Mountains Analogous? The Academic Urban Legend of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Cult Film Adaptation of...

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Mountains Analogous?

The Academic Urban Legend of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Cult Film

Adaptation of René Daumal’s Esoteric Novel

David Pecotic

Independent Scholar

Abstract

The Chilean-French avant-garde filmmaker and self-styled spiritual teacher

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film The Holy Mountain (1973), is often referred to as a

‘surrealistic’ exploration of Western Esotericism, and was a pivotal cinematic

moment for what Christopher Partridge (2004; 2005) has termed ‘occulture’. It

is often claimed in secondary literature and informally online that the film is

based on the unfinished novel Mount Analogue (1952) by René Daumal, French

writer and follower of the esotericist G. I. Gurdjieff. The Holy Mountain is thus

a clear candidate for testing theories about the cultural production of‘Gurdjieffian’ film adaptations. A closer reading, however, shows that the two

texts share few ideological or even structural elements. In the wake of the film’s

reception and Jodorowsky’s growing cultural importance, this article maps the

congruence of the film to the novel by focusing on the role played by the

eponymous mountain as the only invariant symbol in both. Some of the

biographical contours of the two artists’ relationship to Gurdjieffian and wider

occultural esoteric discourses will also be traced to reveal the pre-critical and

largely self-referential narrative of the film adaptation in the secondary

literature as a species of academic urban legend-making.

Keywords

Alejandro Jodorowsky, René Daumal, G. I. Gurdjieff, film adaptation, occulture,

academic urban legends, cultural production theory, Surrealism, Le Grand Jeu



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Introduction

This article continues a research program (Pecotic 2012) to identify and examine

further examples of cultural production (Peterson and Anand 2004) through film

adaptations (Leitch 2003; 2008) via various networks of Gurdjieffians (Rawlinson1997: 291-313). One obvious choice of film, according to both informal online and in

the more formal treatments, is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s (1929) La Montaña Sagrada

or The Holy Mountain (1973), which has been widely understood as an adaptation of

Mount Analogue (1952), a novella by the French writer and follower of Gurdjieff,

René Daumal (1908-1944). Yet even a cursory comparison of the two sources shows

that there is little shared structure, let alone ideology, and that the few explicitly

Gurdjieffian elements in both are also very different. It seems that scholars, en

passant , have assumed the relationship between The Holy Mountain and Mount

Analogue, rather than checking the source materials.

This article begins the work of critically cataloguing the structural and

ideological differences between the book and the film. Yet, even the key differences

between them are sufficient to elude an exhaustive treatment. Instead, the focus will

be the symbol of the eponymous mountain, the only structural and ideological device

in common to both Daumal and Jodorowsky. The aim is not to discredit Jodorowsky

or even to disabuse Daumal’s reputation, as the ‘indefensibility of fidelity as a

criterion for the analysis of adaptations’ is a lynchpin of contemporary film adaptation

theory (Leitch 2003: 162). Rather, it is recognising that culture, whether esoteric,

artistic or academic is, at base, a human production and that this lies behind the

divergence of the primary and secondary texts in this study. With reference to the

secondary texts, a clue can be found in the concept of an ‘academic urban legend’,

derived from analogous cases where ‘despite the vagueness and complete lack of

documentation … [a] story has been picked up by numerous authors who have

redistributed it through journal articles and books’ (Rekdal 2014: 644). To do this this

article will document the claims made in the secondary literature, both informally

online primarily via Wikipedia and in the more formal treatments, and compare the

biographical details from Daumal and Jodorowsky’s artistic careers in what

Christopher Partridge has categorised as ‘occulture’, ‘those often hidden, rejected and

oppositional beliefs and practices associated with esotericism, theosophy, mysticism,

New Age, paganism, and a range of other subcultural beliefs and practices’, but

inseparable from the public domain, with a close connection to (popular) cultural



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products and a loosely organised governing community (Partridge 2004, 62-69).

Further it will collate and analyse the structural and ideological role the mountain

played in both texts, and conclude with some observations about how the association

between book and film could have arisen, and in what sense the latter could still beseen as an adaptation of the former if fidelity is not a criteria, thus pointing to areas

for further research.

A Survey of Secondary Texts

The adaptation claim made in the secondary literature regarding Mount Analogue and

The Holy Mountain consists of texts in two broad categories; informal entries in the

online encyclopaedia Wikipedia and formal published biographical or thematic

treatments. It is important to begin with the former as reliance on it, at least as a

starting point for research in a competing field, is a reality of contemporary scholarly

life and for the educated public. As Rekdal has it:

the digitization of knowledge has dramatically improved the tools we have for

enhancing the quality of research, including verification of references and

documentation … [but] has also created opportunities for new and remarkably

efficient academic shortcuts, highly attractive and tempting not just in milieus

characterized by increasing publication pressure and more concerned with quantity

than quality (2014: 651).

There are four Wikipedia entries of note, all of which appear within the top results of

a Google search of their respective terms. They are, in chronological order of the last

revision and followed by the claims made in full:

1) ‘Mount Analogue’: ‘The book was one of the sources of the cult-film The Holy

Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky’ (Wikipedia contributors 2013);

2) ‘René Daumal’: ‘The motion picture The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is

based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue’ (Wikipedia contributors 2014a);

3) ‘The Holy Mountain (1973 film)’: ‘In this film, much of Jodorowsky's visually

psychedelic story follows the metaphysical thrust of Mount Analogue. This is

revealed in such events as the climb to the alchemist, the assembly of individuals

with specific skills, the discovery of the mountain that unites Heaven and Earth “that

cannot not exist,” and symbolic challenges along the mountain ascent. Daumal died



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before finishing his allegorical novel, and Jodorowsky's improvised ending provides

a way of completing the work (both symbolically and otherwise)’ (Wikipedia

contributors 2014b); and

4)

‘Alejandro Jodorowsky’: ‘It has been suggested that The Holy Mountain may have

been inspired by René Daumal's surrealist novel, Mount Analogue’ (Wikipedia

contributors 2014c).

