Episode 41: Mountains: Where gods and God Congregates

Why do mountains appear again and again in ancient mythology, religious texts, paranormal encounters, and stories of supernatural beings? Across cultures and throughout history, humanity has viewed mountains as places where the physical world and the divine intersect. From Mount Olympus and Mount Sinai to Mount Hermon and the Himalayas, towering peaks have long been associated with gods, angels, spirits, revelations, and forbidden knowledge.

In this episode of Arcane Station, we explore the idea that mountains are more than just geological formations. We examine why so many traditions describe them as sacred meeting places between humanity and higher beings. We look into biblical accounts involving Mount Hermon and the Watchers, ancient myths about gods descending from the heavens, mysterious disappearances in remote mountain ranges, strange lights and UFO reports, and the recurring belief that isolated peaks may serve as gateways to something beyond ordinary reality.

Were mountains chosen simply because of their isolation and elevation? Or is there something deeper that has drawn spiritual practices, supernatural legends, and unexplained phenomena to these locations for thousands of years?

Tonight, we climb into the strange history, mythology, paranormal reports, and high strangeness surrounding the mountains where gods, and perhaps something else, congregate.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hey everyone, welcome to Arcane Station. I'm your host, Mike Porter. Tonight I am going to be talking about mountains, and in particular, I'm going to talk about how mountains are these places of sacred worship, or they are uh venerated as gods themselves. And so I'm just gonna go through a little bit of information here and how you know mountains progressed from um this sort of like spirit into places of worship and finally into mankind actually creating their own mountains, and then talk a little bit about what's still happening around mountains. So the very first thing I want to talk about is back before Christianity and back before any cultures, religions, there was this concept of everything had a spirit. So this was sort of like the beginnings of any sort of religion, and it's called animism. And so before there were churches or temples, and anything had been written down at all based on theology, there were mountains. And these mountains, because they were so massive and stretched up towards the sky, and because many times weather patterns were created around these mountains, they became a place of extreme uh spiritual activity. People would look at those knowing that perhaps something other than themselves, some spirit larger than themselves that resided in there. And they thought everything had a spirit, you know, like the water, the trees, the grass, the bees, the insects, uh everything. But the mountains were at the excuse my pun here, they were at the peak of that uh theological sort of um hierarchy system. The mountains were the largest peace. And so um the mountains they also felt were alive, you know, because it had the spirit, they were uh an active being that they could talk to and they had, you know, sort of a rapport with. And if you climbed a mountain, at a certain point the air becomes thin and you start, you know, losing consciousness, and they thought that perhaps because those places were so high and they weren't able to breathe correctly, that was only reserved for gods. And so for the ancestors, this wasn't a mysterious thing. This was this the mountain was alive, it's something up there, it was powerful. Um you know, lightning would strike its peaks, clouds would like cover them. Um so for sure they thought that this was an actual being. And this concept points to what's called the axis mundi, the world pillar, um, and they think that this is a cosmic pole around which everything rotates. And again, this is an animism. Um that pole uh connects the underworld, the earth, and the heavens, and it's used universally and almost universally that pillar is a mountain. So in the north they have uh Yigstrail, uh, but they also had Asgard on a peak. The Greeks put the gods on Olympus. In Japan, Mount Fuji was home to the kami, a divine spirit. The indigenous people of the Andes called their mountain peaks Apuz, which m literally means lords. And so you didn't just walk past an Apu, you had to ask for permission or make an offering in order to you know not disturb the god or the spirit of the mountain. In Mount Kalash in Tibet, it's worshipped by four separate religions. So Hinduism, Buddhism, Jain, and Bond. So it's never been summated, and it's not because people can't, it's because it's it's forbidden. You're it's a sacred place that you're not allowed to go. And so there's been several elite climbers that have tried to go there, but the governments of the surrounding nations would never allow it. And local tradition says that anyone who stands on its peak will die. So it sits there at twenty-two thousand feet, unconquered, and possibly one of the most sacred pieces of land uh that you can find in terms of this you know spiritual hierarchy of mountains. Now, I want to take you into this sort of next phase, so we go from animism until into there there are um other beings and and faiths along the way. There's um you know different pagan religions and things of that nature, and again, the the mountain plays a huge role in those things, nature in general, but also the mountains in particular. But I'm gonna take you through like a biblical