1

Mountains Analogous?
The Academic Urban Legend of Alejandro Jodorowskys Cult Film
Adaptation of Ren Daumals Esoteric Novel
David Pecotic

Independent Scholar

Abstract
The Chilean-French avant-garde filmmaker and self-styled spiritual teacher
Alejandro Jodorowskys 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 Ren 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 films
reception and Jodorowskys 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, Ren 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 (Rawlinson
1997: 291-313). One obvious choice of film, according to both informal online and in
the more formal treatments, is Alejandro Jodorowskys (1929) La Montaa 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,
Ren 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 Daumals 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 Jodorowskys 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 be
seen 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) Ren 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 Ren 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 selfreferential 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 a
Gurdjieffian in the final French years of Gurdjieffs life (Patterson 2000).
Kathleen Rosenblatts Ren Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystic Guide (1999)
remains the sole major work to focus exclusively on Daumals 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 Cobbs 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 Daumals 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 books 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 barelyarticulated 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 Richardsons reluctance to accept the adaptation claim, based on his
intuitive understanding of an artists role in actively shaping occulture, that is
indicative of the fundamental problem with the formal published treatments, including
those of Rosenblatt and Cobb.
Ren 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 of
compensation 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
Jodorowskys 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 protoSurrealist/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 Daumals 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 mtaphysique exprimentale
(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 Ren 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 (18741934) and, after his death, to his widow
Jeanne de Salzmann (18741934). From 1938, as a member of de Salzmanns French
group, Daumal met regularly with Gurdjieff and attended readings from his books
Beelzebubs 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 mid1940 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 Daumals 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 his
first 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 Artauds 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,
Jodorowskys 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 (19281997), 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 Jodorowskys
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 Jodorowskys 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 more
significant 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, Daumals was derived from the literary
experimentation of Jarrys pataphysics, which he continued to use in all his works,
including Mount Analogue; Jodorowskys instead was rooted in Artauds 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 books 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 narrators 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 cant 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
impenetrablethat 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, political
and religious problems of Latin America. The following section details the Thiefs
apprenticeship in the Tower of the Alchemist. Next is the arrival of seven powerful
business people, representing the seven planetsanother iconic sequence satirising
the capitalism of its dayand the revelation of the Alchemists 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 plot
motivations 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 narrators 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 Jarrys 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). Sogols 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 is
often 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
substancesunknown for this very reason in factcapable 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 earths 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).
Sogols 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 Einsteins general theory of relativity
(Kennefick 2007), is a clue to Daumals artistic choice. This is confirmed by
Daumals use of the term Non-Euclidean, found in the books sub-title and the
prcis 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 spacetime 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

13
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 of
space, 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
Daumals non-Euclidean tale; Rn Guenon. Guenons 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 narrators 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 islands 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 Analogues 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 cover
initial expenses (121) and that the only true means of repaying ones 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 Daumals
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 anyones 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). Daumals law is entirely absent from The Holy Mountainthere 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 Daumals 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 Daumals explicit theology. From the beginning, the
narrators 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, Daumals 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 postNeoplatonic 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 narrators account of the entrance of the yacht,
The Impossible, through the solar door via a powerful suction suddenly pulling us
forward (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 Alchemists
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. Jodorowskys 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 well
know what Ren 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) Daumals 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 Sevenassigning to each
completing process seven irregularly developing phases and correlating with the
Western musical scalewhich 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: Gurdjieffs 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 Jodorowskys film
less Gurdjeffian either, for a number of scholars have noted that Ouspenskys 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 Ichazos
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 derived
from 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 Partridges 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 Jodorowskys
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 Gurdjieffs 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 Jodorowskys 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 Daumals 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 person
who takes a pill; rather, he needs to manufacture the pill (Cobb 2006: 126). We know
that the Gurdjieffian leitmotifYou arent born with a soul; you have to make one
for yourselfbecame increasingly important in the lead up to filming The Holy
Mountain (Cobb 2006: 111). We know that while he was aware of Mount Analogue,
Jodorowskys 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 Jodorowskys 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 therapyin 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 Ichazos 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 Jodorowskys own Gurdjieffian enlightenment. It
is easy, though, to see how the confusion arose given the strong focus in the
secondary 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 Jodorowskys 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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