Mountaineering religion – a critical introduction

The outside world, for instance, persists in regarding mountaineering simply as a pastime – a rather peculiar pastime indulged in by very peculiar people. To the true mountaineer it is much more than that: it is a joy, a passion, an inspiration – one might say “a religion.”…The true mountaineer is not a mere gymnast, but a man who worships the mountains…he demands closer contact with the objects of his passion; but this passion is never otherwise than devout and reverential in its quality. To us the great ranges and the glaciers lying at their feet are sacred things. Our cathedrals are the massive white domes and slender rocky spires thrusting upwards into the blue empyraean…We are zealots with an unwritten creed; for a faith to which no Pope has given definition we cheerfully undergo voluntary martyrdoms; and the fervour of our zeal is apt to lead us, as it leads other sectaries, into excesses which at times border on fanaticism (Stutfield 1918).

In 1918, during an annual meeting of The Alpine Club, club member and well-known British mountaineer Hugh Stutfield delivered the above words as part of a reflection on the meaning and significance of mountaineering, characterising mountain climbing activities as a religion. For Stutfield, the particular vocabulary of religion, as well as its symbolic importance to the west, helped to emphasise many of the existential and social components of mountaineering. The dangerous mountain pursuit was not merely recreation; for the climber, it was a religion.

Stutfield’s characterisations are exemplary of how mountains and religions are considered in the nineteenth and twentieth-century western imagination. Fitting within a broader historical moment that sees many westerners respond to the ecological challenges of industrialisation through a celebration and veneration of nature, wild spaces, and mountains especially, mountaineering soon came to matter significantly as a space where existential meaning would be hard-fought-yet-found through active pursuits in the mountains, particularly by climbing them.

Stutfield made it clear, that the true mountaineer, who is also a ‘new mountaineer’ (cf. Macfarland 2003), takes his vertical enterprises seriously: ‘in this seriousness and earnestness we seem to have the nucleus and the germ of a new faith or denomination. A denomination ought, of course, to furnish its votaries with tenets, dogmas and a canon law of its own’ (Stutfield, 242). As telling here as is his turn to denomination as analogy for understanding the growth of mountaineering is Stutfield’s emphasis on ‘tenets, dogmas, and a canon law of its own.’ In these words, Stutfield is foreshadowing much of the cultural stuff of mountaineering religion that we find so fascinating as scholars of religion, and about which, in the academic study of religion we find a paucity of resources useful for critical, rigorous interrogation of these practices. For instance, entire ethical systems will emerge among mountaineers for demarcating right from wrong ways of approaching mountains, and for climbing peaks. Questions like whether or not to use fixed ropes on ascents, or whether to use mechanical drills to bolt safety devices into the mountain will work over the twentieth century to cultivate ostensible ‘denominations’ among mountaineers and rock climbers, alike. All mountaineers, for Stutfield, were part of a religion. While, how a climber undertakes the religion, according to Stutfield, amounts to denominational affiliation – the Alpinists, the rock climbers, the trekkers, etc. Along these lines, Stutfield elaborates,

The climber’s faith, like every other faith, has its ethical as well as its purely dogmatic aspects. We seek by mountaineering to improve our minds and morals as well as our muscles; and a likeness of muscular Christianity may be said to be the result. Physical prowess is a primary object of worship with us, as with other Britons. The first climber began climbing in order to stretch his legs; as he warmed to the work he found that in the process he was expanding his mind. What first appealed to him as a mere exercise or amusement was seen on closer acquaintance to be also a school, a very severe school, of manners and personal courage and other desirable attributes. He found that it supplied him not only with recreation and bodily vigour, but with an education; and from that time forward he began to climb from a stern sense of duty and conviction … As the mountaineer grew daily more and more impressed with the glories of the mountains, the contemplation of them enlarged his spiritual faculties and purified his soul (Stutfield, 244).