event that takes place on a mountain, and there's many of which uh take place, but before I do the biblical conversation about the mountains, I want to talk first about which Bible we're talking about. So the Ethiopian Bible is the sacred scripture of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tabuahedo Church, so it's one of the oldest continuous Christian traditions on earth, tracing its roots from the fourth century CE and even earlier through Ethiopian eunuch converted in Acts 8 of the Bible. So it's written primarily in Jeiz, which is an ancient Semitic language no longer spoken as a living tongue, but still used in liturgy. At 81 books, it's the largest and most varied biblical canon in traditional Christendom. For comparison, Protestant Bibles have 66 books, and Catholic Bibles have 73, and Eastern Orthodox Bibles have around 76 to 78, so the Ethiopian canon simply is much larger than those others. The Bible is essentially a time capsule of early Jewish Christian thought before the great editing projects of Rome and Constantinople. The texts it preserved, like Enoch, Jubilees, expanded all these angelic cosmologies. They detailed the Watcher narratives, were clearly, you know, circulating in an area of Christ of early Christianity, that though those were made available to everyone, and it's only through editing and taking away of things was that even eradicated from the Bible. And so they were read, they were quoted, like Jude quotes Enoch directly in the New Testament, and considered authoritative by most, um, I guess by some, I wouldn't say most, but there's certain uh Bibles that people say are more true than the other ones, but I think we're missing the full picture because we don't have the full picture. So um the Western Church decided that they didn't want to talk about giants or uh the watchers or any of that stuff, and so they kind of removed some of the uh the more I I guess um outrageous. I'm gonna say outrageous, uh it's not really what I mean, but to them to them it was an outrageous thing that they were talking about. And they wanted to remove these because it removes some of the mysticism from the Bible that I think still needs to be in there. Um the book of Enoch, if you're not familiar, uh, is attributed to Enoch, who's the great, great, great, great, great grandson of Adam. So the Bible describes him as someone who simply walked with God and then vanished. Um the book of Enoch was considered scripture by the early church, it's still canonical, like I said, in Ethiopian Christianity, and it's quoted directly in the New Testament. Then it got dropped from the canon, and depending on who you asked, that was for a theological decision or a very deliberate erasure of that spirituality that I was talking about. But here's what the book of Enoch says. So two hundred beings called the Gregori, the Watchers, assembled on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they made an oath to each other, um, and then they descended down to Mount Hermon. So Mount Hermon is 9,232 feet, and it sits on the border border of modern Lebanon and Syria. So the name itself in Hebrew comes from the root meaning of devoted or forbidden, essentially under a curse. The ancient place name even appears to mean the place of the oath, which is this is where they agreed to do something that they knew was prohibited. So, what did the watchers do? They took on human wives, and they had children with them, and those children were the Nephilim. They're giants, men of renown, powerful, violent, consuming everything, and they taught humanity things that humanity was not meant to know yet. So, for instance, forging of weapons for war, the use of cosmetics and jewelry to seduce, enchantments, the cutting of roots, astrology, the reading of omens, so all of those things is what the watchers, um, the the watchers and by extension the Nephilim were sort of engaged with. So the event in the Enochian tradition is that one is what um triggered the flood. The reason why Moses had to build the ark is because there was this massive amount of abominations that were blocking the the planet. And I'll talk I'm gonna do another complete episode on biblical prophecy and uh on um on cryptids and things like that. But these watchers, they were angels. Um they were supposed to come down and watch over humanity, and what uh from what you read you it sounds like that there was this um they were jealous basically of of mankind because the watchers were not um they didn't have male and female, they had these just divine beings that were of a single gender, I would assume. And they were jealous of Adam because he had someone to share his life with. And the sons of Adam uh had daughters, and um, you know, there was marrying and all this other stuff, and the j these watchers were jealous, and they decided they come down, they made a pact, they said, if one of us is are doing this, we're all doing this. This is going against God's will, but we're so jealous of the humans that I feel like we deserve we're deserving of it, and the humans aren't. So they married these women, uh, and then they in exchange contractually they built the contract to subvert um the uh binding law of God, because God said the heavens are for the angelic and the earth it was made specifically for humans, and the humans have domain over the earth. So anyway, this um this happened. They bred the Nephilim, which are these giants, which are men of renown, um, and additionally after that, um again, extremely violent, eating up all the resources, destroying humanity, abomin um creating