Three mountain dreams

On September 4, 1987 an eighty-three-year-old woman patient of mine told me the following dream that had recurred since she was about twelve years old.

I am climbing a mountain. The terrain is rough. It is very rocky. I choose to walk in the river by holding onto rocks. I have to hold my shoes above my head to keep them from getting wet. I never get to the top. I feel as if I give up, or I’m a coward.

I resolved to do some research about mountain religion and mountain mythology to help myself and the woman understand this dream.

A few days later I was told a dream of a ninety-eight-year-old patient, also a woman. In this dream she was on the top of a mountain with her favorite nurse from the hospital where she was living. When she awoke she told the dream to the nurse who repeated it to me.

I think we are together, but then I can’t find you and I think you are lost. I am all alone up there and I am very frightened.

At a party, on September 25 of the same year, an acquaintance, in her thirties, who was interested in dreams, told me the following dream and asked for an interpretation.

I’m going up a mountain. It’s like an amusement park, like Disneyland but in an outdoor, mountainous setting. We’re on a hike. The mountain has tunnels cut into it, and there are areas where you walk through the tunnels on the trail. There is a line of people going up this mountain, everybody going up at his or her own pace, not in a set line. Some pass you by; some are ahead, some behind. It’s like an exodus going up the mountain.

There comes a point where there is a tunnel but it goes up, and to get up this area you have to pull yourself by bars that stick outside like pegs. And to get to the next level I have to pull myself up, but I keep slipping back. I feel I don’t have enough strength. Finally I get through it, and a lot of other people have gotten ahead of me, because I had to struggle through that area.

Then I come out of this tunnel, and I’m at a lodge. There’s a desk almost like a registration desk, and I ask everyone, “Where does the trail go from here?” and they point over to this other door with an archway and stairs going up, but they say, “You can stay here for awhile.” I think to myself, “I’ll take a look around. This is kind of nice.” I know that a lot of people have gone up to the summit to see this wonderful, gorgeous, breath-taking view, and that’s why everyone is heading up the mountain.

I walk out of this room onto a patio area, and it is very pretty and pleasant, and people are sitting at tables like a patio restaurant area, and I’m looking around and thinking how lovely it is.

I’m thinking to myself I need to get on the trail and get to the top, but I sort of like it there, and I don’t know if I’ll stay there or go up to the top.

(When I came into the resort … I’m … straggling. A lot of people have made it up to the top. I’m the last, because I had trouble in that spot.)

Along the trailway my husband and others are ahead of me, but it’s now a stairway, not a mountain trail. (in this and the first dream above I bold to emphasize motifs that will become familiar as we move along)

Already having decided to do some work around the first dream, I now decided that there was enough reason to turn this work into a more serious project. I had been bogged down in three years of research on the general subject of the attitude towards dreams in native and ancient societies, and now it seemed like a relief to lay down this massive undertaking and begin on the circumscribed subject of mountain dreams.

Even so, the research for this book took about six months to complete, and what started as an article or, at most, a small book, has now expanded into a long volume, this in spite of the fact that I have omitted much of what I found and have controlled myself by not following many leads that promised to yield more “juicy” examples. Enough was enough and it came time to sort through and organize what I had found. After much, I will say, difficult work arranging the material, certain stages emerged from the chaos, Stages of Development or Stages of Sophistication of the mountain experience and of our understanding of it.

The reader may wonder what all this research has to do with the analysis of three more or less simple dreams, but I ask him or her to postpone asking this question. I must present my research on how mountains have been understood throughout history in order to embed these three (and other contemporary) dreams in a context. We will not return to dreams in any depth until the last chapter of this book, Chapter 14, “The Psychological Approach Applied to Mountain Dreams.” In that chapter we will analyze these three mountain dreams along with many others.

The fact is that I was not interested in beliefs about mountains that might be passed on from generation to generation until they were emptied of their original meaning (though these will be analyzed also in the chapters that follow). Rather, I seemed to be searching for accounts of dreams and visions (some readers may think it more accurate to say dreams and illusions or, even, dreams and hallucinations) that people had of or on mountains. It was this living experience, the magma of later cool and hardened beliefs, that intrigued me. In many cases, however, even in most cases, when a description that I found in a book could be certified as a genuine experience, was hard if not impossible to tell. To give the reader one example of this difficulty, please consider the following quote from Okazaki (1977) regarding the Thousand Buddhas Caves at Tun-huang Mountain, in northwestern China.

In A.D. 366 the monk Lo Tsun envisioned a thousand Buddhas appearing above the mountain peaks of Tun-huang and the site was marked by a religious sanctuary. In the succeeding centuries almost five hundred[!] cave temples were hewn out of the mountainside. (pp. 29-30)

The reader may confront the same problem that I face in deciding whether there really was a monk Lo Tsun who really saw “a thousand Buddhas appearing above the mountain peaks of Tun-huang,” and, if so, what was this experience actually like? He or she may also wonder if each of the five hundred cave temples was built in homage to the original experience of Lo Tsun or whether at least some of those who carved out these caves had their own experiences. These questions can be multiplied endlessly once you begin to think about all the possibilities.

There is no need to worry, however, about individual cases, because there are so many examples from so many times and places and cultures that the underlying mountain experience (and our understanding of it) does begin to unfold for the patient researcher. Not only does it unfold, but it sorts itself rather easily into types, and these types seem to organize themselves into an order of sophistication or order of development. It must be remembered that these are not Stages of Development of the physical mountain but, rather, Stages of Development of the mountain experience and of our understanding of it.

The eight stages of the development of the mountain experience and of our understanding of it

These Stages fall rather neatly into place as follows.

Stage 1: The mountain is a god (Chapter 1)

In this stage the mountain is experienced as a person or a god (and this experience is accepted at face value). I emphasize the word experienced. This is not a belief or a story but an actual experience.