Climbing came to establish itself as a school in the sense of a cultural enclave, a disposition towards oneself and the world that had to be cultivated, procured through ritual practice of various sorts. Mountaineering, as is clear from Stutfield’s hagiographic origin account, comes to be a means of what the Greeks might refer to as paidaia, the formation of attention, a deep education that shapes the very character and identity of a person. Towards these ends, mountaineering carries the existential weight of a religion, while in a functional sense, it also reinforces sacred/profane and insider/outsider distinctions. Or, as Stutfield put it regarding the wilderness landscapes full of snow and ice which amount to the mountaineers’ ‘holy of Holies’ (Stutfield, 243), an invasion of unworthy people is considered to be a profanation: ‘Their invasion by unorthodox people, or in unorthodox ways, is to us a profanation of hollowed mysteries. To drive a tunnel through the bowels of our beloved Jungfrau, to set a restaurant or beerhouse like an ugly pot-hat on the head of the majestic Matterhorn is to perpetrate an unspeakable offence against everything we hold dear' (Stutfield, 243). Religious language and imagery is not only a means of securing a rational reflection upon oneself vis-à-vis mountaineering, but also provides the grammar and vocabulary for organising an in-group from an out-group, in this case the mountaineers vs. the vulgar industrialists, capitalists, and those who would not hold the same reverence towards these natural cathedrals.

Religion has played a central role in the development of alpinism and mountaineering among various groups connected to climbing and the mountains climbed. Religion, therefore, seems to offer both a shared grammar for understanding climbing across cultures and societies, but it also works hand in hand with social interests and practices that see various cultures – particularly white, western, masculine Europeans and Americans – dominate both land and people. In the pages that follow as this special issue, we hope to fill a void in the academic literature in two ways: by giving explicit attention to the data of mountaineering as religion, what we are thematically and colloquially naming ‘mountaineering religion.’ And, we want to begin imagining what a critical and decolonising discourse on this data might look like. Towards these ends, we have brought together scholars each offering various critical postures towards the cultural ‘stuff’ of mountaineering and religion. The result is a volume proposing a bit of a historical snapshot mixed with diachronic analysis, met with ongoing theoretical insights – in a word, interdisciplinarity. We hope to apply this intellectual diversity to what we know and admit is our homogeneity on the front of race. Mountaineering has been, and largely remains, a white preoccupation, and the field of religious studies is not immune from that same reality. As such, while the following pages give considerable attention to the impact of whiteness and masculinity on non-white and women’s bodies, historically, the cadre of critics included here remain all-white, for now. There are many reasons for this, but the two most salient are simply that we a) wanted specific contributions from folks with either a critical whiteness discourse-informed or postcolonial critique of white western normativity and b) wanted folks with concrete research interests in mountaineering (as a mountain pursuit) rather than mountains, in general. Mountaineering is a colonial enterprise, as is the study of religion. Bringing these topics together is both harrowing in terms of centring whiteness while it is also necessary if the decolonising task is to take hold. By decolonise, we follow Malory Nye’s suggestion that the task of religious studies includes ‘challenging and changing the sense of white entitlement (and white supremacist) that sets up the structures of power that carefully “allow” (and control) the inclusion of certain forms of diversity’ (Nye 2019, 24).

Stutfield, at the very least, exemplifies the tendency to turn to religious language to reflect on past experience, a means of organising and validating his thoughts and behaviours against an (ever-shrinking) world, while he also models certain colonial and white sensibilities that ignore, undermine, or instrumentalise the perspectives of others. These ‘denominations’ espoused by Stutfield have their adherents even today (free climbing, trad climbing, etc.), seen in the examples of Reinhold Messner, Ueli Steck or Alexander Honnold, all playing a role in the various articles of this special issue. Mountaineering, like the academic study of religion (Nye 2019), needs decolonisation.

This Special Issue’s emphasis on decolonisation gives concrete and ongoing attention to several of the issue vectors emerging from this need, as we each work ‘to understand how race, gender, colonialism, and whiteness’ (Nye, 25) function in (and as) religion, its varied discourses, and the embodied climbing activity. One of these issues is related to access. For instance, in 1906, the U.S. established ‘Devils Tower’ as a National Monument, effectively colonising the prominent rock butte that had for generations prior been (and still is) considered a sacred site by many indigenous communities. As early as 1893, the tower had been climbed by white settlers to Wyoming. Then, again, it was climbed in a fashion born of mountaineering in 1937. Interest in climbing the tower has basically increased among white climbers ever since. In the 1990s, Native American tribes and advocacy groups convinced the National Park Service to ban rock climbing in the month of June (coinciding with a number of prominent Native American ceremonies that take place during the same time). For religion journalist Quincy D. Newell, this presents a fascinating scenario:

To some climbers, the ban goes too far, protecting Native Americans’ religious sensibilities but violating the religious freedom of those who see rock climbing as a spiritual practice. Climbing guide Andy Petefish, for example, bluntly told reporters, ‘Climbing on Devils Tower is a spiritual experience for me,’ a claim that other climbers echoed (Newell 2012).