abominations of nature, and I'll go a little bit into that here in a second about the different types of abominations. And then finally, um uh it gets really weird here because um there's this at the base of Mount Hermon is this uh site called Banias, which is um Caesarea Philippi, which is in the New Testament, and there was an ancient shrine to the god Pan. And there's a cave in the rock face that a spring emerges from, and it has a temple. And the locals call this place the gates of hell. And so the entrance to the underworld is literally at the base of this mountain. Um at the foot of this very mountain is where the washers are descended, they're actually cast down into Tartarus for their transgressions and locked into Tartarus. And so the other mountains that are in that area we'll just talk about really quickly before I go into some other information. So there's three mountains, sorry, there's two mountains, but three encounters. So the first obviously is the um is the descent down from the watchers. Then there's Mount Sinai, uh so in Exodus, the Israelites camp at the base of uh the mountain, and then Moses goes up, and uh what happens there is described as basically um Moses meets God uh and in the form of a burning bush that talks to him and it gives him the commandments. And um when he went up, apparently the fire was really thick, the smoke was thick, the entire mountain was shaking violently, so it sounds like uh uh an earthquake and or a volcanic eruption. Uh but it also said there was a sound like a trumpet growing louder and louder, and the presence, uh the text explicitly says, would kill anyone who touched the mountain's boundary. So the mountain was quarantined, and the people were kept back, and then Moses alone ascends and he comes down with the laws written on stone, and his face is so radiantly changed that he has to wear a veil so people can stand to look at him. So it was transformative. Um then in the New Testament, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John to a high mountain, and Mount Hermon, um, and there his appearance transforms, his face is shining like the sun, his clothes become dazzling white, and then Moses and Elijah appear beside him somehow, and the voice speaks from a cloud, and the disciples fall on their faces terrified. They think about um, you know, if you think about the early readers of this text, they would have understood because Hermon is the place where the watchers fell, and the divine beings crossed into human realm there, and so it made sense that um the same mountain would become this the site of divine glory of a figure who is transfigured from a voice from heaven to its deliberate reversal and undoing the defiling of the mountain, so it became a mountain of revelation. And then we have Ararat, which is at sixteen thousand eight hundred and fifty-four feet, and it's set in modern eastern Turkey, but according to Genesis, this is where Noah's art came to rest. And people have been trying to find it for centuries, and some people think that it actually did. So in 1959, a Turkish pilot photographed an anomalous boat-shaped formation at 6,300 square uh 6,300 feet, and that became known as the Derimpyr um Dorimpar site, and it's 538 feet long, and the length of the arc is given as in Genesis of 515 feet. So, depending on which qubit you use, obviously there's different qubits and they could have different sort of um measurements. They use ground penetrating radar, and it's detected what looks like an internal structure. So the Turkish government has officially designated it as an archaeological site. Um and then there's expedition accounts like new numerous independent witnesses claiming to have seen it and in some cases touched a structure of dark ancient wood protruding from a glacier. So Ed Davis in 1943 and George Jefferson Green in 1952 photographed it from a helicopter and showed dozens of photos of the people. Um he showed those photos to a bunch of people before he died, and the photos disappeared. And then there was an o another expedition in 1972. So clearly there's this mountain has or mountains have these not only uh pagan spiritual elements, there's also Christian spiritual elements. And here's the thing: uh when there wasn't a mountain nearby, humans just decided I'll build one myself. And so if you live in Mesopotamia, that's a flat river valley, it's not a mountain in sight. But if you believe in the divine, that uh if you believe that the divine descends from mountains or from the sky to mountains, then as a human who wants to worship those gods, maybe you build up a mountain to meet those gods halfway. And so the ziggurat um is a stepped pyramid of ancient Sumer and Babylon. So they have Ur, uh, Nammuz, Zigarat at Ur, and uh Etameneki Etamenaki at Babylon, and almost certainly the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11. So these weren't just big buildings, they were their name as Sumerian meant the house whose head is in heaven. So the god lived at the top, and the priests climbed the summit to meet God who descended from the sky to converse with them. And this is structurally the same theology as Sinai. The divine comes down to the peak to the peak, and the human goes up to the threshold. Same thing with the Egyptian pyramids, they built these, it's a different story, but it points to the same instinct. The pyramid basically replicates the bin-bin, which is the primordial mound that rose from the waters of chaos in the beginning of creation. It was the first solid ground. So if you imagine Mount Arrat could have been, after