Stage 2: The gods live on the mountain (Chapters 2-6)

Here the gods no longer are the mountains but are on the mountains. They are experienced and understood as living on (or in) the mountains. They own them, meet on them, stand or sit on them, and the like. They have tents on the mountains or houses or palaces or cities. At times it is said that the kingdom of the god or, in more modern terms, the country of the God is on a mountain.

Again I emphasize that I am not just making these descriptions up. They come out of what actual people have experienced. In the above quote, for example, Lo Tsun is said to have experienced “a thousand Buddhas” over the mountain peaks. We will return to Stage 2 in Chapter 2 (“The Gods Live on the Mountain”) and in Chapter 3 (“God’s Country is on the Mountain”). And the three Chapters of Part 2 (“Who are the Mountain Gods?”) are devoted to a study of the characteristics of these mountain gods.

Stage 3: Men on the mountain (Chapters 7-9)

It seems it is not enough that men “see” their gods on the mountains (and that they take their experiences as literally true). There is something that impels them to climb the mountains, to perform rituals, to build structures, and to leave offerings to the mountain gods. I might add here that I have found only one example from all my research of a woman who climbed a mountain alone and had an experience up there. This contrasts markedly with the modern dreams I have gathered where women, like men, are struggling, sometimes by themselves, up the mountain peaks.

Stage 4: The artificial mountain (Chapter 10)

At some point in the history of a people it may happen that circumstances force them to leave a mountain on which their god or gods have been experienced. Not only are the gods quite capable of “traveling” with them, but eventually they either come to rest on another mountain or on an artificial mountain made especially for them by the people who need them and believe in them.

Stage 5: The mountain in visions and dreams (Chapter 11)

It may come to a point when the people are forced to migrate again, or the artificial mountain, say a temple, is destroyed. In this case it seems that the gods travel again, in a sense, but this time they travel into the people, into their souls, into their psyches — into their dreams and visions.

These visionary mountains are not physical, and the people, in Stage 5, understand this. If they understood these mountains (with their gods) as something within the psyche, then the view would be psychological (or pre-psychological). However here, the mountains (and their gods), though they are not understood as physical, are taken as external to the psyche. Not being understood as physical, but still being understood as external — this means they are understood as existing in a meta-physical dimension or reality.

An example of this understanding, can, I think, be found in Revelation in the Christian New Testament. John is transported, in spirit, as it were, to a visionary mountain, and this mountain is conceived of as external to and independent of him though not of this earth.

Stage 6: The mythic mountain (Chapter 12)

It seems that we can extract from the data a sixth, still more abstract Stage. Here the mountain has become a content of a myth. It is no longer conceived of as a physical mountain or even as a visionary mountain. It is more abstract, more a thought than an image, even if the thought is an emotionally charged and magnetic one. It has become a public symbol that appears over and over again in the literature and art of a culture. From time to time an individual may be “transported” to this mountain, but the people of the culture do not require such dreams or visions to continue talking about and thinking about the mountain. The most striking example of this may be Mount Meru (Sumeru) as it appears in innumerable Eastern myths and religious stories. I will present examples from Stage 6 in Chapter 12, “Symbolic Mountains.”

Stage 7: The pre-psychological approach (Chapter 13)

Next we find a Stage in which the mountain experience is beginning to be approached psychologically. In this Stage, people begin to see the mountain experience, even the original one on the mountain, as a projection of something inner. The external mountain is seen in the more or less cold light of objective science, while all the excitement about it is analyzed as stemming from something inside people that is projected onto the mountain. The old questions of how to contact and influence the gods on the mountain is beginning to be replaced by the modern question of what the mountain experience means to and about the person who has it. At the very least, there is an analysis of the experience, qua experience, and of its place in a person’s life. In Stage 7 we find ourselves in an atmosphere consistent with the world of modern psychology.

An hundred percent psychological approach to the mountain experience has three parts:

1. The mountain will be taken as internal.
2. An attempt will be made to place the inner mountain in relation to the overall inner “journey” on which each person is embarked, and
3. An attempt will be made to ground the meaning of the mountain experience in the everyday, external life of the individual who had the experience.

In Chapter 13, “The Pre-Psychological Attitude,” examples are presented where the mountain in the mountain experience is understood as internal to the one who experienced it, but either 2) or 3) or both are absent from the analysis.

Stage 8: The psychological approach (Chapter 14)

In this Stage, the analyst approaches the mountain experience from all three of the angles just mentioned which means, to me, that we have entered the view point of contemporary psychology.

We will discuss and apply this approach in Chapter 14, “The Psychological Approach Applied to Mountain Dreams.”

Stage 8 seems to me to be new to our present age. I think of it as entering with the birth of modern psychology in 1900, the year of the publication of Sigmund Freud’s, The Interpretation of Dreams.

{Saying that Stage 8 is new is not to imply that it is the last stage there will ever be or that it is the best of the eight stages. At the same time, I think the psychological view, for all its faults, has advantages over the earlier stages. I will mention these advantages in an appropriate place.}

Comment on this idea of stages

As I said, these eight Stages seemed to “spring” out of the material that I was studying as if they were objectively true. It was not until I was well into the arranging of the material, stage by stage, that I began to connect my own experience on a mountain with the material I had gathered.

It may seem odd that, in all this time, in over six months of constant work on the mountain experience of others, it had never occurred to me to connect it to my own mountain experience. At no time did I forget that I had had an experience. It was just that it floated around in its own private world, as something important to me, but hopelessly personal, forever condemned to being left in silence, unshared and unshareable, covered over by my outward, social and work life, like the earth covered by an asphalt freeway.

The realization that I was not writing about a purely neutral subject in a totally neutral and objective way came as a shock. In fact I had been taking pride in undertaking a truly scientific investigation of what many would think of as a subjective subject. Now I realized that I was secretly involved in the project in a way that belied the objectivity of my approach as well as the altruism of my conscious and expressed motive of helping my patients understand their dreams.

