Jerusalem Syndrome - Marc Maron [44]
The commitment that went into chiseling these things was intense. I mean, what could they have been using for tools? Spoons? It was either commitment or slavery. You don’t want to think about that when you are standing in front of something beautiful. It undermines your aesthetic experience, as a tourist, to think there might have been some guy with a whip, saying, “Build the pretty thing!” Unless you’re that kind of tourist.
Petra was a great hub of mysticism and commerce. There are the ruins of an outdoor theater, a technologically advanced water distribution system, and temples of a lost religion. Petra was at the cutting edge of desert culture in its day. I’m sure people would stand on their terraces in Petra’s heyday and say, “We’ve got it all. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere but here. Let’s go to Zabar’s.”
And now there’s nothing but ruins, artifacts.
We walked through this mile-long ravine along the overhanging cliffs on a path called the Siq. It was the main road into Petra. I was taping everything. All along the cliff walls were small eroded square reliefs that had faded symbols on them. The tour guide said they were called “god rocks” and they most likely were depictions of the gods of the culture. They don’t know for sure, because to this day they don’t know what religion was practiced by the Nabataeans. Petra is the ruins of a faded, mystical city. I raised my hand and suggested, “Maybe these are actually ancient billboards advertising a popular soft drink of the time. Is that possible?”
The guide looked at me the way an angry snake would and said, “No, it is not.”
We arrived at the highest point in Petra, which is called the “altar point,” because it is an actual altar. The entire top of this hill was leveled off. In the center of the plane was a slab of red rock about the size of an adult male. It was surrounded by strange, geometrically aligned, pyramidal stair-like structures. It was believed that human sacrifices were made to appease the gods on that slab. I thought, Man, that’s deep. I walked slowly around the altar, filming. I was fascinated. The thought that people could be that brutal and possessed by faith and fear was hard to handle. A sacrifice is performed by a priest or holy man, the seer, the illuminated one who understands more deeply than the rest. He understands that the ritual act done with the knowledge or in the presence of the followers will guarantee the power of the illusion he purports to understand and, conversely, guarantee his power over the followers.
A human sacrifice is the sacrifice of a life: a history of moments, movements, events, engagements, feelings, pains, pleasures, achievements, loves, visions, and hopes. Brought to an end on a slab of rock for the sake of something larger, a greater, godly agenda, a lie. The very possibility of such a thing was mind-blowing to me. As you know, I have a thing for altars. I stepped slowly around it. “They used to sacrifice human beings here. That’s so intense.”
I stepped onto the altar, pointed the camcorder skyward. Under my breath I said, “This would be a good time.” I waited. Nothing.
Then, I stepped up onto a stone staircase above the altar. I put my camcorder in its bag and reached over to grab my wife’s still camera to take a picture of the mountain in front of me. As I turned to take the picture, I heard the sound of my camcorder bouncing down the steps of the stone staircase. I heard all the delicate machinery and components