the flood, that first solid ground, the first Axis Mundi after the destroyer destruction of the world. And so what's interesting too is that the great pyramids are of these or are all aligned with mathematical precision to Orion's belt, and their air shafts point at specific stars, suggesting a function beyond burial, something astrological or astronomical, something oriented towards what's above. But the fine the site I really find most interesting is Gebekli Tepi. So that's a 12,000-year-old site as our best guess. That's 6,000 years before Stonehenge, 7,000 years before the pyramid, in a time when, according to standard archaeology, humanity was still to be these small nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers scratching for survival, yet they decided to band together to create this giant temple space. It's very large. It's a complex of circular enclosures on a hilltop that's now southeastern Turkey. It has T-shaped pillars that weigh up to 20 tons. And they're carved with animals like foxes and scorpions, vultures and snakes, and some of these are very sophisticated reliefs. And again, this is a hunter-gatherer group. Why are they building this temple? So the enclosure of these spherical or uh cylindrical places, they all align to astronomical positions. And the the weird part that you know archaeologists don't quite understand is that it was deliberately buried. So around 8,000 BCE, someone intentionally filled it up with rubble. So thousands of animal bones, tools, debris that were used to entomb the entire complex was just covered over with dirt. So I think it was sealed. But maybe because it was finished and it was just like a work that was supposed to be preserved, but could have been consecrated and closed, or maybe it was buried because they wanted to try to hide it from Christianity, or you know, there's a variety of reasons for that. Um and then you look at other mounds or mound type uh structures, for instance, like the serpent mound in Ohio. Now that's 1348-foot effigy of a snake, it's the largest in the world, built by uh Adenon of um Fort sorry or Fort Ancient Cultures. So they built these spaces to be protected. Uh the serpent has a coiled tail and has an open mouth which appears to swallow an oval form, and that oval form is where a meteor impact happened. And so it's got this pattern that looks as if the serpent's mouth is going to align, is going to capture that, but also. Aligns exactly with the summer solstice sunset. So it wasn't a random place and it placement, it was deliberate. So all over the world, humanity has always built upward, tried to recreate a meeting point between the natural mountains to these ziggurats and pyramids and these mounds. They're trying to manufacture a threshold to interface with the divine. So what's happening now is there's still lots of high strangeness in mountains, and you you hear about it all the time. For instance, you have um in Mount Shasta, it's been the center of strange stories for over centuries. Lemurian survivors living inside of mountains, tunnels, and glowing lights, tall rogue figures seen in the forest around the peak. I mean, there's the Kandahart giant, uh, which was reported by multiple special forces veterans, and the account of a twelve to fifteen foot tall creature, um, this is in Afghanistan, where he's said to have killed one of the people there uh who was trying to um clear the caves and just happened to be killed by this red-headed giant with a spear. Like, hasn't been officially confirmed, but it also hasn't been officially denied, and there's bunches of veterans that are independently repeating the story, and there's actually talk of um from actually Afghans who were in that war that talked about the red-headed giants to the people, and there's many of them that that dye their hair an orange color to make sure that they um fit in with the giant to ensure that they're not taken by the giant. So they still believe very heavily in these giants. So the other thing about that, the giants, is that it's reminiscent of the nef the Nephilim, the the offspring of the watchers. They were meant to be giants. And all of these creatures that we hear about now, those could be um those could be you know the abominations that happened when they corrupted nature, like like a um you know, like a centaur or a cyclops. Stuff from Roman um Roman pantheons of gods and creatures mythology could have been um attributed to these abominations that took place in nature. The other thing I think that might be kind of interesting to to use as a thought experiment is perhaps those watchers came down to the mountains and then they were dispersed widely because um both prior to being sent to Tartars. They were dispersed widely because their children were killing each other and killing humans and all that stuff. But perhaps those are the ancient gods of Rome and Greece, you know, Apollo, um, Zeus, uh Aphrodite, um, those could be the Nephilim offspring of the watchers, or the watchers themselves, the um you know, like Zeus for sure. And then you have Hercules and um people like that. That's a man of renown, a man of great strength and renown that could be quite large. Then you have Goliath, which is another man of renown who was a giant. So these should all be the offspring from this Nephilim watcher's um offspring situation. But what's happening now in the mountains is that we have a lot of like UFO activity on mountains. We have places like Marfa, Texas, that has the Marfa lights, these strange glowing orbs that happen all the time. Um there's the um