by David Cohen
—‘Jerusalem Syndrome’, British Journal of Psychiatry
Although, or perhaps because, Gant didn’t satisfy certain key diagnostic criteria, his case remains noteworthy. Those familiar with Jerusalem Syndrome will know its defining symptom: the sufferer is convinced that he or she is in the Holy City to fulfil some religious or spiritual mission and, in many cases, believes him- or herself to be a biblical character. But Gant’s delusions were not religious in nature. Having treated Jerusalem Syndrome for some twenty years, I found this anomaly both curious and, at first, extremely refreshing. After all, how often can one converse with Ezekiel or the Virgin Mary without experiencing a certain weariness? How many times can one be warned that the Apocalypse is just around the corner without occasionally hoping that it really is? As for Messiahs, there are never fewer than three in the facility on any given day, and this figure tends to increase around Easter.
Assuming for the moment that Gant was suffering from the syndrome, he fell into what is known as Type III – the least common but perhaps most fascinating category. Type III patients, like those with Type I and Type II, experience a psychotic episode while in Jerusalem – or, in some cases, another part of Israel – but, unlike these other patients, they have no previous history of mental illness.
My meeting with Gant came about after I received a call from Alan Hughes, an English ex-pat who managed the Damascus Inn, one of East Jerusalem’s larger backpacker hostel. Gant was staying there and, according to Hughes, he had assaulted two other residents. Hughes is one of many hotel managers I’ve gotten to know over the years. Most are familiar with the syndrome and will notify me if they observe the early-warning signs in any of their guests: reciting psalms aloud, getting about in a long toga-like gown fashioned from bed linen – that sort of behaviour. The Type III syndrome sufferer may also exhibit an obsessive need to take baths and showers, and to perform compulsive fingernail and toenail cutting – ritualistic preparation for the delivery of a sermon, not necessarily on the mount, but at some holy site or other. But according to Hughes, none of this applied to Gant.
I asked, ‘Do you know why he assaulted these two people?’
Hughes replied, ‘He claims they stole his journal.’
‘So why don’t you call the police?’
‘I’m getting to that,’ he said. ‘Now, Nathan’s never been to Israel before, and he only arrived the day before yesterday. Yesterday he went on a trip to Beit Guvrin National Park, and he went down into this cave – one of the caves at Tel Maresha.’
Now things were taking a more familiar turn. Tel Maresha is an archaeological site, not exactly in Jerusalem but some forty kilometres to the south-west, and is known for its many underground caves. One of the Judean cities mentioned in the Book of Joshua, Maresha dates from the time of the First Temple.
‘And what happened while he was there?’ I asked.
‘Apparently he had some sort of revelatory experience.’
‘Ah. I think I see where you’re going. I gather the journal has some connection with all this?’
‘Yeah. The journal contains everything he wrote while he was in the cave, having the revelatory experience. He’s been beside himself ever since it went missing.’
‘Did he tell you about the experience? Any specific details?’
‘No – but it was obviously quite revelatory.’
Gant’s story so far did not indicate Jerusalem Syndrome, but it satisfied certain fundamental criteria: he was suffering delusions, evidently triggered by proximity to one of Israel’s many biblically significant locations. Some readers might contend that this describes practically everyone in Jerusalem. I don’t entirely disagree, but that’s a separate field of inquiry.
Gant had calmed down somewhat by the time I interviewed him, but he was clearly still distressed by the disappearance of his journal. Nor was he very happy about having been brought to the facility against his will. But he made little protest (the alternative was, after all, the police station), simply remarking, ‘It’s a strange world when the victim is detained while the guilty are free to roam the earth.’ Like most Type III patients, he seemed to be an essentially rational person, fully aware of who and where he was. He regretted his earlier violent behaviour, claiming he’d never acted in that way before.
