MOUNTAINS AND THE SACRED, YESTERDAY

A. D. MODDIE

I will not speak about Mountains, but through the Mountains   ;
Rane Daumal, Mountain Analogue

IN THE 1996 ISSUE of the H.J. (Vol. 52, p.136) I offered a piece, ‘Mountains and Science Today’. To complement it, I now offer ‘Mountains and the Sacred, Yesterday’. The first spoke objectively about mountains through unfolding scientific knowledge, as a special feature of the earth’s ecological systems, with environmental problems peculiar to them; first in single disciplines like geology and botany, later in multi-disciplinary studies of what is happening to mountain ecosystems of land, water, forest, people, and climates. Now let us see how man has spoken subjectively of the spirit ‘through mountains’ in the long yesterdays of his history.

In this rational age of machines, organisations, and systems, let us reflect on a pre-rational time, a pristine ‘Dream time’, as it were, when man sensed an extraordinary power in holy mountains, rivers, springs, groves, and in all nature. Mountains seemed to be the abodes or the embodiments of gods, these natural cathedrals of the earth. They spoke with mythical meaning. Like trees and stones, mountains had the power of spiritual symbolism. They seemed to offer divine messages. Man spoke of them with mystery and wonder and awe, except in Europe when, in earlier times, they were the homes of dreaded hobgoblins and spirits. Men, in different cultures in the rest of the planet experienced in mountains a sense of the sacred in so many different ways. They spoke metaphysics through mountains. There was a time when the media of the supernatural was the mountain. Not all, of even the highest mountains were sacred. In ancient Greece, Parnassus was sacred to the god Apollo; the Matterhorn was not sacred to the Swiss. In Asia, Kailash and Kangchenjunga were sacred in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. It may be that the Matterhorns and Mt. Blancs were products of a post-sacredotal time in man’s perceptions. Ponder its consequences in human behaviour towards mountains. And here there may be a link between the sacred and the ecological, between a soulless, chauvinist mountaineering and a soulful personal one.

No twentieth century mountaineer has spoken of that perception of the sacred, that speaking through the mountains better than Marco Pallis in The Way and the Mountain. He wrote : ‘Indeed all Nature in her truly pristine state, is something intrinsically sacred, it has the specific quality of wholeness, holiness for the American Indians, as we know this was their ever open Bible in which to read the signs, better scripture than this they never wanted’. And he added, ‘by this inescapable humbling of all of him that is not spirit, the wind of liberation is felt to blow.’ We shall see signs of those winds of liberation elsewhere too in the mountains; and lament the vanishing of humility, the turning of mountains expeditions into chauvinist conquering ones, even by Asian expeditions which knew that ancient culture of the sacred.

Through the ages and across the planet, man has perceived mountains in various holy ways. He has seen them as a source of water and of life. There is no holier land in Hindudom than the source of the Ganga, where the Ganga emerges from the icy Gaumukh (cow mouth) of the Central Himalaya, then following ‘like a slender thread of a lotus flower’ to give life to the Gangetic plain below; past holy Haridwar (the gateway of the gods) and holier Varanasi where, to die washes away all sins. In ancient Egypt, there were the sacred sources of the Nile, flowing a thousand miles down from unknown mountains to give life and civilisation to the deserts of Egypt, the land of Osiris, the greatest of the gods of the Nile valley, and of Heaven and Earth. As gatherers of melting snows and rains, the mountains were the holy sources of life. The ecological derived from the sacred: they were not in separate worlds. And now science is using the name of the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gata as the name to convey the Earth is a self regulating system.

So it was natural for mountains to be symbols of divinity, a divinity which was both life-sustaining and uplifting. In the Odyssey, the summit of Mount Olympus is a divine realm of light and bliss. The Hindu god, Shiva, one of the supreme trinity, resides in Yogic meditation on Kailash, behind and in splendid isolation from the main Himalayan range. ‘The Japanese view the pure summit of Fuji,’ says Edwin Bernbaum, ‘as the divine mandala of the Buddha, Sengen Nainichi’. Nanda Devi dwells on her mountain, sovereign of the entire Kumaon Himalaya. In the mountain land of Nanda Devi, brass bells are hung from trees on passes and in temples, and worshippers raise their hands to ring those bells in prayers of pealing music. The Chinese emperors chose T’ai Shah, the most sacred peak in China, as a place to perform sacrifices, thanking heaven and earth for their dynastic success. Sacrifices took place on the hills and peaks revered by the Aztecs and the Inca. The mountains seemed like the sublime thrones of the gods, and the holy altars of man.