Skinwalker Ranch, they have it's not a mountain, but it's a um uh butte. They also have high strangeness and and uh lights and crazy activity in that space. Um I've seen multiple now, obviously, a lot of things that you see nowadays is most likely just AI generated stuff, and I I it it frustrates me to no end because while I understand that people are trying to tell a compelling story, what what happens is is that we we get to a point where we can no longer believe anything and therefore nothing is meaningful. And I think that's that's a challenge that we have to figure out how to use critical um critical thinking to ensure that we're not being deceived by things, um deceived by stories, deceived by images, deceived by uh people, and I try my best not to deceive anybody. I'm just going through the things I read, what I see, how I'm trying to adjust um my um my family comes from um I had two grandfathers who were uh Pentecostal um evangelists, and so I come from a very deep religious um background and spent many years going through Pentecostal and Methodist and uh Baptist sort of um churches and things like that. And um so but I'm also very interested into this paranormal and cryptid and unusual experiences, and there's gotta be a way to reconcile those, and I think there is, and I think that's through um how strange if you really read the Bible and see what they're talking about, and just allow yourself to understand that giants were real, abominations were real, you know, these watchers were real, it it opens up the door to um you know the possibilities of you understanding more, I think. So additionally, you know, when you look through um lots of areas around the world, you have these very strange events like missing 411. There's loads and loads of people that are just gone, they vanish from these mountainsides, or they're taken from a trail down below and then end up like you know thousands of feet above where they were in a time period that they would not be able to travel like children, and um sometimes found, sometimes not. Um there's also disappearances like the deathlov pass, which is um the dead mountain is basically what it's called, where these hikers were found, these campers, they were um very experienced outdoors people, and they were doing this um like certification trip where they were um going through this mountain and they ended up nobody knows what it is, it just says in the investigative report, it just says compelling unknown force that killed them all. Um yeah, the the the Mansi uh language, the uh Diatlov pass basically their slope is called Kolat Shayak Shayakhe, which is basically means mountain of the dead. So it was so such a terrifying experience for them that they cut open their tent, they ran, uh, many of them were in their underwear and their socks, and it was negative six uh negative thirty degrees Celsius. So six of them died by hypothermia, three of them die of injuries consistent with a car crash, and uh one of them is missed in their tongue and their skin and their hair have turned orange. So other clothing tests positive for radiation, but they're not really sure what happened, you know. And this is just one experience. And then there's David Pilates in his missing 411 work, and he's documenting thousands of cases of people just vanishing from national parts with clusters that appear near mountain mountainous terrain or um boulder fields, rock fields on side on the sides of mountains, also near bodies of water, and very often under bizarre circumstances. So they're they're found miles away with no trail, no shoes. Sometimes uh their clothing is removed and folded and placed next to them. Sometimes the clothing is just folded and placed there and they are not there. Uh so it's very strange what's happening in the world around mountains. So so here's where I land on this. I think every human civilization, separated by oceans and millennia, by the languages and everything, I think they looked at mountains as and they all sort of reached the same conclusion that there's something greater than us up in those mountains. And so in order to try to uh come to terms with it or try to engage with it, maybe they built their own mountains. They built their ziggurats and their p pyramids and you know, these mouths to try to get closer to this divine, whatever it might be um and with within their, you know, pantheon of gods or god God Himself. Pardon me. And then um I think the whatever's happening is still happening, right? Whatever strangeness that's going on, I think it's still active within mountain ranges. So mountains were the first altars, they were the first interface to the divine. And I think we really need to kind of look there again just to see um I I think we've lost spirituality and I think the way that we get back to it is by sort of communing with nature a bit more, getting out in the woods, looking at mountains, sort of letting our spirits refill with energy, letting our bodies sort of um become one with nature again. I think the closest you can become to any of your you know, if you're a pagan or if you're a Christian, I think the the closest you're ever gonna come to your faith is out in nature, and I feel like the best place to be uh to get the closest is near a mountain. I hope you enjoyed this uh episode. Uh I'm gonna continue looking into the weird and strange. Um please feel free to follow me on um Instagram, follow me on YouTube. I do very short one minute uh quick documentary style blurbs about interesting stuff, and I would love to see you over there. Have a wonderful evening.