Where heaven and earth meet

 

So I read somewhere that Madame Blavatsky visited Mount Shasta in California. Which I never heard before. Nor you, I imagine. Searching for “Blavatsky Mount Shasta” didn´t reveal any relevant information about this factoid (probably an urban legend), but instead I stumbled on a text titled “Spiritual Tourism and Frontier Esotericism at Mount Shasta, California” by Madeline Duntley, published in the International Journal for the Study of New Religions 5.2. (2014). The article is freely available on the web. It feels badly edited and somewhat “stream of consciousness”, as if the author has spent too much time with hippies at the location under discussion. Actually, she was at a nearby archive, the College of the Siskiyous (COS) Library!

Be that as it may, some interesting information can nevertheless be gleaned from this 28-page article. It seems Mount Shasta “always” played a spiritual, quasi-spiritual or proto-spiritual role for the White Euro-American settlers coming to California. Poets and painters extolled the majestic mountain in “cosmic” and spiritual terms. Its mineral springs drew both tourists and people “on retreat”. In language clearly drawn from the gold rush, people looked for “treasure” on the mountain, although presumably of a less tangible kind. An ascent to the top was often depicted in quasi-religious terms, including travails and suffering. The mountain was called an “altar” and those climbing it were “pilgrims”. Christian hymnals, religious magazines and a temperance flag were left at the summit. It´s not clear to me, however, if any of this was typical of Mount Shasta in particular, or simply another expression of nature or frontier romanticism in general. Weird factoid: the author refers to mountaineer tales as “ascension narratives”. Yes, as in ascent to the summit of a mountain. But note that Ascension is also what Jesus did after the resurrection, and what occultists strive for today…

Speaking of which: the first time somebody connected Mount Shasta to modern esotericism seems to have been in 1897, when one Duncan Cumming published the novel “A Change with the Seasons”, which features a Buddhist studying Theosophical lore. But the big splash – unsurprisingly – came in 1905 with Frederick Spencer Oliver´s “A Dweller on Two Planets”. I never read it, but I sure heard about it. Supposedly a channeled message from Phylos the Tibetan, the book seems to be broadly Theosophical in nature. It´s interesting to note that Oliver was a painter (perhaps a Symbolist?). He clearly inspired the next big splash, Guy Ballard´s 1930 supposed encounter with the Ascended Master named Saint Germain on Mount Shasta and the subsequent formation and proliferation of the so-called I AM Activity and its offshoots. During the hippie and New Age craze, the small town of Mount Shasta close to the actual mountain became the epicenter of a thriving subculture of spiritual seekers and finders. It still is. Many businesses affiliated with the local Chamber of Commerce are of an “alternative” character, and the CoC itself has chosen as its motto “Mount Shasta: Where Heaven and Earth meet”. The local college library has a large archive of books, periodicals and personal testimonies pertaining to this subculture.

The author believes that there are clear parallels in how modern American seekers look at Mount Shasta and how Buddhists see sacred mountains. She doesn´t say so, but I assume a Buddhist holy peak is an analogue to Mount Meru, the axis mundi at which various otherworldly beings dwell. In the same way, modern US occultists believe that there are secret cities, UFO bases and treasure caves inside Mount Shasta. (In one of Peter Mt Shasta´s books, I read about White Americans trying to live like Hindu sadhus in the forests of Mount Shasta, making the parallel to Tibet even more obvious, regardless of whether the stories are true or not.) However, there are also traces of American nationalism in the Mount Shasta-centered spirituality. Mount Shasta is said to be the last remaining portion of ancient Lemuria, which was older than Atlantis. Spiritual guidance and perhaps ascension can therefore take place from an American site, rather than from India or Tibet. Again, I can refer here to one of Peter Mt Shasta´s books, in which he meets his White Euro-American guru in the town of Mount Shasta after dizzying odysseys in India. (Irrelevant side point: Madeline Duntley at one point erroneously refers to lemurs as “marsupials”. They are prosimians.)

One peculiar trait of the Mount Shastan metaphysical subculture is that it seems to have certain “old fashioned” traits. The nationalist angle is one example. Another is the Christian ditto. The Saint Germain Foundation (the current iteration of Guy and Edna Ballard´s movement) apparently organizes an annual Jesus pageant in the town of Mount Shasta, called I AM COME. It centers on the Ascension of Christ from Mount Olivet (of course!) rather than the passion story. During the play, the actor starring Jesus “ascends” up a large tree. More modern aspects of the Mount Shasta experience include people looking for UFOs and (perhaps) being vindicated by seeing the curiously-shaped clouds hovering around the mountain. It´s actually somewhat fascinating to see this strange blend of Eastern and Western, old and new, coalesce around a dormant volcano in northern California…

With that, I leave you for now. Oh, and it seems HPB never visited Mount Shasta...