His profile was unremarkable: mid-twenties, white, middle-class, university educated. Having just completed a degree in urban design, he’d taken six months off to backpack around Asia and the Middle East. Gant was Australian, a nationality that has always been well represented here at the facility, maybe because so many Australians travel in the Middle East – and abroad in general. Indeed, the best-documented case of Jerusalem Syndrome is that of Denis Rohan, a shearer from Grenfell, New South Wales. Some of us will recall with a shudder his attempt, back in 1969, to burn down the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Country of origin aside, the two patients had nothing in common. Rohan was an extreme Type I; deranged and bubbling over with religious fervour, he came to the Holy Land as a self-appointed divine emissary. Gant, by contrast, described his upbringing and adult life to date as ‘totally secular’ – once again, at odds with the typical Type III profile. The cave visit was part of a tour offered to Damascus Inn guests; Gant had signed up on the spur of the moment. And yet his experience at Tel Maresha suggested the classic Type III ‘spiritual awakening’.
After talking to Gant for a while, I remarked, ‘You obviously don’t think you’re a character from the Bible. I’m pleased about that.’
He replied, ‘My only bible is my journal.’
‘Let’s talk about that. I’m told this journal of yours contains details of something that happened while you were in the cave.’
Gant became upset once more. ‘They stole it, the bastards!’
‘Who are “they”, exactly?’
‘Those two guys at the Damascus Inn. But everyone wanted to get their hands on it. Everyone.’
Gant then gave an elaborately paranoid account of how a pair of German backpackers had drugged him and removed the journal from his windbreaker. As he described the conspiracy and theft, his facial expression shifted back and forth between despair and disbelief, finally settling on despair. He stared at his Kathmandu trekking boots, and remained frozen in that position for some time.
‘Does it contain profound revelations?’ I asked. ‘Is that why they want it?’
‘It contains revelations. I don’t know whether or not they’re profound. I just wrote down what the voice told me. Simple as that.’
‘Ah. So there was a voice?’
‘Yes.’
‘Whose voice was it? God’s?’
Gant looked up. ‘I have no idea. I don’t know what God’s voice sounds like. I don’t even believe in God, so he can’t really have a voice anyway.’
Gant was something of a riddle. His cave encounter notwithstanding, he came across as a materialist, impatient with questions containing any trace of airy-fairyness.
‘So you’ve never heard that voice before? Or any other voice?’
‘I’ve heard voices, but those voices have always been attached to mouths, which have always been attached to people. This was just a voice, full stop.’
‘Can you describe what happened?’
‘Well, like I was saying, I was on the tour. I wandered off from the group and went down this cave, alone. It was a small cave, a long way down. I was looking at the walls, touching the walls. There was some sort of graffiti on them – crosses and writing. The tour guide had said monks and hermits used to live in those caves.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘During the Byzantine period, I believe. Some say John the Baptist was one of them.’
‘I don’t know about that stuff, but anyway … I’m standing there, in the cave. It was pretty dark, a bit claustrophobic. Then I heard it: this voice.’ Gant said that he was ‘freaked out’ at first, and that his immediate instinct was to run. But the voice told him not to be afraid, and to hearken unto what it was going to say.
‘What did the voice sound like?’ I asked.
Gant thought for a moment. ‘Nothing special. Fairly well-spoken. It had a bit of an accent.’
‘What kind of accent?’
‘It’s funny, I don’t even remember.’
‘Well, what about the content? What did he – it – say?’
‘Nathan’ – it called me by name. ‘Nathan, take the road less travelled.’
‘Ah. Did this advice suggest to you some sort of … spiritual message – a metaphor, so to speak?’
‘No. It was meant literally. It was the … prelude to a guide. The voice dictated it to me and I took it all down.’
‘A guide. What kind of guide, in essence?’
Gant looked directly at me. ‘A travel guide,’ he said. ‘In essence.’
This I hadn’t expected, but I pressed on. ‘What sort of travel guide are we talking about?’
‘A travel guide to Israel. What else would be it be – a travel guide to Sweden?’