Where mountaineering meets religion, religion meets cultural upheaval that is the result of colonialism. Religion provides a vernacular negotiation of power for people on both sides of the issue, with indigenous people appealing to it on the grounds of historical precedent, and white westerners using it – in a manner not altogether removed from how religion has always been used by white westerners – as a justification for behaviour and its consequences resulting from being settlers on land that did not originally belong to them. A similar rock formation in Australia, Uluru/Ayers Rock, closed the formation to climbing permanently, under the auspices of the sacrality of the formation for Indigenous peoples.¹

Beyond the issue of access, mountaineering religion focuses attention to the symbolic and political power afforded by naming. Debates surrounding Devils Tower are once again exemplary of broader trends. What to Theodore Roosevelt was named ‘Devils Tower’ is for many native peoples ‘Bear Lodge,’ not counting the variety of indigenous names for the site occurring in native languages. Another example is that of Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, resting in what is now called the Alaska Range. For decades, white settlers referred to the mountain as Mount McKinley, an homage to a former U.S. politician with no specific connection to the mountain at all. In 2015, under the leadership of Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of the Interior officially recognised ‘Denali’ as the proper name of the mountain, having been the name used by the Koyukon indigenous community who consider the mountain sacred. Across much of the world, many communities regard a wide variety of mountains as sacred, and they have for centuries. With the advent of the colonial enterprise, western religious rhetorical signifiers as varied as ‘God’ to ‘Dragons’ were deployed on and about mountains with such ferocity that in many respects, the mountains so many white westerners celebrate as wilderness spaces today became discursive battlefields, wherein various modes of cultural and social capital were obtained or lost by virtue of the embodied movement of first surveyors and eventually climbers on and across these peaks. The Nepalese ‘Chomolungma’ became ‘Mount Everest.’ ‘Denali’ became ‘Mount McKinley.’ ‘Bear Lodge’ became ‘Devils Tower.’ That so many mountains outside of Europe would have European surnames should give all but the most romantic of scholars and climbers pause.

Nationalism is another issue at work in mountaineering, in terms of the constitution of many of the teams that would seek to summit various mountains across the 19th and 20^th century. For many countries in Europe, and for the United States, it was a point of pride to put together and sponsor a team. And in another sense, as the work of Edward Dickinson has shown, notions of ‘Germanness’ galvanising in the latter decades of the 19^th century were related to a proximate racialisation of indigenous inhabitants of the Alps:

From the early eighteenth century through to the early nineteenth, innumerable prominent European intellectuals and literati – from Albrecht Haller to Lord Byron, from Rousseau through Schiller and Goethe to Percy Shelley and John Ruskin – celebrated the Alps specifically and mountains in general as the home of Europe’s own noble savages and the best exemplar in nature of God’s majesty (Dickinson 2010, 581).

In these ways, mountaineering came to look and feel much like a colonial competition, with white nations competing with other white nations at non-white nations’ expense and on non-white lands (both literally and figuratively in the case of the ‘noble savages’ of the Alps). Today, the explicit nationalism of the 20^th century that saw months-long expeditions to far-flung regions has given way to professionalised, corporate guiding outfits that host expeditions based on the highest bidder. Furthermore, if we consider the various sub-disciplines of mountaineering, such as rock climbing, the latter’s inclusion into the (now cancelled) 2020 Summer Olympics is organised in terms of national teams. The Olympic structure, as well as colloquial parlance about mountaineering, exemplify that the frame of the nation-state remains a popular means of evaluation and distinction within and about mountaineering.