As can be seen, all support the claim, weakly in the first and last entry, most strongly

in the entry for the film itself, that the two cultural products are connected. The entry

for The Holy Mountain will prove the most problematic when the ideological

elements of the eponymous mountain are compared later in this article. However,

there are outstanding issues for all the entries, for example, the hyperlinks for the

claims made in each, linking only to one another, are part of an entirely self-

referential network. In addition, many claims are unattributed to external or reliable

sources.

This lack of attribution is not due to an absence of published treatments,

although few of these are available in English. There are a handful of chapters or

entries in larger thematic volumes about Daumal as founding member of the literary

and occult review Le Grand Jeu or ‘The Great Game’ (Faivre 2006) and as aGurdjieffian in the final French years of Gurdjieff’s life (Patterson 2000).

Kathleen Rosenblatt’s René Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystic Guide (1999)

remains the sole major work to focus exclusively on Daumal’s life as an integral

whole incorporating his literary oeuvre. Publications about Jodorowsky follow a

similar pattern: there is a chapter on the relationship of his films to Surrealism

(Richardson 2006), one on his inclusion in the definitive work on cult cinema

(Mathjis and Sexton 2011), and again only one study that has focused exclusively on

Jodorowsky, Ben Cobb’s Anarchy and Alchemy: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky

(2007).

Interestingly, while the formal published treatments about Daumal are all

silent about the adaptation claim, Rosenblatt is more categorical: for her Mount

Analogue can only be associated with ‘the teacher-disciple relationship of the esoteric

tradition and of the Gurdjieff Work in particular’ (Rosenblatt 1999: 209). Those about

Jodorowsky, however, broadly accept the adaptation claim: in Mathjis and Sexton, for

example, Holy Mountain is a ‘mystical adaptation of Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue



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to which Jodorowsky improvised a clever ending’ (2011: 14). Cobb is more

enthusiastic about the connection:

The book is the single most important source of ideas … For The Holy

Mountain, Jodorowsky took the book’s premise, its storyline, endless textual

details and even the way Daumal introduces his group members … The

crossovers between The Holy Mountain and Mount Analogue are so numerous

that a detailed account of the novel is necessary (2007:120).

Richardson demonstrates a more considered approach. While Richardson accedes to

the claim, having no familiarity with the source material, he regards it as only ‘very

loosely’ based on Mount Analogue, which he calls ‘an unfinished novel by … a

surrealist “dissident”’ (2006:140). His is a more critical approach based on a barely-

articulated suspicion regarding the ideological differences between the two artists. For

Richardson, the filmmaker was only to be believed to ‘the extent to which one wishes

to be seduced by the personal mythology Jodorowsky has constructed around himself’

(2006: 136). It is Richardson’s reluctance to accept the adaptation claim, based on his

intuitive understanding of an artist’s role in actively shaping occulture, that is

indicative of the fundamental problem with the formal published treatments, including

those of Rosenblatt and Cobb.

René Daumal and Alejandro Jodorowsky: Comparative Biographies

Like most biographers, while Rosenblatt and Cobb usefully compile a comprehensive

amount of primary source material about the subjects of their biographies (and both

devote a chapter each to Mount Analogue and The Holy Mountain respectively) their

work constitutes neither rigorous nor critical scholarship. Paying little regard to the

broader social contexts of their protagonists, both focus almost by way ofcompensation on the individuality of their subject to such an extent as to border on

the hagiographic. A comparison of the biographical details from Daumal and

Jodorowsky’s careers as artists actively engaged in the occulture will help overcome

this problem, as well as that of dependency upon these sources, especially if the focus

of this article is the Gurdjieffian cultural production of Mount Analogue and Holy

Mountain.

Daumal was born in Boulzicourt in the Ardennes. He attended secondary

school in nearby Rheims. As a teenager he became an award-winning poet of national



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note and joined ‘The Simplists’, Roger Vailland (1907-1965), Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

(1907-1943), and Robert Meyrat (1907-1997) on the basis of a shared passion for

‘pataphysics’ or ‘science of imaginary solutions’ of French symbolist and proto-

Surrealist/Absurdist Alfred Jarry (1873-1907). Referred to throughout his writings, pataphysics was a major and ongoing interest for Daumal (Rosenblatt 1999: 43, 54;

Daumal 2012). The Simplists constantly explored means of altering perception and

consciousness including, in Daumal’s case, near-death induced by inhalation of

carbon tetrachloride. Moving to Paris, they founded the literary and occult review Le

Grand Jeu. Defining themselves as the principal metaphysical competitors

to Surrealism, they pursued instead the theme of ‘métaphysique expérimentale’

(Faivre 2006: 438), the latter word meaning both ‘experimental’ and ‘experiential’

(Rosenblatt 1999:114). It was during this time that Daumal wrote about the ideas of

the French esotericist René Guenon (Quinn 2006) and began an influential life-long

correspondence with him (Rosenblatt 1999: 110). Only three issues of Le Grand Jou

were published from 1928 through 1930, and by end of 1932 membership quickly

dispersed (Faivre 2006: 440). Soon after Daumal attached himself to the senior

Gurdjieffian Alexandre de Salzmann (1874–1934) and, after his death, to his widow

