Mount Shasta: Sacred Mountain and New Age Real Estate

The mountain ahead of you is fourteen thousand one hundred seventy-nine feet high. It is visible from about one hundred forty miles away on a clear day. It generates its own weather. And it means fundamentally different things to the different groups of people staring at it right now.

For the Wintu people, the mountain is not a destination. It is the center of creation, a living being whose springs are sacred, whose summit is not simply a geological feature but a presence in the world. The Wintu and their neighbors, the Shasta, Modoc, and Pit River peoples, have maintained ceremonial relationships with this mountain for thousands of years.

In eighteen eighty-six, a young man named Frederick Spencer Oliver, living in Siskiyou County, claimed he was receiving dictation from a higher being. The resulting manuscript, completed that year but not published until nineteen oh five as A Dweller on Two Planets, described tunnels beneath Mount Shasta, an advanced civilization of ancient Lemurians, and mystical energies from the summit. By nineteen thirty-one, the Rosicrucian Order had published a follow-up book. In nineteen thirty, a man named Guy Ballard claimed to have met a divine being on the mountain and founded the I AM Activity movement, which maintains an institutional presence in Mount Shasta City today.

The Lemurian mythology is not fringe decoration in the town below the mountain. It is the economic identity of the place. Bookstores, spiritual festivals, and healing retreats built around the legend have driven the local economy since the nineteen seventies.

The Wintu have objected, explicitly, to the appropriation of their mountain's imagery. Their relationship with it predates the novel by several thousand years.

Both realities exist simultaneously in the same town. The mountain is indifferent to both.