Whiteness is another issue central to mountaineering and religion. For instance, today mountaineering is widely regarded as a ‘white’ activity. In fact, in the context of the U.S., journalist James Mills has referred to an ‘adventure gap’ between white and black Americans when it comes to outdoor recreation broadly (Mills 2014). The same largely holds true of mountaineering on an international scale. Many white climbers consider this dearth of black (and brown) participation to be an arbitrary vestige of culture; that is, this is just what white people do, culturally. But in fact, studies are beginning to trouble this widely held notion. Archaeologist and climber Marie Constanza Ceruti is one of the pre-eminent high-altitude archaeologists in the world today. Her prominent reputation was obtained, in no small measure, as her excavation site at the Llullaillaco volcano in the Andes was for a time the highest archaeological site ever, at an elevation of 6739 metres. But more importantly, there Ceruti and her team discovered the remains of three small Inca children, who it is theorised were sacrificed to the mountain god (Reinhard and Ceruti 2010). Such findings trouble any notion of mountaineering belonging to a European or ‘white’ culture. Indeed, centuries and centuries before and half a world away from the Alps, perhaps Inca priests constituted the first mountaineering religion. In another line of inquiry, it is also the case that the widely assumed ‘white’ cultural ownership of mountaineering is as fictional as is whiteness, itself. In other words, both whiteness and its assumed ownership of mountain climbing had to be manufactured. In a brilliantly illuminating study of the relationship between sport and race in Apartheid South Africa, Farieda Khan explains that across the turn of the 19^th/20^th century, various mountain clubs emerged (as did clubs for many sports) in the country (Khan 2019). Forming in such a segregated and anti-black climate, the first university mountaineering organisations were all-white affairs, despite the fact that black South Africans were already participating in mountaineering activities (Khan, 49). In 1931, despite the difficulties of associating in any formal capacity, ‘a group of enthusiastic [so-called] Coloured mountain climbers’ established the ‘Cape Province Mountain Club’ (Khan, 52). As apartheid became official law in 1948, South African mountaineering became officially segregated, and was represented in the racialised university mountaineering clubs. Anti-black animosities and fears of mountaineering miscegenation would run rampant among white South Africans for the insueing decades (Khan, 54–6). For black South Africans, the effects of Apartheid effectively alienated them from mountain spaces:

In Cape Town, the implementation of the Group Areas Act from the early 1960s onwards would be devastating to climbers who used the mountains for recreation. Coloured communities living in areas close to the Table Mountain Chain were uprooted and forcibly removed to dreary, purpose-built townships on the Cape Flats, devoid of sporting and other facilities, and which were situated a considerable distance from climbable peaks. Deprived of easy access to the mountains and faced with inadequate and expensive public transport, it was inevitable that among the Coloured community, mountain hiking as a leisure pursuit would suffer in the wake of forced removals … it was in the sport of mountaineering that the evictions were to prove especially damaging … (Khan, 53).

It is not beyond imagining – much less researching – that similar processes were at work across a colonised globe. Such stories disabuse white westerners of overly naïve assumptions that ‘our’ relationship to mountaineering (or mountains, at all) is sui generis.

The Black Lives Matter protests that re-emerged with such fervour in the summer of 2020 (in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd) left no community untouched. The online climbing community was no exception. On one side of the issue, clothing companies like The North Face and Patagonia pulled advertisements from Facebook as a result of the social media leviathian’s failure to address the rising tides of hate-speech meeting with disinformation on its platform. On the other side of the the protests, it was also revealed that principal investor of the parent company of prominent mountaineering gear manufacturer and retailer Black Diamond, Inc., Warren Kanders, is also owner of the company supplying police forces across the United States with tear gas.² Within this dynamic, many professional climbers began to speak out openly about police brutality, racism, and whiteness. The backlash from angry white climbers to many of these comments was fierce and loud. The defenders of whiteness within the broad climbing community were emboldened to denounce the political statements, regarding them as detracting and sullying the otherwise pristine virtual wilderness space. The logic was akin to parishioners angered when their pastor “gets too political.” Other responses were simply outright and explicit anti-black and brown racism, that would seemingly be more at home in Apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow Southern United States, than on the Instagram comment threads of famous white climbers. The result of these tensions is still to be determined, but led by companies who increasingly regard racism as bad for business, anti-racist activists within the climbing community are slowly revealing the frostbitten face of whiteness and white supremacy within climbing.

Finally, of the various issues to emerge from mountaineering religion, perhaps one of the most salient is masculinity. Mountaineering has been, as many of the articles here bear out, a ‘man’s game’. That said, women often participate in various aspects of climbing. Essentially, as the work of Patricia Purtschert has demonstrated – Purtschert is also a contributor here – the mountain space, for white European (and American) men has been a space where nation met with gender to produce a notion of the proper, courageous, European subject. This is a man who is rational, in need of embodied and cognitive challenges, and who seeks out those challenges that would force a confrontation with who he has perceived himself to be as a man. Like the problem of whiteness in climbing, hypermasculinity inordinately shapes the climbing options for women and non-binary conforming climbers, while it reinforces white masculine domination as a trope to be esteemed and continuously tested. Such tests and reinscriptions of masculine social identity play out in concrete climbing endeavours, as well as in the media accounts of those endeavours. Adventure fiction comes alive alongside the advent of mountaineering, and they work hand in glove to present an image of the white, western European man as rugged, fearless, and a proud representative of the nation-state. This has led to climbing being respected and revered by a large number of people who have a very limited understanding of climbing, suggesting that the identity forged by mountaineering is not limited to the climber’s own identity, but extends to the culture of the climber, as well. Few white men ridicule the practice, and overall, the reputation of climbing within western culture far exceeds what one would expect to be the reputation of a sport with relatively few participants. The work to disentangle gender from religion from climbing from race will be arduous. We hope this collection adds to that endeavour.