Mountain tops have been shrines to deities and saints in thousands of places. Pilgrims climb Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka to worship at the footprint believed to have been left by the Buddha, Shiva, Adam, or St. Thomas, depending on the particular choice of the worshipper. The massive, colourful Uluru Rock in C. Australia, a sandstone relic of 100 million years, recalls for the aborigines the magic ‘dream time’ of human ancestors and animals. (In contrast, the early European mind saw the residence of Satan on Mt. Blanc, and the fiery entrance to hell on the active volcano of Mt. Hekla in Iceland). And out of respect for Sikkimese tradition, Charles Evans and his party stopped some feet short of the summit of Kangchenjunga, the first respect of a Western expedition for this universal perception. Earlier, that fine fusion of religious spirit and mountaineering in Marco Pallis described the summit as a place ‘outside time’, where only ‘the eternal present’ reigns. It is utterly inexpressible in its uniqueness; silent is the knower of the summit, and the whole universe strains its ears to catch the accents of his speechless eloquence. Not so silent have been later summiters when the sacredness of mountains was lost.

In the geography of the metaphysical imagination, mountains have been the centre of the world, or of local mountain regions. The cosmic mountain, Meru was the physical and metaphysical centre of the Hindu and Buddhist worlds. It was a symbol of the Universal Axis. Meru is represented by the spinal chord in the human body (meru-danda). The Axial Peak was also a part of the Chinese tradition, where the Mountain of the Axis rose boldly out of the swirling Sea of Possibilities. As the Axis is for the world, the ruler should be for his subjects, the centre of Heaven and Earth. In the Mahabharata, it is interesting to find the Himalaya described as ‘the measuring rod of the earth’. The centre of the geometry of earth seemed to be in these high places.

Mt. Fuji is an example of a mountain as the local centre of a region, as Nanda Devi is in Kumaon. The country god of Khumbu does not reside on Everest, the universal Mecca of mountaineers, but on the summit of Khumbila, a relatively minor peak south of Everest, in the middle of the Sherpa homeland. Its central location gives it precedence over higher peaks. How good to see height above sea-level receiving secondary place in this traditional mind.

People also perceive mountains as the source of their ancestry. The Lepchas of Sikkim trace theirs to the primordial couple (their Adam and Eve) born from the glaciers of Kangchenjunga, behind whose veil of ice they will go when they die. Cold origins and cold destinations, their ‘dream’ world. Edwin Berrbaum gives examples of the I.R. of Uganda who believe that their god set the first man of their tribe on the slopes of Mt. Murongola, binding them to live close to the sacred mountain. And the Yuman tribes of N. Arizona revere Newberry Mountain as the place where the first humans emerged from the spiritual world of the dead beneath the earth. The Puruha in the Ecuadorian Andes claimed descent from a sexual union between the masculine mountain, Chimborazo and the feminine, Tungurahue; a seismic mating of mountains. The Navajo singers refer to the sacred peaks which define the borders of their homelands as mothers and fathers of their people, a charming parental association.

I would like to end the story of the yesterdays of the Sacred Mountains as creative places of renewal and self-realisation; perhaps the most potent symbolic associations of man, as relevant for this age as for past ages. And of all the ideas in Tradition’s treasure chest, the most appealing to the mountaineer. In so many places, human life is perceived to be renewed after a flood. In the Western tradition it is Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat after the Biblical flood. According to the Ohlone of California, Coyote created the human race anew on the summit of Mt. Diablo, the only protruding spot after the flood covered the earth. In Greece, Mt. Parnarssus was the first place to emerge from the flood. The people of the Nanda Devi region have identified their sacred mountain as the place where the sage, Manu descended after a flood to renew the human race. A less known, but profound example is that of Zarathustra, who is said to have contemplated for ten years in the mountains of Iran, and then returned to preach his message through the Gathas. Apart from being the first monotheist who preached of one God who made the Good Creation; his doctrine of ‘Frasho-Kereti’, which the Oxford scholar, Mary Boyce has translated as healing renewal, had a dual dimension, physical and moral, for the world and for man. The physical referred to the healing renewal of earth’s Natural elements, air, water, fire, and all life — sustaining processes. So Professor J. Hinnells thought Zoroastrianism was the first ecological religion. The second moral dimension was man’s role as God’s ‘hamkar’ or ‘co-worker’ in maintaining the purity of Creation, and his relationship with fellowmen on the principle of ‘Asha’ or Righteousness. ‘Frasho-Kereti’ was no post-flood renewal. It was a cardinal doctrine from the beginning of time, until the Saoshyants come to perfect the world in its last phase.

The theme — of mountains as symbols of man ascending levels of aspiration, of self-realisation — finds one of its highest literary expressions in Dante’s Divine Comedy on the Mountain of Purgatorio. The poet describes the ascent of this hill, on top of which is the ‘terrestrial paradise.’ The climb from the inferno is the climb from our lower selves, what the Hindus would aptly call the ‘tamasic’ state to the higher, rajasic and satvic. When Dante was impeded by the three beasts, the leopard, the lion, and the wolf, they were the metaphors for pleasure, pride, and greed. Purgatorio is Dante’s metaphor for the realities of life, and when he emerges to the forest on the summit, he feels cleansed and purged. It is a state of bliss, of redemption. The mountain is both training ground and an arena of Karma where one’s actions are played out, and one takes the consequences for good or ill. Only after the long climb is the climber liberated to love, peace, and humility; as Marco Pallis was to find centuries later.