At the same time, I felt an intellectual liberation. I felt that I could now compare the data I had collected with my own experiences and, in this way, not only make a step towards validating it first hand, but also help the reader understand the mountain experience more from the inside. This benefit was offset by the shock that I was now exposing to public view and interpretation and criticism, something I had consciously tried to keep hidden, but which, perhaps, nonetheless, I had secretly hoped someday to communicate.

The fact that it was not just “my” experience to be discussed, but an example of a type of experience, made it easier to push on in this direction.

It was not for another two or three months, when I was well into the second draft, that I realized something still deeper. When I was struggling with the question of the objectivity of the eight stages, I suddenly began to remember that the stages corresponded, at least in part, to the stages I went through in relation to my own mountain experience. The stages were, apparently, not something that I had objectively gleaned from the heap of material in front of me on my desk, carefully extracted from close to one hundred sources. Far from it. These stages that, as it were, “popped” into my mind and persisted there in spite of all my rational doubts, were none other than the stages of my own inner life. Whether these stages really exist in the material or are just the form of development of my own mind I cannot answer and leave to the reader to judge. I can say, however, that even after the awareness of the subjective origins of my analysis, the eight stages still seem to me to exist in the data I collected, even if I have had some confusion in the exact way they should be ordered and expressed.^[1]

It is relevant here to mention an even more interesting and confusing fact. Towards the end of the rough draft I decided to review my own dreams. I have tried, for many years, to write down, each morning, all the dreams that I can remember. Unfortunately for this research, my records are spotty. I have records for part of the year 1975, just before my trip to the mountains, and then I have the logs for 1983 to the present. Including the year 1975, and scattered more or less equally throughout all the records, there have been to this date (August 6, 1988) what seems to me the staggering number of 111 mountain (hill) dreams!

Whether or not it is common for people to have such a high percentage of mountain dreams I do not know. I have asked many people for their mountain dreams, since I have started this book, and I have carefully recorded the relevant dreams of my patients, with their kind permission. Most of the people I asked hardly remembered any of their dreams let alone their mountain dreams. A few people remembered a single mountain dream, and one patient had started having mountain dreams long before I met her, and they continued on throughout her work with me (see Chapter 14 for her dreams). Thus, though I do not know how rare or common mountain dreams are, I have a fair number of contemporary mountain dreams to present to the reader and to place side by side with historical mountain experiences.

My awareness of the importance of mountains in my inner life has led me to the psychological (and not just intellectual) question, apparently of some magnitude in my external life as well, “Why is there such a fascination, or if you prefer, obsession, with mountains?” Mountains seem to have appeared in my dreams even before I had my mountain experience at about the same rate as after it, though the data here is scanty. It seems as if there was something in me that pushed me to the mountains, gave me an experience, sent me home to act it out in various ways (Stages), and again wound up visible in me in the form of dreams. Further it seems that this something has been propelling me to write this book, along with my consciously explicit motives of helping my patients understand their dreams. What is this thing in me that urges me, forces me to write, blindly at first, perhaps more consciously now, and in spite of my inward decision to suppress it in the name of social adjustment? What does it want from me, and how can I give vent to it so that I might feel some relief from its pressure? It’s as if a voice in me wants to, no, needs to speak. Apparently I feel the need to empty myself of this voice, and this book is one of my ways or one of its ways of forcing me to express it.

{This means that there is an additional level of complexity in this book that may be of interest to some. In addition to being a study of the Mountain Archetype, it is also a study of how the underlying psychological makeup of a researcher can affect the choice of research topic and the way data is gathered, organized, and understood. I think anything the reader learns about this interaction from reading this book, he (or she) should be able to apply when reading any number of other research studies.}

The reality of the psyche

In ancient times or in native cultures, people having mountain experiences such as mine might have been understood as having been chosen by some mountain spirit or god to do its bidding. This description would have fit very well my subjective feeling, but it is decidedly at odds with our more modern way of looking at it. Our modern approach would be to say that there is something inside me that is motivating me. The trouble here is how to understand what it could be that is inside me. What inside could subjectively feel so important and, at the same time, be so sneaky and have what feels like a mind of its own?

For the modern psychological view to phenomenologically accommodate an experience such as mine, it must allow for a “personality” within that is more forceful than my conscious goal of suppressing it and that feels as compelling as an instinct. It may be well at this point to say a little about the word psychology.

This word comes from two Greek words psyche and logos. The Oxford New English Dictionary defines logos as speech or discourse or reasoning. Psychology would therefore be speech or discoursing or reasoning about the psyche.

But what is the psyche? Apparently the word psyche was used as early as Homer where it referred to a second, shadowy person within the body. This second or inner person or psyche was asleep when the body was awake and active, and awake and active when the body was asleep, i.e. in dreams. The psyche was the person who travelled in dreams as well as the figures and images of the dream experiences themselves. The psyche was also thought to survive the death of the body. It was what went to the world of Hades in a life after death. When the dead Hector appeared to his friend Achilles in a dream (Iliad, xxiii, 103f.), it was called psyche, and so we see that the figures of the psyche have a personality and a mission of their own. It is, therefore, very much within the ancient Greek way of speaking to say that a figure in the psyche is “compelling” me to write this book, and speaking or reasoning about this figure is doing psychology, that is, literally, speaking about the psyche. Equally, when we speak and reason about the dreams of my patients or the visionary experiences of a Lo Tsun, we are doing psychology, speaking and reasoning about the psyche.

The reality of the psyche is not a theory but a fact to anyone who has had a nightmare, even if the memory fades during the following busy day. We just do not know how much of our daily, conscious goals are “compelled” by unknown figures that remain unconscious.