From nature religion to mountaineering religion

For Stutfield, as for many contemporary academics on the topic, the threshold for thinking about nature as related to religion exists with Jean Jacques Rousseau, who ‘has been described as the first of the Nature-sentimentalists, the ancestor of modern romantic naturalism, which, in his case, was inflamed by the glorious vision of Mont Blanc from his native town of Geneva’ (Stutfield, 245). In his speech, Stutfield even opines the possibility that Rousseau ‘was the father in some sense of our modern worship of the mountains’ (Stutfield, 245). Stutfield notes, regarding the dangerousness of mountains, that the mountaineer is ‘not over-sanguine with success’ (245), but shows an attitude that he compares to ‘the educated modern Japanese towards his religion – a posture of politeness towards possibilities’. This statement is interesting in many ways. First, the way the ‘modern Japanese towards his religion’ articulates a transformation of Rousseau’s notion of the ‘noble savage’ into a ‘modern savage’, thereby actualising colonial dichotomies between the European and its ‘exotic’ Other. It is noteworthy that by our count, this reference to the Japanese is Stutfield’s only reference to non-white social actors in his entire speech. Second, this also shows the self-conception of the modern, white, and colonial man who sees almost unlimited possibilities from which he ‘politely’ chooses the most daring – the gentleman-colonialist, freely occupying those (unmarked) places where he sees a good ‘possibility’ to survive.

For those readers with working knowledge of contemporary American naturalism or transcendentalism discourses, Stutfield’s reverence shown to wild places – itself always a rather romantic retelling of actual events – may sound familiar. Religious Studies have given considerable attention to American naturalism, transcendentalism, and various expressions of nature religion. To note only of more recent years, perhaps one of the better-known works is American religious historian Catherine Albanese’s Nature Religion in America (Albanese 1990), wherein Albanese situates nature religion as a distinct, albeit disparate religious tradition in the United States, unified under a shared sense of the awe and harmony provided by nature (Albanese 1990). Another American religious historian, Mark R. Stoll, draws certain cultural connections between American Protestantism and the growth of nature religion. The archival material Stoll turns to is filled with anecdotes detailing various mountains climbed as an aspect of this nature worship. Further, on at least one occasion, the 19^th century celebrants of nature were referred to as ‘“climbing clerics”’ (Stoll 2015, 103). As with the above reference from Stutfield, Stoll also sees reason to draw continuities between the advent of nature pursuits and the ‘muscular Christianity’ of the period that championed hypermasculinity (Ibid.). A considerable number of scholars have – too many to account for here – given attention to the sacred or religious significance of mountains. The overwhelming majority of these, however, give scant attention to the embodied climbing pursuit. For instance, in his study of the transformation of the cosmo-geographic space of Mount Meru – a sacred, mythical mountain thought by many adherents of both Buddhism and traditional Indian religion to be the axis mundi, Adrian Hermann gives a rich account of how the discursive site of the mountain became contested space for secularisation debates to unfold (Hermann 2015). Meru, for Hermann, brings together east and west epistemologies, forcing a negotiation (and renegotiation) of meaning, often for both sides. Similar dynamics were at work in efforts to literally climb the eponymously named Meru Peak, in the Garhwal Himalayas of India. The mountain stood for some time as one of the most prized ascents among mountaineers, finally climbed via several different routes during the early 21^st century. A 2015 film documents one such ascent, and in the film, the climbers often attribute considerable mythical powers to the peak (Meru, 2019). A peculiar sort of secular syncretism is at work via climbing, moving semiological meanings from one ‘religious’ register to another ‘secular’ register, and vice versa. Hermann’s piece is useful for underscoring the issues of power impacting disparate knowledge-systems, while we want to suggest that the acute practice of mountaineering is an important site for further exploring such power relations.

