The Second Revelation

Slowly, you learn to fall asleep standing on one leg, balanced on the stick, and to ignore the threatening whispers of warning that fill the darkness at night. When your life depends on something, the brain knows how to manage. The snakes begin to whisper more and more terrible secrets, to tempt you - like listening to women's conversation about sex, which becomes more and more sensational, and teaches you things you would never know otherwise

The Scapegoat - William Holman Hunt (Source)

At the top of the holy mountain lives the mountain priest. You set out on your journey to the mountain. First, you must leave the inhabited area, but the settlement has already grown very large, and every time it seems to end, there are more houses, and it's almost impossible to reach the horizon. When you increase your running speed, cars overtake you towards the horizon, so you try instead to crawl slowly, as if to slip away unnoticed. Like how you slipped away unnoticed from the woman, when you had to leave the house, the woman who has been opposing and begging for years for you to forget about it, promising and extracting promises from you, which have now turned into lies. Or like how you crawled out of bed, hoping that the naked body beside you wouldn't wake up and pull you towards it in a way you couldn't resist, thwarting all your plans.

Under the cover of darkness, and precisely when you're distracted, you manage to leave the human area, but you still have to cross the desert. There, snakes are waiting for you. It's unclear what the snakes live on, as there's no one else passing through there besides you, and it's impossible that they live only on you, yet the desert is completely empty. You're forced to move only in the scorching daylight, when even the snakes don't come out, and at night you balance yourself on a thin stick, so that if a snake crawls on it, it will be noticeable, and without the element of surprise, you can crush its head with a stone. Slowly, you learn to fall asleep standing on one leg, balanced on the stick, and to ignore the threatening whispers of warning that fill the darkness at night. When your life depends on something, the brain knows how to manage.

The snakes begin to whisper more and more terrible secrets, to tempt you - just enough that you barely hear something, but hear that there is something, and hear enough to understand that it's a secret you simply must hear, like listening to women's conversation about sex, which becomes more and more sensational, and teaches you things you would never know otherwise. After forty days in the terrible sun and forty nights in the much more terribly tempting darkness, you reach the foot of the mountain.

It's not a special mountain or different from others, and in truth, you can't know that this is the mountain. Except for the fact that it took you forty days and forty nights to reach it. You start climbing, and rocks roll down from the mountain heights, sometimes barely missing you, and sometimes it seems to you that they are thrown at you, and not just randomly, but by the priest at the top of the mountain. But you soon long for the rocks when the snowballs start.

It seems that the mountain is much higher than it initially appeared. After three days of non-stop climbing, the path leads into a cave, which must be passed through to continue upwards to the mountain top. Everything is so steep around now that one wrong move is enough to lose your life, so you're actually glad you've reached the cave, until you realize you've reached the priest's cave.

You say to the priest: I overcame the temptations of women, snakes, man, and stones, and I arrived at the place, on time. But the priest mutters something unclear. He doesn't remember. Or pretends not to. He doesn't perform rituals, and the stick in his hand is not a sacred tool, but a weapon of killing, and now you see in the darkness as your eyes adjust slightly that the sacred accessories are not at all ritual objects, but weapons, and torture devices. The small altar is a kind of bed, with four chains at its pointed corners, and the inner altar looks like some unidentified inquisition device. Instead of ancient oil-painted holy pictures on the walls, there are naked women, and the scent of incense is the smell of decay and blood. You recoil backwards, towards the abyss close to the edge of the cave, and the priest who noticed your interest, which necessarily caused your entry into the cave, now stands by the entrance waiting for you, with the skull-crushing rod of God in his hand.

Your eyes sharpen now, and in the depths of the cave you notice accessories whose shape indicates they are intended for something indecent, but you cannot understand what. He meanwhile gets bored with your curiosity and leafs through a book, but when you approach to peek, even though the book is upside down, you see that instead of letters in the holy language, his book is composed of countless small pictures of genitals, a huge variety of genitals and round breasts are the letters of this book, which closes almost on your nose, because your curiosity has gone too far.

The priest thunders: Who gave you permission to come here?

And you say: I heard the word of God.

And the priest says: How did you hear if you didn't come here.

And now you already understand that a terrible mistake has occurred. You ask: Servant of God, are you the guardian of God's mountain against man? Why does God need you? Let me return and I will never come back. God does not need my sacrifice.

But the priest only growls: And how do you know He doesn't need it? And as he ties me to the altar he says: It's not God I'm guarding from man, but man I'm guarding from the revelation of God on the mountain.