To call the psyche Imagination is not to pass it off as insignificant or child’s play. Instead it is to elevate the Imagination to a critical and irreducible place in ourselves, deeply implicated in even our seemingly transparent actions. To deny this is foolhardy. I have seen many neuroses and even psychoses (of the paranoid type) develop in rational materialists who could not seem to conceive even the remotest possibility that certain experiences they underwent were completely within themselves and not objective facts. The experiences were so vivid that they assumed that they must be true externally and objectively. They were not aware that it is almost the opposite that is true: The more vivid and certain and dramatic a situation appears, the more likelihood that it is an inner experience, not objectively true in the outer world.

This brings us to one of the most important and confusing subjects in the whole field of depth psychology, Projection.

The projection of the psyche

I hate to use my own case as an example, but it is so clear that it is useful, and I have already started on this course and placed it before you. The question that intrigued me for a long time, and it is a modern question, is: Was the “magic” I experienced in the mountains the magic of the mountains or the magic of my own psyche?

For a long time I approached this problem as if it were a philosophical question (as per my training as a philosopher), and I constantly came away from the pondering with a feeling of pain, caught between the horns of a dilemma. Recently, however, it has come to seem to me more useful to see it as a practical question about the stages of life, and, therefore, as a question with an answer.

The question is very much like the problem of falling in love with the wrong woman (or man). When love first makes its appearance in a heart it will, almost inevitably, be projected all over the place. It is only by painful, and sometimes dangerous, trial and error that a person gradually comes to find that these love feelings are inside oneself and begins to be able to pick, more objectively, a woman (or a man) of high quality, worthy of ones maturer affections.

It seems that the same Stages can be found in the mountain experience. When the mountain archetype is first awakened in the psyche, it is projected onto a real mountain, and the experiences have a firecracker quality not unlike a puppy love. Gradually, however, circumstances may force a person into realizing that the important mountain is within the psyche and that the place of ones home may be chosen more objectively than by giving up everything and rushing towards the firecracker. Here, too, painful trial and error plays its inevitable role.

With the mountain experience, as with first love, the initial projection is a total and compelling experience, always, accompanied by intense emotions and an irresistible fascination; it is immediate and unconscious, not planned or thought out; it seems real or true; and it is very difficult to catch it in oneself while it is happening, though it is peculiarly easy to see it in others while it is happening to them. Presumably it is an instinct and impossible to destroy without destroying life itself. Yet, at the same time, if it is not understood and controlled to some extent, it can equally well lead to self-destruction or the destruction of others (the 1930 Marlene Dietrich film, The Blue Angel, comes to mind, though, in this movie, the issue is projection onto a woman, not a mountain). In general, projection is not something that can be argued away. If we are lucky enough to handle the charm of its initial effects without being destroyed, we gradually grow immune to it even if we always can feel its pull. Painful experience is the antidote to projection, though some people, perhaps the truly blessed, seem to live their whole lives in benighted ignorance, never having been torn away from their corner of the universe and forced to see it from a different angle.

The mountain light:  An example of projection

One example of the mountain light experience can be found in the writings of John Muir on the Sierras.

When I first enjoyed [the] superb view, one glowing April day, from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, the Central Valley, but little trampled or plowed as yet, was one furred, rich sheet of golden compositae, and the luminous wall of the mountains shone in all its glory. Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years spent in the heart of it, rejoicing and wondering, bathing in its glorious floods of light, seeing the sunbursts of morning among the icy peaks, the noonday radiance on the trees and rocks and snow, the flush of the alpenglow, and a thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray, it still seems to me above all others the Range of Light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain-chains I have ever seen. (1894/1977, pp. 2-3)

The reader will please note the uses of the words glorious [glory] and divine which both have a religious connotation.

Another example is from around the world, from a Buddhist abbot, Sheng Ch’in, of a monastery on Mount Omei (= Mount Emei) in China who, we are told, went into hermitage on the mountain in order to experience the renowned lighting effects. After spending a few summers and winters on the mountains, he had his experience.

Suddenly, I became aware that the Bodhisattva (Samantabhadra) had bequeathed his manifestation to this human world, displaying many varieties of visible appearances. … The singular wonder is that every time, when winds and clouds change suddenly and fantastically, there appears unexpectedly a huge, round, bright circle, floating across the mountain, full of strange colors, gathering into splendor. At the moment, peaks, ridges, grass, and trees are all fresh, gleaming, and magnificent. … Certainly, this is the universally-shining Buddha’s Glory. (Evans-Wentz, 1981, p. 42)

Please note again the use of the word glory, this time identified with an attribute of Buddha (the divine, not the human Buddha). (I do not know the Chinese word translated by glory.)

The reader may ask how can an objective phenomenon like the light effects on a mountain be something within the psyche of an individual man? Even more so, because we know that, for example on Mount Emei, thousands of pilgrims came to this mountain every year just to experience this same effect. How could they all be misled? How could they all be projecting?

But the fact of a large number of persons having a convincing experience does not in any way diminish the possibility of it being a projection, in this case a mass projection. It is not the seeing of light that is a projection; it is the experience of divinity, glory, or Buddha’s Glory, that makes us suspect a projection and makes us realize that the psyche is at work. This does not make the, for example, Buddha’s Glory, any less real, but it does imply that it is in the psyche of the Buddhists who experience it.^[2]

For some reason, the idea that projection is involved in the mountain light experience is very hard to accept, especially for those who have spent time in the mountains and experienced it themselves. The mountains are glorious! They are divine!