Thinking of mountains and religion as symbiotic is not new. Building on such work, our goal is to invite readers into a conversation about mountaineering, specifically, and its variegated relationships to religion. Prior to our efforts here, most treatments of mountains and religion in academic discourse focus on notions of reverence, cultural pluralism, spirituality, and ongoing expressions of enchantment. What if the story of mountains and religion also required attention to the mountaineering religion wherein individuals, groups, and even entire nation-states wrestled with questions of autonomy, identity, and power? Would a turn to the concrete cultural practices arising from the simultaneous demystification of mountains alongside the mystification of embodied recreation practices in wild spaces reveal something new or telling about secularisation, in general? Or, about the west’s relationship to the object of religion? Or, about how we as scholars might attend to power and identity in our work?

One exception to the general rule of religious studies ignoring mountaineering is the work of Bron Taylor. While Taylor does not give extended attention to climbing, his notion of ‘deep green religion’ provides a way of thinking about the psychological and existential sense of awe and yearning that folks like Stutfield seem to be conveying. Writing about how this plays out for surfers, he says that this deep green religion includes ‘myths, rituals, symbols, terminology, and technology; a sense that some places, animals, and plants are especially sacred; convictions regarding what constitutes proper relationships within the community of practitioners as well as with outsiders, human or not’ (Taylor, 125), concluding that ‘rock climbers and other mountaineers’ also follow these ‘same sorts of dynamics’ (Taylor, 125). And such dynamics, according to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, often produce what in the discourse are called ‘peak experiences’, with Csikszentmihalyi describing such experiences in terms of ‘flow’ or the ‘zone’. Taylor turns to Csikszentmihalyi briefly and in doing so, notes that it is potentially the case that some features of what occur during ‘flow’ are cross-cultural (Taylor, 117). Presumably, such findings would offer grist for the religious studies mill. Taylor limits his discussion of ‘flow’ to the surfing arena, but in fact, Csikszentmihalyi has actually researched rock climbers, specifically (MacAloon and Csikszentmihalyi, 1983). For many climbers, the idea of mountaineering religion is more than analogy, but the climbing pursuit contributes to embodied experiences of both oneness and intense distinction (from everything else), as well as other experiences of a total surrender of self. Taylor provides space for these climbing pursuits to be regarded as significant as data for religious studies; and, in fact, both ‘Rock Climbing’ and ‘Mountaineering’ appear in Taylor’s edited Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ecology (2008). Of ‘Mountaineering,’ Kocku von Stuckrad notes that ‘The climbing of a mountain has always been part of religious devotion, but it is only in early modern times that overcoming the difficulties related to high mountain walking became a symbol either of controlling the power of nature or of connecting spiritually with the transcendent realms high mountain areas stand for’ (von Stuckrad 2008). The present Special Issue hopes to build upon this space so described by von Stuckrad, and also to trouble this binary accounting of mountaineering as an object of religion. Further, a paucity of works exist on the subject of mountaineering within religious studies such that none of the representative texts turned to for the encyclopaedia entry’s bibliography include the academic study of religion, much less its critical accounting. In the same encyclopaedia, Greg Johnson – self-identified climber and religious studies scholar – offers a jovial, yet sincere consideration of rock climbing (as a religion), and himself (as climber) as both insider and hopeful outsider (given his critical professional predilection). Johnson suggests climbing best be handled functionally, in terms of exploring it as ritual activity (Johnson, 2008). Doing so would enable a critical posture. In the pages of this journal that follow, we’ve sought to take Johnson’s charge seriously, treating mountain climbing pursuits with a critical methodological distance. Doing so helps to give attention to the discursive manufacturing of objects, artefacts, and experiences as sui generis, while we also include attention to history, critical theory, hermeneutics, ethnography, and yet more functionalism in order to place emphasis on what such activities as rock climbing (a kind of mountaineering, as we treat it here) do in the social world to and for various actors. As readers will see, we think the forging and forming and fighting over social identity is at the heart of such activities. While mountaineering religion may not concretely emerge from ‘masculine Christianity’, such comparisons are appropriate for the analyst to form. In the pages that follow, we hope to forge a transnational conversation that includes attention to the particular European interest in mountains (and mountaineering) that serves as a harbinger and foil for what will later also preoccupy the American alongside the European imagination. And as noted at the outset of this Introduction, we also work to consider this interest in mountaineering with an eye on historical and contemporary colonial practices and hegemonic ways of relating to other persons and places.

