"The Sacred Mountain" is a symbol revered by people in every religious and ethnic tradition of Asia. The 29 articles contained here celebrate these sacred peaks through prose, poetry, travelogue, historical and spiritual texts, art, and photos, and will be of interest to all students of Asian culture.

This book explores in depth the wisdom and fierce beauty of an ancient Sioux story, which teaches the value of setting out on a quest in the natural world in order to discover who and what one truly is. What unfolds, in a dramatic and inspiring way, is a vision of the elements intrinsic to the pathless path toward freeing oneself from constraining beliefs and conditioning in order to awaken to the wonder and mystery of pure presence before the soul of the world.

Custodians of the Sacred Mountains is the first comprehensive ethnography of the Bali Aga, a large ethnic minority that occupies the island's central highlands. The Bali Aga are popularly viewed as the indigenous counterparts to other Balinese who trace their origin to invaders from the Javanese kingdom of Majapait, who have ruled Bali from the fourteenth century A.D. Although Bali remains one of the most intensely researched localities in the world, the Bali Aga have long been overshadowed by the more exotic courtly culture of the south. A closer analysis of the changing position of the Bali Aga within Balinese society provides a key to understanding the politics and social process of cultural representation in Bali and beyond. The process is marked by a blend of representational competition and cooperation among the Bali Aga themselves, among the Bali Aga and southern Balinese, and later among the island's aristocratic elites and foreign colonizers or scholars, and state authorities. The study of this process raises important issues about the establishment and maintenance of status and power structures at regional, national, and global levels. Custodians of the Sacred Mountains explores the marginalization of the Bali Aga in light of a critical theory of cultural representation and calls for a morally engaged approach to ethnographic research. It proposes an intersubjective and communicative model of human interaction as the foundation for understanding the relative significance of cooperation and competition in the cultural production of knowledge.

Chronicling the inner as well as the outer journey, an influential author offers his personal view of his spiritual adventure amid the breathtaking vistas of the Himalayas.

First published in 2007. Geil argues in this book that five is a number most remarkable to the man of the Central Kingdom. Crafted to the rule of fifths, the author discusses aspects of the world, mountains and religion which lead to the analysis of five. These include the ascent of five key figures: Tai Shan, Nan Yo, Sung Shan, Hua Shan and Heng Shan. This title includes illustrations throughout with a comprehensive index.

The mountains of northern Thailand inspire fear and awe, respect and love, curiosity and creative imagination. Drawing on the legendary histories of three mountains in the regionDoi Ang Salung Chiang Dao, Doi Suthep, and Doi Khamthis book explores the various ways that mountains in northern Thailand are seen as sacred space, and therefore as an environment to be respected rather than exploited.

In the spring of A.D. 587, John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist embarked on a remarkable expedition across the entire Byzantine world, traveling from the shores of Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. Using Moschos’s writings as his guide and inspiration, the acclaimed travel writer William Dalrymple retraces the footsteps of these two monks, providing along the way a moving elegy to the slowly dying civilization of Eastern Christianity and to the people who are struggling to keep its flame alive. The result is Dalrymple’s unsurpassed masterpiece: a beautifully written travelogue, at once rich and scholarly, moving and courageous, overflowing with vivid characters and hugely topical insights into the history, spirituality and the fractured politics of the Middle East.

W. Y. Evans-Wentz, great Buddhist scholar and translator of such now familiar works as the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, spent his final years in California. There, in the shadow of Cuchama, one of the Earth's holiest mountains, he began to explore the astonishing parallels between the spiritual teaching of America's native peoples and that of the deeply mystical Hindus and Tibetans. Cuchama and Sacred Mountains, a book completed shortly before his death in 1965, is the fruit of those explorations. To Cuchama, "Exalted High Place," came the young Cochimi and Yuma boys for initiation into the mystic rites for their people. In solitude they sought and received guidance and wisdom. In this same way, the peoples of ancient Greece, the Hebrews, the early Christians, and the Hindus had found access to inner truth on their own holy mountains: and in this same way must the modern person find the path to inner knowing. Surveying many of the most Sacred Mountains in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, Evans-Wentz expresses the belief that the secret power of these high places has not passed away but only awaits the coming of a New Age. This new age, in accord with the oldest prophecies of our continent, will be a time of renaissance, the long-waited era of harmony and peace among all peoples. This renaissance shall be uniquely American, a renewal based on the values so long honored by the Americans before Columbus, and so ruthlessly trampled by the "civilized" Europeans who overran them. No other race of people has been as spiritual in their way of life than the original Americans, notes Evans-Wentz. Perhaps none other has known such martyrdom. Yet the secret greatness of the Indian religion still lives, ancient as the Earth itself, yet ageless in its power to renew.

Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo helped inaugurate the midnight movie phenomenon. Its success spawned The Holy Mountain, through interventions by John Lennon and Allen Klein. After a scandalous release and a 16-month midnight career, The Holy Mountain was relegated to the underground world of fan bootlegs for over thirty years until its limited restored release in 2007. This short study reveals how The Holy Mountain, a poetic, hilarious, and anarchist cult film by an international auteur, anchored in post-1968 critiques, is – at the same time – an archaeological capsule of the counterculture movement, a timely subversion of mystical tenets, and one of the most mysterious films in the history of world cinema.