Jeanne de Salzmann (1874–1934). From 1938, as a member of de Salzmann’s French

group, Daumal met regularly with Gurdjieff and attended readings from his books

Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson and Meetings with Remarkable Men (Shattuck,

viii-ix, in Daumal 1992; Rosenblatt 1999: 191). Daumal began Mount Analogue in

1939 after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He had drafted three chapters by mid-

1940 when, along with his Jewish wife Vera Milanova, he left Paris for rural France

to avoid the German occupation. Daumal only returned to the manuscript in 1943, and

died in 1944 in Paris, midway through a sentence in the fifth chapter (Shattuck, x, in

Daumal 1992). The French manuscript of Mount Analogue was first published in

Paris in 1952, but it was only in 1981 that H. J. Maxwell and C. Rugafiori published

the definitive French edition. In English, only the 1992 translation by Shattuck is

based on the 1981 edition, useful in this case not only for this reason but also because

it includes an introduction and afterword by Vera Daumal, as well as relevant

excerpts from Daumal’s notes and letters composed during those same years.

Jodorowsky was born to Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant parents in a provincial

Chile still dominated by the frontier colonialism that has found its way into most of

his films. Later his family moved to the capital, Santiago, where he first came to



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national attention for his poetry and founded his own theatrical troupe. Jodorowsky

moved to Paris in 1953 to study mime with Etienne Decroux and Marcel Marceau,

and once there participated directly in Surrealism through his friendship with the

surrealist artist Jean Benoit (1922-2010, Berg 2006: 136). He experimented with hisfirst film in 1957. In 1960, he moved to Mexico City where, over the next six years,

he continued to direct plays and co-founded a surrealist review (Cobb 2006: 43).

However, he continued to return to Paris, where in 1962 he founded Producciones

Panicas (‘Panic Productions’), with Fernando Arrabal (1932) and Roland Topor

(1938-1997), which aimed to go beyond ‘conventional’ Surrealism by embracing

Absurdism, especially Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ (Cobb 2006: 33). With this aim,

Panic staged ‘ephemeras’ or happenings, attacking the audience with a barrage of

violent, transgressive, conflicting yet rhythmic stimuli (Cobb 2006: 35). In 1967

Jodorowsky began to put cinema ‘through the Panic machine’ (Cobb 2006: 68) to

make his first feature film Fando y Lis, which was infamously banned in Mexico. His

second, El Topo (1970), made his reputation internationally. Like its predecessor,

Jodorowsky’s third film The Holy Mountain was limited to midnight slots and

attracted a sizeable cult following, running solidly for sixteen months and closing in

1975 (Cobb 2006: 172). Jodorowsky became a disciple of Ejo Takata (1928–1997), a

Japanese Zen Buddhist monk living in Mexico City, while making El Topo. He also

received spiritual training from Oscar Ichazo, Chilean founder of the Arica Institute,

during the making of The Holy Mountain (Cobb 2006: 127). Soon after the release of

The Holy Mountain, Takata gave Jodorowsky his kyosaku, the ritual stick used to

‘encourage’ meditators in the Zen tradition.

The Holy Mountain had, until 2004, been unavailable for distribution to

theatres, on videocassette, or DVD, in the United States or the United Kingdom, due

to ownership disputes with distributor Allen Klein. With the resolution of the

ownership dispute, ABKCO Films re-released a digitally remastered Holy Mountain

in 2007, with commentary provided by Jodorowsky himself. Although this has had

the effect of rendering The Holy Mountain an immediate classic on the underground

film circuit, it also has meant that until recently it was difficult to study it directly and

at length.

The above brief comparison of the trajectories of Daumal and Jodorowsky’s

artistic careers in occulture show revealing parallels but also important divergences.

Both had provincial origins and remained outsiders despite their urbane successes.



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Both were seekers who sought out consecutive spiritual teachers, but without

abandoning previous ideologies. In Jodorowsky’s case, the combination led him to

embrace, and incorporate into his films, indigenous South American shamanic

practices; this remains a point of difference from Daumal. There were two moresignificant parallels as well. The first is the autobiographical nature of Mount

Analogue — ‘my story up to this point, clothed in the words of the mountain’

(Daumal 1992: 188) — and The Holy Mountain, ‘The film is my own search for

enlightenment’ (Cobb 2006: 126). The second is a complicated relationship with

Surrealism. Indeed, what Richardson wrote of Jodorowsky, that ‘his concern for

“liberation” … most divides him from surrealism … [which] denies the very idea of

liberation’ (Richardson 2006: 141), could just as easily be said of Daumal, despite the

fact that both are often described as ‘surrealistic’ in secondary texts. Daumal and

Jodorowsky both co-founded oppositional alternatives to Surrealism. While both are

based upon Absurdist positions, Daumal’s was derived from the literary

experimentation of Jarry’s pataphysics, which he continued to use in all his works,

including Mount Analogue; Jodorowsky’s instead was rooted in Artaud’s theatre but

expanded beyond it in the medium of film.

Mountains Analogous, Part 1: Comparison of Plot Structure

Even this brief biographical comparison shows that there are significant underlying

differences between Daumal and Jodorowsky that have been missed by commentators

focused on more numerous and readily grasped occultural similarities. Moreover, it

would be reasonable to assume that the same would apply to Mount Analogue and

The Holy Mountain. Yet as we have seen, the secondary literature is mostly in

agreement that ‘Jodorowsky took the book’s premise, its storyline, endless textual

details’ (Cobb 2007:120). However, if this were the case, it would be especially so

with reference to the textual detail that most directly connects Mount Analogue and

The Holy Mountain; the eponymous mountain of both book and film. What follows is

a comparison of both plots and their structures, which for the first time will examine

whether this is the case for that particular motif.