Organisation of this special issue

This special issue tries to shed light on a multifaceted aspect of the modern history of religion that is intertwined with white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism as well as with some of its byproducts, e.g. exotericism, (male) heroism, athleticism and a revised vision of masculinity. Accompanying this perspective, that draws from critical whiteness and postcolonial studies, there are a variety of works that tend to treat mountaineering from the standpoint of tourism studies, or Victorian studies. Mountaineering is a kind of tourism, and not surprisingly, much of the scholarly work done on it extends beyond studies of the Victorian era and comes from tourism studies – a combination of social science methodology and business. Tourism, for its part, is a kind of leisure travel popularised in the Victorian era, telegraphing class, race, and other modes of social status, so the routes between scholars of the Victorian era and tourism follow ‘natural’ paths. Western tourism arises from prior travel during the European age of discovery and conquest, and follows these earlier modes of travel’s preoccupation with intercultural contact with the exotic and the unfamiliar – the Other. As a result, much of the work on tourism turns to thinkers like literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt, whose notion of ‘contact zones … refer to social spaces where cultures meet, cloth, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today’ (Pratt 1991). Within these ‘contact zones’ emerge much of the cultural content and data we turn to in the academic study of religion. Hoping to bring together analyses of ‘highly asymmetrical relations of power’ operative in mountaineering with ongoing critical attention to power, ‘colonialism, slavery’, whiteness, and ‘their aftermaths’ expressed in and as ‘religion’, the work of mountaineering religion hopes to accomplish a variety of these overlapping goals.

Historically, mountaineers do not tend to fashion themselves as tourists, but adventurers, anti-tourists, and even priests. On the topic of tourism, Stutfield is once again illustrative. In his 1918 speech, after referring to the dogmas, to which the ‘zealots’ of the mountains hold on, Stutfield regales the encounter of Otherness in the tourist: Stutfield remarks that ‘when we meet the harmless necessary tourist on a glacier our glances and demeanour seem to say to him, “take thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground: none but the demigods of the axe and the rope may enter here’” (Stutfield, 243). Historically, mountaineers seek to escape the ordinary social activities that mark the white western tourist, to the point of expressing antipathy for said tourists. Whereas in this invented stereotype, the ‘tourist’ is the object of exclusion, the history of modern Alpinism has only begun to recall the many ways that Others were excluded from a purely white, male, often martial (at least semantically) and mostly bourgeois enterprise. Further is the basic point that mountaineers, with rare exceptions, are also tourists. Lastly, in recent years, mountaineering has become corporatized such that the line between high mountain tourism (e.g. trekking, hiking in the big mountains without concern to climb to the top, etc.) and mountaineering is increasingly blurry. Yet, today, corporate mountaineering in the Himalaya have in some ways flattened the qualitative distinction between summiting (as a mountaineer) and who can do it (as an ordinary tourist), while also reinforcing the pursuit as an extremely expensive leisure activity. What is at stake for the mountaineer that they would position another tourist as Other, and also work to discipline that other? Also, what mechanisms of discipline and distinction function in the alpine space?

For western mountaineers, every other person, even other mountaineers at times, is treated as part of the landscape, terrain to be overcome, conquered, or rendered into a docile state. Some very noteworthy studies such as from Sherry Ortner or recently Patricia Purtschert (see also this volume) cover the neglected Others of the many golden ages of mountaineering – women, black and brown people (for instance Sherpas), mountain-people (e.g. Bergvölker). But this work is largely ongoing and its results, still emerging. Towards these ends, we hope this Special Issue is constructive.

The first article, ‘Mountains as Sacred Spaces’, from Ulrich Berner, provides a useful long historical account of the relationship between mountains and religion in the western imagination. Applying a method of phenomenology as description, Berner sees a common thread wherein mountains provide certain disclosure experiences to the climbers. He writes of the climbing accounts found in the text of Egeria, a 4^th or 5^th century woman who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There, she ascended Mount Sinai, and in doing so may offer the first acute account of what today we would call technical rock climbing. Berner also briefly discusses the contemporary annual pilgrimage to Mount iNhlangakazi, in South Africa. These examples, for Berner, demonstrate that some mountains, for believers, maintain synchronic and diachronic connections to the holy, providing a hierophanic space for believers. Berner then juxtaposes these ‘religious’ relationships to the mountains with the account of Italian humanist and poet Francesco Petrarca, who in the 14^th century, provides an account of his ascent of Mont Ventoux in Southern France. Petrarca, some have claimed, is the ‘father of Alpinism’, understanding alpinism as the secular pursuit of mountain peaks. Berner situates the mountain, for Petrarca, as the place of a ‘cosmic disclosure’, deconstructing the assumption that ‘religion’ provides a concrete analytic threshold in history. Nevertheless, a genealogy of sorts unfolds for Berner, including English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s growing naturalistic relationship to mountains. This longstanding distinction between nature and religion is ultimately overcome, quite fully for Berner, in the ‘nature religion’ of American naturalist and conservationist John Muir. Berner concludes with explicit attention to colonial, anti-black, and anti-indigenous realities juxtaposing Muir’s sympathetic, yet somewhat ambivalent relationship to the Native Americans removed from Yosemite Valley to make room for the National Park, with the sensibilities of South African Jan Christian Smuts, whose mountain religion did nothing to curtail his deeply racist positions. For Berner, this comparison remarks on both the efficacy of Religious Studies exploring mountains within a ‘poetics of sacred space’ alongside giving considerable attention to the ‘politics of sacred space’.