The days of classics-bred mountaineers seem long over. Not quite. There was still Rene Daumal, who wrote Mountain Analogue long after Sinai and Olympus lost their analogical importance. In his work, Rene Daumal, himself an Alpinist, sees the resemblance in Mount Analogue of life and mountain climbing. ‘It is a modern myth drawing on physics and exoticism to bridge the gap to the invisible world’, says his brother, Jack Daumal. For Rene, the summit of that mountain must be inaccessible; its base accessible to human beings, as nature has made them. It must exist geographically, not in myth. The door to the invisible must be visible. We must act and suffer together. Alone he can only intellectualise. With another the task is not easy; only the impossible becomes possible. The image of his hexagram is the mountain, symbol of stillness. Between its top and bottom lies the quiet heart, that of the climber, and the seeker. True peace of mind is needed to understand the laws of the universe. Do not serve a master stronger than yourself, or you will be swept along, Rene advises. Know the powerlessness of mere words. ‘Listen to myths and symbols letting them evoke in oneself interior resonances based on real experience’. This is the gist.

Note the juxtaposition of thoughts in Mount Analogue. The mountain must exist and be real, not mythical; the summit is inaccessible; the base accessible; make the impossible possible with others; do not be swept by a stronger master; let myths and symbols evoke ‘interior resonances’ based on real experiences. Know, through it all, a quiet heart. That’s the message.

Rene, it was discovered, had T.B. The doctors recommended mountain air therapy, not mountain climbing. That was when the idea of Mt. Analogue crystallised. ‘If I could scale mountains, I would sing of them from below. I will not speak about the mountain, but through the mountain. With this mountain as language, I would speak of another mountain which is the path uniting earth and heaven. (The old tradition of the ‘axis mundi’ linking earth and heaven). I will speak of it, not in order to resign myself, but to exhort myself’.

And that is what countless millions have done through the ages in many mountain lands, uniting earth and heaven, exhorting themselves. As you and I should now, recapturing a touch of sacredness with science. That way we may find two realms of Meaning, ultimately merging into ‘a complementary exploring reality’, as Einstein was seeking in his Mt. Analogue, the Unified Theory of the Universe.

P.S.:

Since writing the above, I chanced to read Tu Wei-ming’s writing on ‘Mao as A Source of Social Suffering in China.’ Perhaps no man in this century symbolised the destruction of the traditional and sacred as did Mao. ‘In Mao’s mind’, writes Tu, ‘this message of violent struggle was encoded in nature as well’, in contrast to Confucius, and all the earlier Asian aesthetics of harmony in mountains. The Japanese said ‘Wa’ (harmony) was all.

With his mountain symbolism, Mao also represented the harsh, desacrilisation of the earlier images of mountains, with the spirit of conquest which the Western world brought to mountaineering, the notion of a ‘battle’ and in the same age. In the caves of Yenan, after the Long March, Mao wrote :

Mountains!
Like great waves surging in a crashing sea,
Like a thousand stallions
In full gallop in the heat of battle.

And then, in this spirit of war (remember Dhyrenfurth’s ‘It is war’ on Kangchenjunga), there is Mao’s demonic cleavage of Kunlun, a ravaging of a mountain range in poetic rage :

To Kunlun, now I say,
Neither all your height
Nor all your snow is needed
Could I but draw my sword o’er topping heaven
I’d cleave you in three;
One piece for Europe
One for America
One to keep in the East.

With the spirit of conquest, Mao was also the great flag-waver on mountains, imbued with nationalism and ideology.

High on the crest of Lin Pan Mountains

Our banners idly wave in the West Wind.

The flag symbolised physical ideological conquest in war; not the quiet triumph of the human spirit.

It is amazing how this man who first saw a map of the world only at the age of nineteen, could reveal ‘a grandiose self-image, verging on megalomania’, to quote Tu, to conquer that world. He, not the gods, stood on the desacrilised mountains with his ‘banners waving in the wind’. It symbolised the end of the sacred mountain in this century, even in Asia. Here was a conspicuous example of what happens when the sacred is lost or deliberately destroyed. It lead to ‘social suffering’ on a scale and, in a short time, hitherto unknown in even China’s turbulent history. At the same time, across the Eurasian land mass there was a Nazi conquering attitude to mountains, followed by unprecedented social suffering there too in the holocaust of six million Jews, and more millions in the same megalomanic worship of conquest. This seemed to be the ‘zeitgeist’, the harsh spirit of the age, carried into the mountains.

I deliberately put this into a postscript, not only because it came from later reading, but to differentiate more clearly the two ways of ‘speaking through the mountain’; that of the earlier sacred, and that of harsh chauvinist conquest. As we saw earlier, the world of ecological science is closer to the sacred, both life-sustaining. The world of nationalism and ideology is the diabolical opposite. How far has modern mountaineering seen this clear divide, in its quest for summits; a la Marco Pallis or Mao ?

SUMMARY

Reflections on the mountains as sacred.

 

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