Climbing Mount Analogue

The gateway to the invisible must be visible. This is a cardinal rule of the Western imagination, that helps to express a crucial difference between the Western way of accessing other worlds and Eastern approaches (especially as misrepresented by Westerners) that discount imagery and dreams.

The statement comes from René Daumal’s unfinished novel Mount Analogue A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, first published – posthumously – in 1952. The opening is choice. The narrator publishes a “literary fantasy” - in the Revue des Fossiles, describing a location he has imagined as if it is an actual place. He then receives the following message:

Monsieur,

I have read your article on Mount Analogue. Until now I thought I was the only person convinced of its existence. Today there are two of us, tomorrow there will be ten, perhaps more, and we can launch the expedition.

In his original article, the narrator explored the symbology of the mountain as the path between heaven and earth. The problem is that today, thanks to explorers and mountaineers, the mystic mountains of the past that had recognized addresses (Mount Olympus for example) have become “cow pastures”.

Where do we find the World Mountain? He suggested: "For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue, its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The gateway to the invisible must be visible."

The novel makes the first literary use of the strange word "peradam", one worth adding to our vocabulary because it exactly defines something that adventurers in consciousness will know: a peradam is an object that is revealed only to those who seek it.

"The Ascent of Mount Analogue" by Remedios Varo. Illustration from the 1952 edition of the novel.