Magical, Mystical Mountains Provide A Heaven On Earth

Your plan to climb Tacoma (Mount Rainier) is all foolishness. No one can do it and live. A mighty chief dwells upon the summit in a lake of fire. He brooks no intruders . . . You make my heart sick when you talk of climbing Tacoma. You will perish if you try to climb Tacoma. You will perish and your people will blame me. Don't go! Don't go!

- Sluiskin, a guide from the Yakima Tribe, to Gen. Hazard Stevens and P.B. Van Trump, who were readying for the first ascent of Mount Rainier in 1870.

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For Sluiskin, the Yakima guide who begged Hazard Stevens and P.B. Van Trump not to climb Mount Rainier, ``the mountain'' was the place where powerful, dangerous spirits dwelled.

Theodore Winthrop, seeing Rainier in 1853, was struck with a much different sense: ``Only the thought of eternal peace arose from this heaven-upbearing monument like incense, and, overflowing, filled the world with deep and holy calm . . . And, studying the light and majesty of Tacoma, there passed from it and entered into my being, to swell there evermore by the side of many such, a thought and an image of solemn beauty, which I could thenceforth evoke whenever in the world I must have peace or die.''

How a mountain is regarded reveals much about a people's culture or religious tradition, believes Edwin Bernbaum, author of a carefully researched and photographically spectacular new book,

``Sacred Mountains of the World'' (Sierra Club Books, $50).

An Asian-studies scholar who works in the field of comparative religion and mythology, Bernbaum is also a climber and a philosopher. Like naturalist John Muir, Bernbaum has found his spiritual sustenance in mountains, and his book proves he's not alone.

From Mount Sinai and Mount Zion in the Middle East to Olympus in Greece, Fuji in Japan and the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona, Bernbaum writes, ``people have traditionally revered mountains as places of sacred power and spiritual atonement.''

One of the things he tried to do in his book was to show ``the incredible richness and diversity in the ways people regard mountains,'' Bernbaum says. ``Sacred mountains are marvelous windows into other people's ways of seeing the world and understanding other views of reality.''

Mountain climbers from mainly monotheistic Western cultures seldom see mountains as the residence of a deity, Bernbaum notes. Instead, they tend to see them as spiritual centers in a personal, rather than cosmic sense.

The isolated Qollahuaya people of northeastern Bolivia see Mount Kaata as very much like a human being. Rather than pray to it, they feed it, stuffing llama fat into holes and caves and pouring sacrificial blood onto earth shrines.

``The view of Mount Kaata as a human being underlies and unifies almost all aspects of Kaatan religious and social life,'' Bernbaum notes. Agricultural rituals, so important to these people in life, feed the body of Mount Kaata so that it would, in turn, nourish the corn and the llamas.

A culture's or religion's view of mountains reflects its central values, Bernbaum suggests: For the Jewish people, Mount Sinai is the awesome site where God appeared in clouds and thunder to give Moses the Torah, the laws and teachings of the faith; for the Japanese, Mount Fuji represents sublime beauty and spirit.

In India and Tibet, Mount Kailas represents the realm of the highest gods and the utmost attainments of spiritual meditation.

Symbolically speaking, mountains can metamorphose, Bernbaum notes. During the Middle Ages, the wilderness provoked horror in Europeans, and mountains were believed to be the haunted realms of demons.

But as the Enlightenment swept Europe, that view changed. The wildness of nature once feared became ``the manifestation of a divine reality infusing the world and resolving its contradictions,'' Bernbaum writes.

Some observers, attempting to find a single theme, have concluded that mountains represent a ``cosmic axis'' that stands at the center of the universe.

Bernbaum says the feelings mountains inspire transcend individual religions. ``You're talking about an experience of the sacred, which is an experience, first of all, of wonder and awe, which mountains naturally evoke.'' Mount Rainier is especially noteworthy, he says, with its size, often awesome cloud formations and the way it stands up from the surrounding landscape.

``And what that wonder and awe reveals is a sense of a deeper, more mysterious reality that makes life meaningful. That reality may be a deity, or it may be something that connects you to the world and makes the world meaningful. The sense of the sacred transcends any particular formulation in the religious tradition,'' Bernbaum notes. ``Einstein was experiencing it, feeling he was going deeper into the mystery of the universe.''

Bernbaum came to his fascination with mountains at an early age. When he was 2 or 3 years old, his parents, who were in the foreign service, moved to Ecuador.

``My earliest memories are of snow-capped peaks on the equator,'' says Bernbaum. Later, he moved to lower elevations, but found that snow occupied an important symbolic place for him.

``When it snows, the world becomes a magical place. I was enchanted by it; it's very mysterious. In a sense, it makes the world sacred,'' says Bernbaum. The problem was that he was living in the tropics, so in order to find the snow he loved, he had to look to the mountains.

As a teen-ager, he began climbing in Ecuador and became fascinated with a book, ``Annapurna'' by Maurice Herzog, in which the author recounts a mystical experience he had on approaching the summit of the Himalayan peak. ``He didn't see visions, but his whole perception of the world around him was transformed,'' Bernbaum said.

Later, Bernbaum joined the Peace Corps, went to Nepal, and there, had an experience that gave him a firsthand view of the power of mountains - from underneath an avalanche on that same peak.

Pinned underneath the cement-like snow and ice, he stopped trying to breathe, he recalls in the book, and a ``strange calm'' came over him. ``Letting myself drift into it, I began to die,'' he writes.

But then, Bernbaum, too, had what he considers now to be a mystical experience. ``Suddenly, my hand was in front of my face, and I had air to breathe. In one motion, without any direction from me, it had sliced through the snow and cleared a space.''

Convinced he was pinned beneath a giant block of ice, he again subsided into the deadly calm. ``As I ceased to struggle, my body, on its own, made an explosive wrench, and in one clean movement I popped free,'' he writes.

``All I know is the reason I got out of the avalanche is that something took over inside me,'' he recalls. ``To me the important thing is that something happened there, however I explain it. When I go back in my memory and think about it, I get insights from it. It transforms the way I see the world.''