But, projection is always hard to see in oneself. It is persistent and unconscious, and it seems real, or it wouldn’t be projection. It is only later that it can be recognized for what it was. This is as true in our relations with mountains, as it is true in our relations with other people. {The American actress Marilyn Monroe was dazzling to many American men including the then President of the United States. Sparkling mountains can dazzle us also. There is something real here, but what? And what is the difference between surface reality and deeper reality? It is relevant that old men and young men may have different perspectives on these matters.}

Also it is particularly hard to see projection in examples that come from our own religious ambience. For example, it is not that far of a leap from Mount Emei to Mount Horeb where Moses had an unusual light experience while he was tending sheep. We are told that Moses

came to Horeb, the mountain of God. An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. He gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. … God called to him out of the bush: “Moses! Moses!” …  Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. (Exodus 3:1-6) (Tanakh, 1988 — all biblical quotes in this book are from this translation unless noted)

The rest of Exodus 3 and 4 is filled with the long conversation Moses had with the god or the angel of the god who called him from out of the flaming bush on the mountain.

Later, on Mount Sinai “the Presence of the Lord appeared in the sight of the Israelites as a consuming fire on the top of the mountain.” (Exodus 24:17)^[3]

Understanding and interpreting these experiences is not an easy job, but one thing seems certain: In all these examples — from Muir, Sheng Ch’in, Moses, and the Israelites — there were seemingly genuine experiences where some sort of mountain light was seen as glorious or divine or as an angel or even as god himself.

Stage 2 is missing in the literature of mountain light (because it would not even make sense to say that god lived “on” the light, whereas it makes sense to say that god lived on a mountain), but Stage 3 is present. In Stage 3, men don’t just look from a distance or experience passively, but go onto the mountain and perform rituals, leave offerings, and build structures.

With respect to the light, I will give only one example here. In his discussion of Hittite temples and high places Kurt Bittel (1981) quotes from an early Hittite text translated by Albrecht Goetze: “When the king goes to the mountain to raise the great sun, he performs various charms and incantations” (p.66). Other examples will be given in Chapter 8, “Why they Went and Why we Continue to Go.”

In Stage 4 of the development, we would expect to see an artificial light (corresponding to the artificial, man-made mountain). One example here should suffice also, the example of the menorahs (lampstands) in the Jewish temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. The detailed instructions for the construction of the original menorah was given in Exodus 25:31-40 and 37:17-24.^[4] The Lord on Mount Sinai commanded this light to be kindled from “clear oil of beaten olives” (Leviticus 24:2) and was to be lit on the table in the Tabernacle “on the first day of the first month” (Exodus 40:2-3) and at other times kept burning “from evening to morning before the Lord regularly” (Leviticus 24:3). Whether this light was meant to stand for the “consuming fire” on Mount Sinai is not possible to determine, but we may guess that this was so: The traveling tabernacle stood for Mount Sinai; the light of the menorah stood for the “consuming fire on the top of the mountain.” And when a devout Jewish mother lights the menorah, her whole family may feel they are surrounded by a divine glow.

In any case, by the time of Solomon, (or, at least, by the time the biblical books about Solomon were written) as Meyers points out (p. 35), there was only one reference to the menorah and, now in the plural rather than in the singular. The only mention of the menorah in the Book of Kings is where we are told that Solomon made the furnishings of the temple, including “the lamp stands — five on the right side and five on the left — in front of the Shrine, of solid gold” (1Kings 7:49).

We may theorize: The Stage 1 god of the natural fire on Mount Sinai, has come down, in Stage 4, and has traveled with the Jews, according to his own decree, eventually stopping in Solomon’s temple on Mount Zion in the form of a man-made, artificially lit fire on a lampstand. This fire has further travelled, following the final destruction of the temple in 70 CE, into the home of every practicing Jew who lights a menorah.

In Stage 5, the light that was seen on the mountain is no longer taken as physical. I will give two examples — one from Jewish tradition and one from the early Christian. The first is from The Zohar where we find this passage concerning the “hidden” light.

And God said: “Let there be light!” This first light god made before making the sun and stars. God showed it to David, who burst into song. This was the light Moses saw on Sinai! At the creation, the universe from end to end radiated light — but it was withdrawn … and now it is stored away for the righteous, until all the worlds will be in harmony again and all will be united and whole. But until this future world is established, this light, coming out of darkness and formed by the Most Secret, is hidden: “Light is sown for the righteous” (Psalm 97.11). (quoted in … The New Union Prayer Book …, Stern, 1978, p. 4)

The second example is from Revelation where the author says he was transported in spirit to a high mountain where he witnessed “the holy city of Jerusalem [which is on a Mount Zion] coming down from God in heaven” (Revelation 21:10).

But I didn’t see any temple in it, because the Lord God, the Almighty, and the Lamb [Christ] are its temple. And the city doesn’t need any sun or moon to give it light, because God’s glory is its light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. (Revelation 21:22-4) (The four translations New Testament …, 1971, Beck translation)

It will be remembered that the author says he saw the city with its light in spirit which probably did not mean to him an inner city but (what we would call) a metaphysical one.

By medieval times the hidden (or inner) light was seen as a definite phenomenon over and against the natural lights of the sun and moon. In other words it had become a common symbol that one could speak of even if one had never experienced it oneself. The hidden light had become a public symbol, almost a mythological motif. Thus we have arrived at the Stage 6 development.

Next, we find that some men seem to have been aware that even the original Stage 1 mountain light experiences were internal, in more modern terms, a projection. In another place, the author of The Zohar says that the burning bush was in the “region of holiness” (Sperling, Simon, & Levertoff, n.d., p. 217, Jethro (Exodus) 69b). The region of holiness may have been the author’s name for the psyche. If this is true, the author of The Zohar is speaking from Stage 7, with the psychological or pre-psychological attitude.

One of the earliest Kabbalists speaks even more clearly from this point of view.