Mount Analogue is written in a documentary style over five chapters. The

mountain appears on the first pages of the first chapter, which introduces the main

character, Father Pierre Sogol. It opens with a letter from Sogol convinced of the



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reality of the narrator’s ‘literary fantasy’ about the ultimate symbolic mountain

‘uniting Earth and Heaven’. Because of the relationship between the ‘dimensions of a

structure … and those of the human body’ he calls the mountain Mount Analogue, the

summit of which ‘must be inaccessible … its base accessible … and it must exist geographically’ yet be characterised by ‘inaccessibility to ordinary approaches’

(Daumal 1992: 7-9).1 The narrator accepts a request to meet him, and the remainder

of the chapter establishes the character of the ex-monk Sogol, who ‘can’t do any other

work in life except invent absurdities’ (Daumal 1992: 15). Sogol details his life-long

search, based on his insistence that ‘[s]omewhere on this Earth …[a] superior form of

humanity must exist, and not utterly out of reach’ (Daumal 1992: 35). He concludes

not only that they can be found on Mount Analogue but also that, as he could now

calculate its location, that they must undertake an expedition.

The second chapter begins with an account of the ten others invited to join the

expedition party (Daumal 1992: 45-51), but the bulk of it is taken up by an

explanation of the mechanics behind why a mountain larger than the Himalayas on a

South Pacific island continent as big as Australia (Daumal 1992: 53) may exist

unobserved. The theory offered is that it must be ‘encased in a “shell” of curved

space’ (Daumal 1992: 59), around which ‘everything takes place as if Mount

Analogue did not exist ’ (Daumal 1992: 62). This shell is, however, ‘not absolutely

impenetrable—that is … [a]t a certain moment and in a certain place certain persons

(those who know how and wish to do so) can enter’ (Daumal 1992: 65).

The third chapter details the weeks-long voyage and the communal life of the

eight remaining members of the expedition party on board the yacht The Impossible,

four having dropped out at the conclusion of the previous chapter. The fourth chapter

describes their stay at Port o’ Monkeys, one of countless coastal towns on the

continent, and their interactions with the inhabitants, especially the mountain guides,

who exercise authority and administer the towns based on their possession of

peradams, ‘a curved crystal’ unique to Mount Analogue and ‘the basis and standard

of all currency’ (Daumal 1992: 116-117; 121-122). In the few completed pages of the

final extant chapter, the expedition begins its ascent, aided by mountain guides.

The Holy Mountain is composed of several distinct sequences, rather than a

strictly linear plot. The opening scenes show a ritual, introducing Jodorowsky as the

1 All italics are in the original texts unless elsewhere noted.



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Alchemist. The next introduces the Thief, the other main character, and his

subsequent iconic misadventures making money from tourists in the City

accompanied by the Cripple, a footless and handless dwarf whom he carries. This is

the longest sequence by far, in which Jodorowsky satirises the neo-colonial, politicaland religious problems of Latin America. The following section details the Thief’s

apprenticeship in the Tower of the Alchemist. Next is the arrival of seven powerful

business people, representing the seven planets—another iconic sequence satirising

the capitalism of its day—and the revelation of the Alchemist’s quest to reach the

summit of the Holy Mountain of Lotus Island to steal the secret of immortality. Next,

we see an indigenous shamanic training regimen delivered by a Peasant Holy Man,

and subsequent spiritual rebirth of the new group aided by hallucinogens. Following

this is the quest sequence itself, which will be described in more detail below.

The mountain itself only makes an appearance at the end of the fourth sequence,

when the Alchemist explains why he has gathered them together: ‘In all traditions

they speak of Holy Mountains … Nine immortal men live on top of the mountains.

From the highest peak they direct our world. They hold the secret to the conquest of

death’ (Cobb 2006: 157). The mountain and its island do not feature in the film again

until sequence six, after the group arrive by boat at Lotus Island and are met with the

Guide who takes them to the Pantheon Bar, a cemetery party where previous arrivals

have abandoned their quest for drugs, poetry, or acts of physical prowess and tempt

the group to do the same. Leaving the bar behind, they ascend the Holy Mountain

each aided by the other. As they near the summit, the Thief refuses to continue and is

sent back down the mountain to occupy the Tower as the new Alchemist with the

following message: ‘You are a master … Forget the summits’ (Cobb 2006: 157). The

rest approach the summit, surviving a barrage of symbolic visions representing each

character's worst fears and obsessions, reminiscent of earlier Panic ephemera. They

confront the cloaked immortals, only to find them to be faceless dummies. Pulling

back the hood of the last immortal reveals Jodorowsky as the smiling Alchemist

(Cobb 2006: 170), who then reveals the film apparatus just outside the frame and

breaks the fourth wall, instructing everyone including the audience of the film to

leave the Holy Mountain. The film ends with his injunction: ‘Real life awaits.’

Mapping the respective plots of the film and the book, the entire mountain

structure of Mount Analogue takes place in sequences four and six of The Holy

Mountain, less than a third of the film, and only begins over halfway through the film.



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Moreover, the final scenes, in which the audience is exhorted to both forget and leave

the summit, summarily dismiss it, an element absent from the plot of Mount

Analogue. It is difficult to square the relative weights given by Daumal and

Jodorowsky to the claim for an adaptation of ‘endless textual details’. Even the plotmotivations for the respective quests are entirely different, which points to ideological

differences between the book and the film, to which this article will now turn.

