Of Myths and Mountains
New Age culture, the rejection of science and the inevitable rise of animism
What is it about mountains?
See the way that jagged peak rises like the knuckles of the Earth, a thing so much older and larger than you and I could ever hope to be. See how the mountain moves the world across it slopes, sculpting the landscape, how the land changes from desert valley to alpine forest to a place so high and inhospitable that life lays down before its peak and stops.
Is it simply the grandeur that inspires such awe? A scale beyond what we can fit inside ourselves, reminding us, like fields of open sky sprung up with stars, that there are vaster, longer cycles moving all around us? Is it that mountains mark borders, separating bioregions, crossing the boundary from Earth to the heavens, holding life in place? Is it the way they feed the rivers that in turn feed life, like fathers spilling their seed across the land?
Or is it the mystery? How their peaks are so often covered with a ring of clouds, a place we cannot see, beyond the line where rain and thunder fall upon the world?
In Greece, the gods lived on top of the mountain. In China, a series of eight mountains were the pillars that held up the sky. In Spain, the god Guayota was trapped inside a mountain. In…