Indeed Moses received the Torah [the Five Books of Moses in the Old Testament] at Sinai and gave it over to those who sought the kiss, and this is a great secret; there is no place in the entire Torah which arouses the soul to its initial thought like this. And this is the secret of the seekers of the kiss — that they may be cleansed of the punishment of Mount Sinai and receive the known cause on Mt. Gerizim, upon which dwells the created light, which is holy to God; … — that place which is the sanctuary of the soul with the intellect. (from one of Abraham Abulafia’s disciples, the author of Sefer ha-Malmad, quoted in Idel {1988, p. 183}) (my bold)

The contemporary psychological approach, Stage 8, sees the mountain light as inner but also tries to place it in the context of the life of the person who experienced it.

A fragment of a dream of mine contains mountain lights. Since it is a dream there is no question, to the psychological mind, that the light is an inner light. In the dream I am taking the comedian, Woody Allen, down a path and into nature. How I see the overall dream in the context of my life I will discuss in Chapter 14. One of the questions from the psychological point of view is, “What is the meaning for the dreamer of the flashes of lightening?”

We walk into the open desert off the end of [a] path. It’s night. We look up at the mountains and see lightning flashing between the peaks. It keeps up, more and more, and then one flashes out towards us. And then one goes up into the sky and spins more and more into a circle of lightning that speaks and says it’s from outer space and it has a message for us here on earth. It is especially for Woody Allen. He is impressed and I am too. I have never seen anything like it. It is going to tell how god made everything. But to do this it has [they have] to come down to earth. They have to take human form and they do. They stream down and become ordinary people in a big mobile home where they are learning our customs and preparing for their show. I am helping them. They are trying on their clothes. I hear a place on the floor where it creaks. I get nervous it will blow the whole thing. But they say it is O.K., because they have to be human. (12-22-1985)

The radicalness of the views of Stage 7 and Stage 8 can be summed up in one sentence: The god who at one time was seen as existing outside a person amidst the light on a mountain is now viewed as existing within a man in the “sanctuary of the soul” or the Intellect or the psyche. In short, the god and his light are in us.

From the psychological view, what has compelled me to write this book is not an outer spirit or a god but a spirit or god nonetheless — the spirit or god within my own psyche with whom I can wrestle but whom, apparently, I cannot suppress. And the glorious and divine light exists, but in us as an experience, perhaps as an uplifting experience — maybe as a flash in the intellect or as a seemingly outside glimpse of our individual and collective life situations.

So far we have left out the question of just what is the god inside? Can it be explained further or is it a brute fact, given to us by nature, that pushes us, commands us, buffets us around, in spite of our conscious intentions? There seems to be a voice within, quite capable of holding a long conversation with us, that knows more than we do, or, at least, thinks it does.

Phenomenologically it is accurate to call it god; psychologically we must add that this god is within. But it is important to recognize that this god within is experienced as an alien force that is capable of disrupting our plans. It is not something we can brag about or identify with. It is not us. It is in us, presumably in everyone, but it is not something anyone can take pride in. To believe that I am the god within or that I can dominate it is just as dangerous psychologically as believing that I am the god without or can dominate Him is dangerous theologically (and psychologically). Psychologically it leads to what Jung called a dangerous inflation.

All this is to say that the psyche is Autonomous, and not under our control even if we can influence it.

The autonomy of the psyche

Even if we admit the reality and the importance of the psyche, our intellectual troubles are not over. First of all it is very important to understand that the psyche is not a mere shadow of waking consciousness nor is it a mere construct of the will. To use Jung’s word, the psyche is autonomous. There are some today who brag that they can control their dreams, but, even if this is true, no one claims they choose all the images that come them in their dreams. It seems to me that the world of the dream, and, more generally, the world of the psyche is just about as controllable or uncontrollable as the waking world.

On the other side, though the outer world has some influence on our dreams, it is very hard to point to a single dream that is completely determined by the events of the day. To give one example, we may wonder about a man who eats Chinese food for dinner and then dreams of a Chinese emperor that night. It might seem obvious that the dream came because he ate at a Chinese restaurant, but this is not as clear as we might think. Waking experience is itself “contaminated” with psyche. The man may already have been day-dreaming while at the restaurant, and his going to the restaurant in the first place was possibly a living out of the same projection or fantasy that led to the dream. The dream may be a continuation of his waking experience-dream that uses the Chinese restaurant as a stimulus to further imaginings.

And second, even if a dream is stimulated by a physical event, the connection seems tenuous. The actual forms of the figures that appear in the dream are specific, personal, and idiosyncratic even if, generally, they can be said to be in the same ball-park as the stimulus. Chinese food may be Chinese; it is not a Chinese emperor. So at least one important factor of the dream, the emperor could not have been a copy of the restaurant experience. The last emperor of China abdicated in February, 1912. The dream brings up its own image. Even more, all the details of the emperor’s clothing, manner, activities, down to the smallest detail of his vocal intonations or slight movements can, usually, in no way be found in the physical event or events that are said to stimulate the dream.

It is this creative factor in the psyche that interests us, this addition that is woven in by the dream. The dream seems to be “its own man.” It “listens” to outside reality and all the events of the day and uses them but makes up its own mind. It uses them to weave its own fabric with its own designs. Whatever we come to call it, there seems to be an independent factor in the creation of dreams. The dream is not a copy of physical stimuli nor is it the conclusion of a syllogism whose premises are our previous experiences.

Equally, the dream is independent of our will. The dream is in large part something that we do not create. Dreams sometimes even seem to come on us against our will and in spite of our best intentions. We can find no cause in ourselves or in our environment. They are autonomous.

The reason I bring this idea up at all is that over and over in the research I came across statements like this: “The fact that people believed that the rain god lived on the mountain can be explained by the fact that rain clouds form on the mountain tops.” It seems to me, that in all such rationalistic explanations (to use Jung’s word), the autonomous factor is left out. In fact, however, insofar as a person had a real, dream-like or visionary experience of the psyche, where they “saw” or experienced the god of rain and did not just think him up or theorize him, then we are confronted with an autonomous experience that is obviously connected to the rain clouds on the mountain but is in no way explained by them.