Mountains Analogous, Part 2: Comparison of Ideologies

Central to the idea of The Holy Mountain as an adaptation is the claim that it ‘follows

the metaphysical thrust of Mount Analogue’, that is, its ideology, ‘revealed in such

events as … the discovery of the mountain that unites Heaven and Earth “that cannot

not exist,” and symbolic challenges along the mountain ascent’ (Wikipedia

contributors 2014b). Diving deeper into the above plot structures, which textual

details about the eponymous mountain are specific to book and film can be most

clearly seen from an examination of the following ideological elements: anomaly and

pataphysics; invisibility and non-Euclidean cosmology; the ‘Sundoor’; the mountain

guides and their ‘ peradams’; and emanationist theism.

Anomaly and pataphysics are integral to the discovery of Mount Analogue. At

the beginning of chapter two, Sogol spends some time explaining the method he uses

to discover the nature and whereabouts of the narrator’s Mount Analogue, if ‘a priori,

by virtue of the laws of analogy … it must exist’ (Daumal 1992: 55). He states,

‘considering the problem as solved’ (Daumal 1995: 53), ‘which consists in regarding

the problem as solved and deducing from the solution all logical consequences

…[and] has always served me well in every field’ (Daumal 1995: 65). This is a direct

reference to Jarry’s ‘science of imaginary solutions’. We already know Daumal took

pataphysics for his own method, one which ‘symbolically attributes the properties of

objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments … [and which] will examine

the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this

one’ (Jarry 1997: 21). The observation of anomalies, especially in order to discover

the location of the island, is a constant thread in Mount Analogue (Daumal 1995: 44,

62, 68, 135). Sogol’s method is absent from The Holy Mountain. The Alchemist

instead discovers both the existence and location of the mountain in an ‘ancient

Rosicrucian manuscript’ (Cobb 2007: 157).



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If, as Rosenblatt points out, Sogol spends a full ten pages in chapter two

‘providing the scientific data, complete with diagrams, to explain the anomalous

properties on Mount Analogue’ (1999: 203), it could not have been without

ideological significance. Invisibility is a key property of the mountain, and the term isoften repeated (Daumal 1992: 9, 41, 58, 62, 68, 95). But it is one predicated upon

repulsion: the ‘invisible structure around the continent repels not so-called material

bodies but light rays as well’ (Daumal 1992: 58). Sogol proposes the following logic:

‘a body does in fact exercise a repellent action of this kind … [as] predicted by

Einstein … verified by the astronomers Eddington and Crommelin … [that] during a

solar eclipse … a star can still be visible even when, in relation to us, it has passed

behind the solar disc’ (Daumal 1992: 58). Using the previous method, Sogol

concludes that the continent of Mount Analogue must be composed of ‘unknown

substances—unknown for this very reason in fact—capable of creating around them a

much stronger curvature of space’ so that, as already discussed, ‘the region is encased

in a “shell” of curved space’ (59). This curvature ‘deflects the light from the stars and

also the lines of force in the earth’s gravitational field, so …[that] I assume I am

moving in a straight line’ (62-63); ‘in following the curvature of space, the ship itself

lengthens proportionately to the curve’ (64).

Sogol’s direct reference to the very first observation of gravitational lensing

by Arthur Stanley Eddington in 1919, a technique now commonly used by

astronomers and which famously evidenced Einstein’s general theory of relativity

(Kennefick 2007), is a clue to Daumal’s artistic choice. This is confirmed by

Daumal’s use of the term ‘ Non-Euclidean’, found in the book’s sub-title and the

précis to chapter two (Daumal 1992: 44), a shorthand reference to non-Euclidean

geometry. The nineteenth-century discovery of non-Euclidean geometry and attendant

fourth and higher dimensions posed a problem at first only for abstract mathematics

but increasingly also for physics, culminating in the acceptance of Einsteinian space-

time in the inter-war period, and into wider culture as a consequence, shaping the

origin and evolution of modern art and spirituality including Surrealism (Henderson

2013). That Eddington makes an appearance in Mount Analogue is then unsurprising,

as he gave lectures, interviews, and radio broadcasts on relativity during the 1920s

and 1930s that were popular with the public for their willingness to discuss the

philosophical and religious implications of the new physics (Hutchinson 2007). It is

precisely these implications that are the reason why many writers from the late 1800s



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onwards began to make use of the possibilities opened up by the exploration of the

concept (Bohn 2007). Indeed, Daumal was not the only author of his day to write

about non-Euclidean anomalies in the South Pacific caused by the gravitational

lensing effects of exotic matter (Tippet 2012). Yet the non-Euclidean curvature ofspace, an underlying theme in Mount Analogue (Daumal 1992: 60-65, 86), and its

artistic and occult associations are entirely absent from The Holy Mountain: the

mountain is not invisible nor are the nature of its material properties entertained.

Regarding the ‘Sundoor’ to Mount Analogue, in the first few pages of Mount

Analogue the narrator insists that: ‘The door to the invisible must be visible’ (9). As

noted already in the plot summary, the ‘shell cannot be completely closed’ (60) nor be

‘absolutely impenetrable’ (65). Sogol continues his method: ‘To find a way of

reaching the island, one must assume the possibility and even the necessity of

reaching it’ (65). His deduction is that because the ‘standard unit of time common to

Mount Analogue and to the rest of the world … [is] the course of the sun … the sun

has the property of “uncurving” the space which surrounds the island’ (65-66).

