wait to overthrow Moloc because another System Lord could take his place and they would be no better off, but Ishta was determined to assassinate Moloc because of all the deaths he had caused. With the help of Teal'c and the SGC, Moloc was killed, and Ba'al, as Teal'c had predicted, took the opportunity to absorb Moloc's domain into his own, making him stronger than before. (8.09 "Sacrifices")

A group of ex-NID agents had formed into an organization called The Trust. They decided that it was best to take an offensive position in protecting Earth from the Goa'uld threat, so they put into action a program of systematically killing off all of the Goa'uld and Jaffa on the planets known to be in Ba'al's territory. They selected Ba'al's domain first probably because Ba'al was considered the strongest of the System Lords. Millions of Jaffa were killed in this assault before the SGC discovered the plan and attempted to stop it. They confiscated all of the poison which The Trust stored in a warehouse on Earth, but were not able to stop The Trust in escaping with Osiris' Al'kesh with enough poison to wipe out at least six more planets. (8.10 "Endgame")

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--DeeKayP 10:17, 17 Jun 2004 (PDT)

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