That there really are such experiences, even in modern times, can be understood from the following account of what followed “a serious mountaineering accident.”

After the catastrophe two of the climbers had the collective vision, in broad daylight, of a little hooded man who scrambled out of an inaccessible crevasse in the ice face and passed across the glacier, creating a regular panic in the two beholders. (Jung, 1969, Paragraph 408, p. 223)

Combining the ideas of the reality, the autonomy, and the projection of the psyche

{These three ideas: the Reality of the psyche, the Autonomy of the psyche, and the Projection of the psyche, are, to my mind, of almost astounding practical significance. For now though, I want to play devil’s advocate and pose a skeptical question: If the inner gods of the inner mountain are both real and independent of the will (in the psychological view), aren’t they metaphysical and not psychological objects? To put this another way, “If, during a state of mental quietude and tranquility, I should be “transported” to a real and independent divine inner mountain and mountain god, why not say that I was transported to a visionary (metaphysical) mountain and god and not just an inner, psychological one? 

I think there is a difference and that it is important and that it embodies the advantage the psychological approach has over its predecessors. To my mind, the advantage is that the psychological approach is a partial antidote to fanaticism. It does not deny the reality and importance and autonomy of the religious experience, but it makes it more difficult to project it and to believe in it and to kill or to die for a mountain no matter how divine it seems. Once I realize my mountain experience is more about me than about a physical mountain, I am less likely to be willing to fight over that physical mountain. And the same goes for metaphysical mountains. If I think the mountain god of my vision is independent of me, in a metaphysical sense, then I am likely to try to convince (or force) others to pay homage to this god — more than if I think of the god as autonomous and real, but inner.}

Archetypes

In the discussion of the mountain lights the reader may have been impressed by the pervasiveness of the idea of “divine” or “glorious” lights. The reader may even have had such an experience of a glorious light on or off a mountain. It is hard to account for the experience or explain it, but naming it is easy. In the study of folk-lore such a theme or pattern is called a motif; in biology it could be called a behavior pattern or an instinct; and in the study of the psyche it has been called an archetype. Jung said that an archetype is the appearance of an instinct in the psyche. It is apparently innate and present as a potential image within the psyche of every human. It is charged with a lot of energy (emotion). It is a mysterium fascinosum (using a term introduced into the study of religion by Rudolf Otto). It is impossible to destroy even though it can be modified and “civilized” by human consciousness.

What is an archetype?

{To discuss this topic fully we would have to abandon our topic and fill up another book or two with our thoughts and theories and speculations. It is, for our purposes, best to take a minimalist approach and to think of an archetype as a pattern of thought. The existence of the pattern is established by observing motifs in myths and dreams and the like and by categorizing them and by running statistical analyses on them. Statistical analysis is beyond the scope of of this work and of our abilities, but someone who wanted to could do a validation study of our results. Our approach is similar to other observational approaches that we find in sciences such as Biology. It differs in subject matter.

In this book we will avoid the temptation to postulate or even discuss whether archetypes are things. Someone could argue that they stand somehow behind the patterns we find, that they are classes of mental objects, one step up in abstraction above the mental objects themselves. Whether or not this is true is a metaphysical question for philosophers that is not, it seems to me, immediately relevant to our psychological study.

Another question that can be (and has been) raised is about the so-called diffusion of ideas. Many have argued that there are no built-in patterns in our minds. Jung thought that the patterns we find are deeply, perhaps biologically and genetically based in each of us, but it has been argued that we do not need to assume this to explain the patterns we find. It is more likely, it is argued, that each archetypal idea started somewhere, at some point in historical time and in some particular human being and that it spread from person to person in the way that any idea can spread. Alternatively, given the contemporary idea that the human species started thousands of years ago in Africa and then migrated around the world — perhaps so-called archetypal ideas arouse thousands of years ago, before humans spread out over the world, and, perhaps, these ideas were taken with them. This could explain why an ancient Israelite and a Navajo Indian might have the same attitude towards mountains.

Like the question about the independent reality of archetypes, this is an interesting topic, but it is beyond the scope of this book. What is important to us is the fact to which all might agree: that there are patterns of thought, feeling, and imagination that we can document and categorize.

Finally, it is important to recognize that the concept of archetype is relative, at least as far as the mountain archetype goes: What we see as an elevation is relative to the environment from which we view it. A hill in a desert, Mount Arafat, for example, with an elevation of 230 feet can affect an Arabian Moslem just as powerfully as the massive Mount Kailash affects a Tibetan Buddhist. In what follows, we will see that the same mountain archetype is projected onto hills and onto the highest mountains and onto every natural elevation in between. The critical point seems to be that there is an elevation relative to where we are standing. Mount Kailash in Tibet has an elevation of 21,778 feet. It is considered by Hindu believers to be the house of the god Shiva. Arunachala Hill in India has an elevation of 561 feet, and Sri Ramana Maharshi, the Hindu holy man, said this mountain is not just a home of Shiva like Mount Kailash, but Shiva himself.

One important question for us is whether archetypes can change. It will be argued that the Mountain Archetype, at least under that name, seems to be morphing because of factors in the modern age that we will be discussing. For our purposes, we will assume the archetypal content has not disappeared but that it has been and will be projected less and less onto mountains and more and more onto something else. This fact, if it is a fact, can lead to philosophical discussion about the nature of archetypes, but we do not need to pursue this topic to reach the goals we have set ourselves in this book.}

The archetypes and the unconscious

{It is an assumption of this book that there is a difference between the Unconscious and Consciousness. The problem is, “What does this mean?” Suffice it to say that there are two ways of experiencing anything: One way is from the unconscious and the other is from consciousness. A woman can appear to a man who is in a certain unconscious state as a dazzling goddess. In another mood — maybe even a moment later — she will seem ordinary. Then, just as suddenly, she may seem transformed into a devil, a Jezebel. Seeing the woman as a goddess or as a devil, is to see her from within the unconscious. This is how I am using the term. Seeing her as a regular human among other humans is to see her from the rational, conscious mind, as a number, as an object with qualities, as a mammal among mammals, and so on. When we experience something from the unconscious, we may be aware we are in a non-normal state. We may feel we have entered another reality and that what we are experiencing is something magical. It is only later, when we “wake up,” that we look back and see what we were in as an unconscious state similar to a dream.