However, it is only the effects of sunlight at certain angles that penetrate the shell:

‘We have only to take up our position in line with the sunrise or sunset … and to

await the proper moment … as long as the solar disc remains on the horizon’ (67). It

is this reference that betrays the occult but non-Gurdjiefiian origin to the twist in

Daumal’s non-Euclidean tale; Réné Guenon. Guenon’s prolific essaying on the

metaphysical roots of symbolism and the meaning of symbols, including that of the

mountain (Guenon 2007 [1962]) served as the template of the narrator’s original

article. Guenon and his milieu also wrote about the symbolism of the sun as a door to

higher realities (Coomaraswamy 2004). None of the above details feature in the film,

whether in the Tower before the departure of the group or in their arrival on Lotus

Island.

The connection between the power of the mountain guides and their

possession of peradams has already been mentioned in the above plot summary. The

curved crystals that are the basis of the island’s currency, ‘the only substance, the

only material thing, whose value is recognised by the guides’ (Daumal 1992: 122).

Daumal clearly wishes the reader to associate the spherical, curved crystals otherwise

‘entirely unknown on this planet’ (121) with the ‘substrata of this territory …

inducing curvature’ (59) and as a consequence invisibility, ‘so perfectly transparent

and its index of refraction so close to that of air in spite of the crystals great density



14

that the inexperienced eye barely perceives’ (122). Mount Analogue’s peradam-based

economy, though, is more akin to the theological notion of a divine dispensation

‘from above’ based on the material and gratuitous qualities of the stone. The element

of gift comes about because the ‘new arrival … receives … [an] advance to coverinitial expenses’ (121) and that the ‘only true means of repaying one’s debt in full is

in peradams’ (123). Though found ‘rarely on the lower slopes and more frequently as

one ascends’ (121), like the mountain itself, ‘to any person who seeks it with sincerity

and out of true need it reveals itself’ (122). The emotional significance of Daumal’s

final pages for chapter four cannot be a coincidence, then: on the beach where they

arrived, on the eve of the ascent, Sogol ‘humbles himself in his heart … [and] returns

to his source’ (133-134), relaxing his authority over the group, and as he does so finds

the first small peradam: ‘never in anyone’s memory was one ever found so far down’

(145-147). Beginning their ascent, the expedition learns from the guides that the

acquisition and circulation of peradams is as a consequence further associated with

‘one of the basic laws of Mount Analogue’: ‘To reach the summit, one must proceed

from encampment to encampment. But … one must prepare those coming after to

occupy the place one is leaving. Only after having prepared them one can go on up’

(171). Daumal’s law is entirely absent from The Holy Mountain —there is no group

preparing the next camp for them, nor do they do so for those coming after. Cobb

speculates that the glass sphere the Alchemist extracts from a miniature black obelisk

during sequence three is ‘perhaps a peradam from Daumal’s Mount Analogue’ (2006:

140) but it plays no subsequent role in the ‘metaphysical thrust’ of the film. The

Guide in the film, in contradistinction to the guides of Mount Analogue, tempts the

climbers to abandon their quest at the Pantheon Bar.

The final difference in the ‘metaphysical thrust’ of the mountains to be

examined in this paper lies in Daumal’s explicit theology. From the beginning, the

narrator’s article refers to Mount Analogue as the ‘way by which man can raise

himself to the divine and by which the divine can reveal itself to man’ (Daumal 1992:

5); ‘the kingdom of the one impersonal Being’ (6); and the ‘way of uniting Earth and

Heaven’ (8). Daumal ends the first chapter with the narrator already well in ascent,

while ‘invisible through excess of light, rises the utter- most pinnacle of Mount

Analogue’, listening to a song by the mountain guides worth quoting extensively:



15

There, on a summit more pointed than the finest needle,

He who fills all space resides unto himself …

The supreme and immutable crystal alone subsists … the perpetual incandescence.

There, at the centre of all creation, is he

Who sees each thing accomplished in its beginning

and its end (Daumal 1992: 41-43).

Outside the unusual alpine context, Daumal’s mystical hymn reads very much like

one addressed to a monotheistic deity. However, like many exemplars of both

Western mysticism and contemporary occulture, Daumal held to a broadly post-

Neoplatonic emanationist schema in which the manifold emerges and descends

hierarchically from a monad, the originating source to which all can once again

return. In Mount Analogue this can be best seen in the mountain guides’ cosmogonic

myth of the Mount as the home of ‘the One’, the source of all beings in the ‘lands

Beyond’ and to which they seek to return (133). As the story goes: ‘In the beginning

[there was] a single inconceivable Form … fused in a single Will, which willed only

its own being. There came a separation but the Unique remained unique’ (132). In

Daumal the two are combined in the narrator’s account of the entrance of the yacht,

The Impossible, through the solar door via ‘a powerful suction suddenly pulling usforward’ (114): ‘the wind that had carried us there was no natural and fortuitous wind

but had blown in accordance with a will’ (117). ‘A will’ also directs proceedings from

the summit in The Holy Mountain but it is that of the Nine Immortals rather than a

monotheistic or even an emanationist deity. Jodorowsky does not articulate a theology

at all in the film, infrequently and aptly referring only to an ‘inner God’ in the

commentary (2007b: [section 28] 00:02:27-30; [section 223] 00:24:31-38; [section

845] 01:37:20-25).

Although in The Holy Mountain the Alchemist states that there are ‘many …

holy mountains’ none are described as a way of uniting Heaven and Earth as Mount

Analogue does. Despite his exhortation to the group to ‘unite our forces to assault the

Holy Mountain and rob its wise men of secret of immortality’, even the Alchemist’s

successful quest to reach the summit proved in the end not only an illusion but was

another point of difference from Mount Analogue where the ‘ summit must be

inaccessible’ (8). Ironically, this mission bears an uncanny resemblance to what

Daumal in his notes and letters had planned for ‘the expedition of the four quitters’:



16

‘how another expedition, pursuing quite different goals, barely missed destruction’

(41). This is yet another textual detail missed in the adaptation – the ‘four quitters’

who declined to take part in the expedition did so because they ‘thought that the

mountain must be sitting on top of … treasure and must be jealously guarded by a people who would have to be subdued’ (170). They planned to take Mount Analogue

by force, much like the group in The Holy Mountain, but because they were

‘completely ignorant of the laws of the place, they were caught in a whirlpool’ (171).