‘But when you say “travel guide”, do you mean a guide to the holy places? Places of pilgrimage? Places the voice directed you to visit in order to further your spiritual mission?’
Gant sighed. He seemed exasperated by my line of questioning. ‘I don’t know why you keep going on about that. It mentioned some religious sites, yes, but it wasn’t religious. There was a whole list of places: natural wonders, historical sites, markets – you name it.’
He’d thrown me something of a diagnostic curve ball. I’d come across hundreds of patients who’d heard voices telling them one thing or another, but every message invariably had a spiritual tenor.
‘So let’s recap,’ I said. ‘You were down in the cave and a voice dictated to you a travel guide to Israel.’
‘And the Palestinian territories – not that the voice was taking sides.’
‘It must be one of the few voices that isn’t.’
‘The national psyche has been severely traumatised,’ Gant said.
‘Did the voice tell you that or is it based on your own observations?’
He hesitated. ‘The voice mentioned it in passing.’
I remarked that it must have taken a long time to write down a guide to the entire country.
‘Not as long as you might think,’ Gant said. ‘It’s very selective, you see. It only includes places off the beaten track; places no-one – or hardly anyone – has been to before.’
‘And what places did the voice recommend?’
Gant peered at the charts and diagrams on my office walls. ‘Not here, obviously.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t imagine this place is on any tourist’s must-see list.’
‘I’m not a tourist,’ Gant said, picking at a loose thread in his convertible hiking pants. ‘I’m a traveller.’
‘What is the difference, as you see it?’
‘If I follow what the voice told me, I’ll see the real Israel, not the tourist traps.’ Then he remembered that he no longer had the journal. His complacent expression faltered, and his tall frame seemed to collapse in on itself like a deckchair in the wind.
‘Can you remember anything of what the voice told you?’ I asked.
Gant was silent for a while. Then his face brightened. ‘Actually, yes.’ He sat up. ‘I’ve committed quite a bit of it to memory – maybe not word for word, but …’
I opened my desk drawer and took out some notepaper.
‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘I’d like you to list, as well as you can and in as much detail as possible, some of the places the voice told you about.’
‘Will you want to read it?’
‘Yes, but I assure you that anything you say or write here will be kept strictly confidential.’ He seemed unconvinced.
‘Just a few samples,’ I said. ‘I give you my word that I won’t tell a soul.’
‘Fair enough,’ Gant said after a while. ‘I’ll just write down the descriptions themselves, without the commentary.’
‘There was commentary too?’
‘Additional material to flesh out the basic information – precise directions, the best times to travel. Stuff like that.’
He produced his own pen – some sort of special travel pen that he claimed could write underwater, on top of a mountain, beneath the burning desert sun, and in outer space, if necessary – from the pocket of his North Face zip shirt, retired to a corner of the room and wrote: short, intense bursts of scribbling separated by long pauses during which the only sound was the low, sustained breath of the air-conditioning unit. At noon the air-conditioning unit shut itself off, adding another layer, as it were, to the silence.
Half an hour later Gant handed me what he’d written. It amounted to a couple of pages, printed in a small and neat hand.
‘Why,’ I asked, before I began reading, ‘do you think the voice chose you to tell all this to?’
‘Who knows? Maybe because I was receptive to it.’
‘It’s interesting that you say that, given you claim not to have any religious inclinations.’
Gant studied me for a few moments, as if he were the doctor and I the patient. ‘You seem obsessed with religion.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I treat people suffering from what we call Jerusalem Syndrome. These people tend to get very caught up in – overwhelmed by, you might say – the spiritual significance of this city.’
‘I’m just someone,’ Gant said, in the self-satisfied tone that had come to inform his every pronouncement, ‘who seeks authentic experiences.’
Before commenting on Gant’s written fragments, I insert here three samples, reproduced exactly as he wrote them. They reflect the content and flavour of the list as a whole.