Rudolph Otto called experiences such as these numinous. It is possible to have a numinous experience of a bar of soap or a bubble or a woman or man or a cloud or a mountain. And the same bar of soap or woman or man or cloud or mountain can be experienced in a numinous manner or in an ordinary way by different people or by the same person at different times. We can say that the numinous way of seeing things is a religious way as opposed to the secular way most of us usually experience things.

Most of us can’t choose to see things in a numinous way. Many people pay a lot of money and travel to all ends of the world or risk taking dangerous drugs to experience things in a sacred manner, in a numinous manner. This state is desirable to many and sought after. At the same, it can be dangerous. It can lead to madness with consequences for self and others. 

Some things in this world seem to be able, better than others, to stimulate the experience of the numinous. There are certain men and women who make a living being such stimuli. And some mountains seem to be more susceptible than others to being attractive in this way. But any woman can seem a goddess to some man; any man can seem a prince to some woman; and any mountain can show a divine aspect to someone at some time.

In any case, mountains, the subject of this study, can be experienced in both ways, as numinous or as just ordinary (even if big) things. The Mountain Archetype will be understood in an archetypal manner only by those who have had a numinous mountain experience or who are capable of understanding, second hand, the numinous mountain experiences of others.

It is probable to me, though I can not present much evidence to this effect, that the mountain archetype remains as an unconscious factor in the mind of people who have never had a numinous experience of a mountain. A mountain climber, for example, may never have had a “magical” experience on a mountain and may see himself as climbing mountains to set records or to make a name for himself or for his health or to get away from work, but it might be that, unconsciously, he is under the sway of the mountain archetype, of the mountain and its gods. As discussed at the beginning of this Introduction, the mountain archetype seems to have had a huge influence on the writing of this book, though this influence was largely unconscious.

This can explain part of the attraction this man has to mountains, his “obsession” with them, and it can help explain why certain mountains are more appealing to him than others.

Regarding this last point: From the point of view of the unconscious, mountains have personalities even if this sounds silly to the conscious, rational mind. This is more than to say that mountains have different physical characteristics and that no two are the same. Mountains are, to the unconscious, among other things, people, and, just as with two legged people, we have relationships with mountains and prefer some to others. 

For example, Mount Fuji in Japan (about 60 miles from Tokyo) is an active volcano whose last eruption was in 1707.

It is also a symbol of Japan, a goal of religious pilgrimages, an inspiration for poets and artists (such as Hokusai and Hiroshige), and it is on the World Heritage List of Cultural Sites.

At the same time it is called, Fuji-san which means, roughly, Mr. Fuji or, perhaps more accurately because more respectfully, Sir Fuji. In order to pacify it, “the Imperial Court awarded it court rank and venerated it as Sengen Ōkami [a Shinto goddess] in the early Heian period [794-1195 CE].”^[5] So, along with everything else, the mountain also has a position, along with human beings, in the government and is, at the same time, a Goddess.

Continuing with the idea that mountains have individual personalities and even are persons, there is a camera on the holy hill (or mountain) in India called Arunachala. This camera takes a photo every minute, and, on the website you can watch the mountain and get to know its moods, as it were.^[6] This is one of the greatest of the contemporary public homages to a mountain that I have found in my researches.

The personal, individual nature of each archetypal experience is one factor that contributes to the difficulty we have identifying an archetypal experience while we are in one. We can study the Mountain Archetype, for example, and learn all its facets, but, if we have an archetypal experience of or on a mountain, it will be unique and personal (even as it embodies the general). We have to step back from and out of the experience to see its general features and to see how it is typical. While in it we feel we and it are special and unique which is true to some extent, but only to some extent. Later we realize that, while we were under the “spell” of the experience, we were moving blindly and by instinct as one in a crowd. What we felt as separating us and making us special, is what made us typical and part of the human herd around us. We are unconsciously part of and participating in what Jung called the collective unconscious.}

The mountain archetype

{I will remind the reader that the author, as researcher, has observed and tried to document a pattern, an archetype, he found in his scanning of the world’s religions and myths and in the dreams of his patients and in his own dreams. In all such studies the subjective element can seep in. The reader will have to decide if the patterns presented in the following chapters are objective or illusory.}

In working on the subject of mountains one is struck by the large number of archetypes that are projected onto mountains — It is as if the mountain archetype is a complex archetype made up of numerous others. We have already looked at one piece of this complex — light. Connected to light is the archetype of the sun. Then there is water, life, creation, immortality, the Garden of Eden, plant-life, animals, heaven and hell, gods and demons and giants, the land of the dead, the center of the universe, and other archetypes. All these themes appear in relation to mountains, but many of them can also be found in relation to other archetypes (for example the ocean). They are like threads of various colors woven into different designs in different cloths. They are like the waves of the ocean intermixing in a complexity that has only recently come under scientific scrutiny.

Dreams of mountains are one piece of this elaborate structure. Written down dreams, as autonomous products of the unconscious psyche, are examples of the mountain literature and are, at the same time, explained by it. To understand mountain dreams we have to examine the religious beliefs and mythology that has grown around mountains. Even then we cannot hope to completely understand our subject. The psyche is separated from objective consciousness by a gap, as big a gap as between passivity and activity. Each state can be reflected in the other, but, to use Shakespeare’s word, they appear to be “co-supreme.”