A Gurdjieffian Adaptation? The Discursive Strategies of Occultural Artists and

Academic Urban Legend-Making

It would appear that the book and film share so few aspects in common that even

employing contemporary adaptation theory, unconcerned as it is with fidelity, would

be difficult. Jodorowsky’s own words about Mount Analogue and the origins of The

Holy Mountain shed little light. He had been familiar with the book, its author and his

teacher, Gurdjieff, since at least 1968 (Yezpitelok 2011). In 1970, speaking about his

next film project after El Topo, a ‘gangster movie’ about mountain-climbing treated

like spiritual initiation (Cobb 2006: 119) Jodorowsky had said: ‘One day … we’ll

know what René Daumal never finished in his Mount Analogue … what he had

intended to write and what he found at the top’ (Cobb 2006: 125). However, during

the very same interview he also said that this movie would be based on the Spanish

Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross’ Mount Carmel (Cobb 2006: 119).

Jodorowsky mentions neither Daumal nor Mount Analogue in his commentary on the

film (2007b), or in his most recent autobiographical work (2010). Elsewhere, he refers

to Kabbalah, Tantra (Cobb 2006: 269) and Alchemy as his major influences (Stermac

1974: 61). Jodorowsky as The Alchemist tells The Thief: ‘The Tarot will teach you

how to create a soul’, and the film is replete with its symbolism, but as interpreted

through the Gurdjieffian theme of conditional post-mortem existence.

The question that arises, then, is in what way is The Holy Mountain an

adaptation at all? A tentative response might be found in at least three of the elisions

upon which the undocumented claim that the film was a faithful adaptation of the

book. That is, the academic urban legend at the heart of the available secondary

literature might be reliant on an uncritical acceptance of: 1) a conflation of

Gurdjeffian ideology with the Enneagram of personality; 2) Daumal’s relationship to

Surrealism; and 3) Jodorowsky's ‘sacralisation’ of Panic filmmaking. Like other



17

forms of legend-making, it has its roots in the social dynamics at play in the

production of the primary sources. As a consequence, a cultural ‘production

perspective’ will be deployed to highlight the social systems ‘within which they are

created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved’ (Peterson and Anand 2004:311).

The nine-sided figure known as the Enneagram is the most visually

recognisable and distinctly Gurdjieffian symbol (Wellbeloved 2003: 60-70). Unique

to Gurdjieff, it expressed his two axiomatic, universally interacting laws: a dialectical

‘Law of Three’ and a more technically complex ‘Law of Seven’—assigning to each

completing process seven irregularly developing phases and correlating with the

Western musical scale—which he originally applied to cosmogonic, cosmological,

and metabolic processes (Moore 1990: 1; Moore 2006: 448). It would then seem to be

no surprise that it also appears in The Holy Mountain in the scenes featuring the

Immortals (Cobb 2006: 157, 170). But this is not itself sufficient cause to mark a

cultural product as Gurdjieffian, otherwise Mount Analogue, where it makes no

appearance, would have to be discounted. A better explanation is an historical one:

Gurdjieff simply did not teach the Enneagram to his French followers, as transcripts

of his group meetings with them attest, documents which also further demonstrated

the origin of the key theological difference: Gurdjieff’s emphasis in this period on a

divine dispensation and grace previously absent in his teaching (Patterson 2000).

Jodorowsky claims to have acquired it through his encounter with Oscar Ichazo; ‘He

was from Bolivia and came from the Gurdjieff tradition. He taught us the enneagram,

which I used in this film’ (Jodorowsky 2007b: [Section 360-361] 00:39:23-31). On

the other hand, diminished proximity to Gurdjieff does not make Jodorowsky’s film

less Gurdjeffian either, for a number of scholars have noted that Ouspensky’s pupil

Rodney Collin, who gave the first account of the Enneagram in Spanish and was also

the first account to include a psychological typology, is the most likely link between

the original cosmic symbol as preserved in the Ouspenskyian lineages and Ichazo’s

psychological typology via the groups he formed in Argentina, Chile, Peru, and

Uraguay (Moore 1990: 3; Rawlinson 1997: 331-332; Wellbeloved 2003: 64).

A more critical assessment of the approximation of Mount Analogue and The

Holy Mountain to Gurdjieffian ideology requires a more historically flexible

definition. For the purposes of this article, one can be synthesized from the

Gurdjieffian notion of a conditional post-mortem existence (Moore 2006) as



18

augmented by Rawlinson and Rosenblatt to include: an ‘insistence on effort’ as the

‘cosmological principle’ (Rawlinson 1997: 312); the anthropological principle that

our ‘task … [is] to become more conscious [,] to become independent of accidental

influences or to develop our essence’ (288); and that the aesthetic principle derivedfrom these principles is that art ‘should help the upward flow of consciousness in man

[ sic], struggling against the current of mechanical life’ (Rosenblatt 1999: 136-137).

This definition will help to resolve the issues found in the secondary texts around the

uncritical acceptance of Daumal's relationship to Surrealism and Jodorowsky's

‘sacralisation’ of Panic filmmaking by focusing on the discursive strategies used by

artists in occulture. A recent refinement to Partridge’s now well-known occulture

thesis that is useful here shows that artists manufacture, maintain and challenge

certain concepts, discourses and boundaries in their striving towards ‘higher

knowledge/wisdom’ so that certain forms of art are privileged as ‘spiritual’, ‘higher’

or ‘absolute’ as opposed to others (Kokkinen 2013).