1. Khan Yunis’s colourful Bedouin market. Everything from fresh fish and locally produced honey to clay cooking pots and embroidered linen.
2. Catch a sherut to Qalandia checkpoint and then a cab into Ramallah. Drop in at Al-Muqata’a, the Palestinian Authority headquarters. Spend the afternoon sipping coffee and playing backgammon. Head up to Nablus for a day lost in an enchanting market set between stone mansions. Head to the Jordan River valley and down to Jericho for some extraordinary hiking through Wadi Qelt.
3. Halfway between the Jordan River and the coast is the stone-clad village of Peqi’in. Inhabited predominantly by Druze, it has also been home to a centuries-old Jewish community, which according to tradition has never been exiled from the Holy Land.
If these locations sound familiar, it’s because they are. Hundreds – probably thousands – of foreign travellers have visited the places mentioned. Clearly, the privileged information provided by Gant’s cave voice was not so privileged, which is why I have no qualms about including it here. Gant’s roads less travelled were, and are, if not exactly roads more travelled, then at the very least roads quite travelled. While his list makes no mention of, say, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock or the Wailing Wall, it contains nothing one wouldn’t find in any comprehensive travel guide. Ten years ago the places on Gant’s list might not have been so well explored – considered too dangerous, too controversial, too out of the way – but nowadays people clamour to see them, for the very same reasons.
The language employed by Gant’s revelatory voice is worthy of examination. Certain phrases kept coming up, both in Gant’s notes and in his oral recollections. Focusing on the notes alone, I have recorded these recurring phrases, and the number of times each one was used (NTU).
Phrase NTU
road less travelled 8
off the beaten track 7
a land of contradictions 6
a land of contrasts 6
a land of extremes 5
centuries-old traditions 5
echoes of times gone by 5
desert community untouched by the modern world 4
Alone in my office – Gant, at my suggestion, had meanwhile gone to the dining room – I tried an experiment. I typed, in turn, the phrases ‘a land of contradictions’, ‘a land of ext
remes’ and ‘a land of contrasts’, coupled with the word ‘Israel’, into Google. Dozens of entries from various travel-related websites – some linked to books or television documentaries – appeared. I entered each phrase again, this time minus ‘Israel’, only to learn that these self-same phrases had also been used to describe Australia, Canada, Iceland, India, Kenya, Mozambique, New Zealand, Peru, Scotland … How, one may ask, can a revelatory experience – even if the medium is, ultimately, a voice in someone’s head – be so unoriginal? But perhaps Gant’s voice was no less original than the voice that informs a man that he is Jesus Christ.
Continuing my experiment, I selected random excerpts from Gant’s descriptive passages and typed these into the search engine. The results were enlightening. Every word string I entered took me to the same source, namely the Lonely Planet Guide to Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The question, therefore, was whether Gant’s condition had emerged from an unusual intersection of Jerusalem Syndrome – a psychotic episode in the form of the voice in the Tel Maresha cave, triggered, despite Gant’s constant denials of any ‘religious’ component, by the heightened spiritual atmosphere of the place – with intensive reading of the Lonely Planet guide.
I followed this up with Gant after lunch. He leaned back in his seat and stared out through the glassy eyes of a medicated patient, even though I hadn’t administered any drugs; they’re not usually called for in Type III cases.
‘You seem a bit lacklustre,’ I observed.
‘Just resigned, that’s all.’
‘Resigned to what, may I ask?’
‘To the fact that the thieves are already systematically visiting those locations. I won’t be the first now.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘How do I feel? How would you feel? Pretty shithouse. Soon those places will be overrun, ruined, no longer worth going to. I just hope when I get to India, I’ll hear another voice in another cave, or maybe somewhere else – a mountaintop or whatever. Except this time I’ll guard my notes more carefully. Maybe I’ll write them in code.’ He thought about that for a moment. ‘Yeah, that’s the answer.’
