Books: Sacred Mountains 25th anniversary

Sacred Mountains 25th anniversary

By Dawn Holden

September 2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Sacred Mountains: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Meanings by Dr Adrian Cooper. Even today, it is a pioneering book because it validates the mountain journeys and experiences of non-famous / non-elitist climbers and walkers. Cooper spent thirteen years, between 1984 – 1997 travelling through many of the most iconic mountain landscapes around the world, meeting fascinating people from many social backgrounds, all of them with one thing in common: a passion for mountains.

From the wisdom and insights of the 144 people who Cooper interviewed, we learn stories of how mountain walking and climbing provides deep psychological healing from challenges including anxiety, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, loneliness, unemployment and much else. These are powerful stories which deserve to be shared. Cooper does that job with empathy and compassion.

Around his interviews, Cooper also discusses the literature, art and music which helped the people he met to cope with the challenges of beginning their incredible personal journeys, and carrying on with them to their end. So we not only encounter brilliant poetry and prose from China, Japan, South East Asia, Europe and North America, but we also learn how that writing became important for the people featured in Cooper’s book. Sacred Mountains is also a book about incredible personal sacrifices which many of these walkers and climbers made in order to engage with their mountain journeys.

From giving up jobs which were destroying their souls, to finding child care for extended periods of time, and many other hard choices, this is often a tough book to read because most of the sacrifices which these travellers have made are themselves tough to make. Drawing together mythical mountain traditions from every continent, Dr Cooper shows how paradoxical the world’s high places can often be. While mountains might fill our hearts and minds with joy and fascination from being in those incredible high landscapes, our journeys might also be scarred by paralyzing fear when things go wrong.

Fear and fascination are often closely aligned on most mountain journeys, and yet we carry on exploring in those spectacular high places. Equally, while many people talk about mountain journeys transcending everyday concerns, those same journeys may often be dogged with haunting memories of immanent concerns, perhaps regarding people back home who we love and miss.

There may also be immanent worries about personal debt, housing problems, unemployment, inflation and much else.

Cooper’s extraordinary book also shows how, at the end of each mountain journey, travellers may feel as if their future agenda and priorities have been made clear, only to subsequently find that those illusions of clarity can easily become confounded with confusion.

The truth, of course, as Cooper shows, is that we navigate through life after our mountain journeys, greatly enriched by those experiences, while still remaining human: flawed, illogical, inconsistent, but always good enough to deserve opportunities to travel through mountain landscapes, to learn from those journeys, to weave their memories into our lives, and to hopefully engage in more captivating and life-changing mountain journeys to help us deal with whatever life throws our way.