During the Second World War, a few years after Yeats composed
"Meru", Rene Daumal, a French mystic and writer, attempted to construct a
cosmic axis for the modern world. Drawing on the symbolism of sacred peaks in
Eastern and Western traditions, his allegorical novel Mount Analogue posits the
existence of a supreme mountain "uniting Earth and Heaven" - a concrete symbol
of the way in which people may awake from the slumber of their usual state of
mind and ascend to a higher level of consiousness. Writing as a character in his
own book, Daumal decides that such a peak must have the following
characteristics:
"For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue, I concluded,
it's summit must be inaccessible, but it's base accessible to human beings as
nature has made them. It must be unique, and it must exist geographically. The
door to the invisible must be visible."
Having decided that the summits of the highest known mountains
lack the requisite inaccessibility and that mythic peaks like Meru lack the
necessary geographical reality, Daumal and a group of like-minded characters,
led by a professor of mountaineering named Pierre Sogol, determine that Mount
Analogue must exist on a huge island in the South Pacific, hidden by a
mysterious force field that bends light rays around the peak. They form an
expedition and set off to find and climb the mountain.
The nature of the peak and its ascent immediately bring to mind
comparisons with Dante's Purgatorio. The mountains in both works bear
allegorical names that make their symbolism explicit: Mount Analogue and Mount
Purgatory. Each rises on an island situated on the opposite side of the earth
from places well known to the reader: Paris in Mount Analogue and Jerusalem in
the Purgatorio. When Daumal and his party land at the foot of their mountain,
they find a Community of people similar to those who reside at the base of Mount
Purgatory - procrastinators and others who lack the motivation needed to
continue the Spiritual Quest. Like Mount Purgatory the climb of Mount Analogue
requires a profound act of repentance, a purgation of self-willed egotism. Sogol
finds the group's first peradam, a nearly invisible crystal needed as payment to
ascend the mountain, when he expresses these feelings of contrition and
humility:
I have brought you this far, and I have been your leader. Right
here I'll take off the cap of authority, which was a crown of thorns for the
person I remember myself to be. Far within me, where the memory of what I am is
still unclouded, a little child is waking up and making an old man's mask weep.
A little child looking for mother and father, looking with you for protection
and help - protection from his pleasures and his dreams, and help in order to
become what he is without imitating anyone.
Although Dante and Daumal share the basic idea of the mountain as
a symbol of the Spiritual path, they situate their allegories in the milieux of
their times, making for profound differences between the two works. Set in the
twentieth century, the French novel tells the story of a mountaineering
expedition - inconceivable in the early Renaissance - complete with ropes,
crampons, and Alpine guides, who represent Teachers who have attained higher
states of consciousness. Whereas Dante makes the ascent of Mount Purgatory an
expression of Christian doctrine regarding the path to Salvation in Heaven,
Daumal uses the climb of Mount Analogue to represent the Teaching he considers
most relevant for his time - the Ideas of the Russian mystic George Ivanavich
Gurdjieff concerning the way that people must follow to awaken from the
automatism of the human condition.
Dante reaches the Earthly paradise on top of Mount Purgatory, but
we never find out what lies on the summit of Mount Analogue, not what its
heights symbolize. Just at the point that his characters begin the actual ascent
of the mountain, Daumal died, leaving the novel to end in midsentence. His
failure to complete his work - and the odd fact that nobody has tried after him
- may say something about the nature of our times: that the modern world lacks a
unified view of the cosmos needed to create a universal allegory comparable to
Dante's, with its magnificent Vision of a cosmic axis linking the human realm to
a higher order of existence.
From Edwin Bernbaum's book: "Sacred Mountains of the
World"
Source: http://sangre-de-cristo.com/westcliffe/stories/
Omnium
Gatherum