Daumal and Jodorowsky are certainly no exception, but as it is Jodorowsky’s

strategies that are the most relevant to the adaptation claim, Daumal can only be dealt

with briefly here. As a writer, and given the historical and social context of his

metaphysical opposition to Surrealism through Le Grande Jeu and his own poetry as

outlined in his previous biographical details, he was already familiar with the struggle

to make words liberating in a soteriologically Absurdist sense for a post-Surrealist

milieu. For Daumal the Gurdjeffian aesthetic came to be expressed as a response to

his exposure to Gurdjieff’s own writing and group instruction. In his novels his own

writing increasingly adopted an allegorical and elliptical style. However, to his French

followers Gurdjieff insisted on a subtler but still cosmic materialism. As ‘a man [ sic]

cannot reach truth directly nor all by himself’ (Daumal 1992: 35), the struggle for

conscious embodiment was to be counterbalanced by the practice of relaxation as

preparation for the descent into the physical body of a higher but still material ‘will’.

This allowed Daumal to differentiate himself from the tendency toward solipsistic

asceticism of his earlier poetry.

Given the historical and social context of Jodorowsky’s own metaphysical

opposition to Surrealism through Producciones Panicas, he was similarly familiar

with a like artistic struggle but in his case to at first make theatre liberating in a

different but still soteriologically Absurdist sense. Later, it was ‘cinema [that] could



19

be a way, a sacred way’ (Cobb 2006: 269), that could ‘wake people up’ (Jodorowsky

2007b: [Section 393] 00:43:02-06). Unlike Daumal’s smaller target audience,

Jodorowsky aim was the broader and larger emerging counterculture: ‘When one

creates a psychedelic film, he need not create a film that shows the visions of a personwho takes a pill; rather, he needs to manufacture the pill ’ (Cobb 2006: 126). We know

that the Gurdjieffian leitmotif—‘You aren’t born with a soul; you have to make one

for yourself’—became increasingly important in the lead up to filming The Holy

Mountain (Cobb 2006: 111). We know that while he was aware of Mount Analogue,

Jodorowsky’s Panic lens had the effect, as Richardson has pointed out, of regularly

ignoring the text he was adapting (2006: 137). As Jodorowsky explained about his

attempted adaptation of Dune, he ‘did not want to respect the novel … [but] to

recreate it … the Myth was to give up the literary form and become Image’ (Cobb

2006: 177-178). All the Gurdjeffian elements, including his Arica training with

Ichazo, became in The Holy Mountain an ingredient in the cinematic equivalent to his

earlier ‘ephemera’: ‘I studied him in order to play myself a master’ (Cobb 2006: 127).

Indeed, as part of their preparation, the lead actors also undertook Arica training for

three months before living communally for a further month in Jodorowsky’s home

(Cobb 2006: 128). The aim of his own transformation and that of his actors and crew

was to transform that audience: ‘In Holy Mountain you do not follow a story, you

follow an experience with me and the actors … It is training’ (Stermac 1974: 62).

However, the psychologizing, instrumentalist approach of the slogan ‘With the

correct formula any human being can become enlightened’ as voiced by The

Alchemist deemphasises the Gurdjeffian cosmological imperative which, over the

years, lead Jodorowsky to develop his own more post-Jungian spiritual system—

‘psychomagic’ therapy—in the 1980s (Cobb 2006: 211). In a further point of artistic

differentiation, it was not an accident that Jodorowsky, who chooses to make his films

in Mexico, also chose Ichazo as his spiritual master: it was Ichazo’s own post-colonial

founding myth story about the indigenous origins of his teaching that would have

been a deciding factor.

Conclusion

This article has only begun the task of mapping The Holy Mountain onto Mount

Analogue, making a case, through a close reading of the eponymous mountain, that on

the face of it the two share little in terms of structure or ideology. For example, also

missing from the film but not directly related to the mountain complex being



20

examined in this article, is the role played both the peradams and the mountain

guides. However, while The Holy Mountain may not be an adaptation of Mount

Analogue, it is a Panic adaptation of Jodorowsky’s own Gurdjieffian enlightenment. It

is easy, though, to see how the confusion arose given the strong focus in thesecondary texts on their mutually complicated relationship to Surrealism. As the

secondary texts about the adaptation are mostly from the film studies side, this has

lead to the perverse situation where academics can ‘discuss the work of competing

fields’, generating academic urban legend-making through ‘misrepresentations on a

scale that would never be acceptable within their own field’ (Sismondo 2005). Yet,

this is not an issue that is merely ‘academic’. Renewed media attention to Jodorowsky

has shown that The Holy Mountain continues to have an ongoing influence on a

whole range of audio-visual artists (Hua 2013), including no less a popular culture

figure than Kanye West (Pasori 2014), who based the audio-visuals, conceptual

elements and plot of his recent Yeezus tour almost scene for scene on The Holy

Mountain (Scarano and Pasori 2013). This is a field ripe for further research,

especially in order to trace the historiography of the academic urban legend to find

out exactly how it was born, distributed, and maintained. As Jodorowsky’s artistic

career and influence continues to be re-evaluated, interviewing Jodorowsky about

Gurdjieff, Rene Daumal and Mount Analogue is one final further possible avenue for

research should be highlighted, as the time is fast approaching when it will no longer

be possible to clarify the relationship between the two and discount the possibility of

commentary or parody.

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