"Even if I got rid of all my problems, I'd just go out and get new ones..."

Them bones them bones them, dry bones...
6:21 p.m. on 2003-08-15

In a dark dark city, in a dark dark monastery, in a dark dark catacomb, 25,000 skeletons lived.

I am not a superstitious person. I will walk under ladders, I get annoyed, but nothing else, if a mirror breaks, and I rather like black cats, actually. But whilst every other tourist was busily snapping at the ten metre-deep pit of skulls that lies in the catacombs of the San Franscisco Monastery in Lima, Peru, I was... well, I wasn�t. Somehow, taking a photo of so many skeletons, however old, seems macabre and more than a little tasteless. These were people, even if they lived hundreds of years ago. And now they are a tourist attraction. Not that I really mind, since it is interesting. I just don�t want a snapshot of them in my album.

The visit to the monastery prompted yet another musing on the topic of religion. Having seen artefacts from the Incan and Chimu societies, a religion which worships the death and resurrection of one man, seems far more ludicrous to me than one which worshipped the sun, moon, and earth. Nature is a life giving force, that upon which we all depend. In the Incan religion, the cross symbolised the union of earth, sky, and air (I think), but it was the Spanish invaders who decided the appearance of this cross meant the devil had already visited Peru. Thus the mass killings and destruction of so much Incan gold.

But somehow, from, if not an aethestic perspective, then an agnostic perspective, it seems far stranger to worship one man than the entire earth.

Ho hum. These are deep thoughts for a Friday night. Far too deep. Where�s that issue of Cosmo?

Random thing: being interviewed by a group of Peruvian school children and their video camera, as to why English tourists come to visit Peru.

<< >>