Next, Patricia Purtschert’s contribution, ‘White Masculinity in the Death Zone: Transformations of Colonial Identities in the Himalayas’, organises and explains mountaineering literature, films, and popular media depictions of the mid-20^th century as part of the colonial archives. At times the white western relationship to these expeditions evinces colonial practices directly, while in other instances it evokes what Purtschert describes as ‘amnesia’ or nostalgia. Situated within this archival material, Purtschert convincingly argues that big mountain climbing enables the liminal deconstruction and reconstruction of white masculine identity, over against other identity motivations like east and west, and national pride. The Swiss expedition of 1952 to summit Everest is the focus of Purtschert’s attention, along with the discourse surrounding Swiss climbing efforts of the early 1950s. In particular, Purtschert underscores a ‘transracial’ ‘brotherhood of the rope’ constituted between Sherpa Tenzing Norgay (the first man to summit Everest in 1953 with Edmund Hillary) and Swiss Raymond Lambert. Together, in 1952, they failed to summit Everest, but in their effort, came to celebrate a transracial bond that is at once intersubjectively progressive, while it is also reproduces certain colonial structures. In Purtschert’s reading, big mountain climbing provides a space where white masculinity reinvents itself.

The third article, ‘Sublime Sahib: White Masculine Identity Formation in Big Mountain Climbing’, finds Christopher M. Driscoll engaging similar themes as underscored by Purtschert, while thinking more about the existential and psychological effects of big mountain climbing ‘contact encounters.’ Thinking about religion through the prism offered by historian of religions Charles Long’s notion of signifying practices that take hold during moments of colonial contact, Driscoll explores the late Swiss mountaineer Ueli Steck’s contacts with risk and limitations. For Steck, there exist dangers and limits faced due to the mountain, limits faced by meditation and the psychological aspects of accomplishing the seemingly impossible, economic and other structural limits, and limits faced by experiences with others. As Steck’s climbing record reveals, the ‘Swiss Machine’ (as he was affectionately nicknamed) excelled at dealing with these first three kinds of limits (whether overcoming them or resigning to them), while on the social boundaries between himself, other Europeans, and professional climbing Sherpa communities, he leaves a more complicated record. Steck, for Driscoll, is ultimately exemplary of distinct sorts of manufactured challenges faced while mountaineers fashion themselves as raced and gendered subjects.

The fourth article is Magnus Echtler’s ‘Call of the Mountain: Modern Enchantment on and off the Screen’. In it, Echtler explores the development of mountaineering in the 20^th century alongside technological, cinematic developments, culminating in the mutual reliance on one another. Mountaineering relied on the burgeoning film industry to establish itself as an aspect of European culture and white masculine endeavour. Film, on the other hand, turned to the big mountains to entertain and elicit embodied responses from viewers. Echtler turns to two classic films, Der heilige Berg (1926) and Der Berg ruft (1936) – the holy mountain, and the mountain calls, respectively – in order to analyse the construction of a mountaineering ‘identity’ within and alongside these films. Such films would contribute to normative notions of gender, race, nationality, and more, as well as help to popularise the distinction between mountaineering and simply hiking. The former involves a wrestling with the constant threat of death, against an unnameable attraction. The paradox of climbing, the immensity of the mountains against the relative size of the climber, is one of many philosophical effects achieved through various production techniques, particularly involving scene, angle, and scale. Echtler argues that similar techniques and effects are at work in contemporary climbing films, particularly in the form of ‘free soloing’, climbing without protective ropes. Echtler then concludes with thoughts on the ongoing enchantment of mountains, seen in the 19^th century Austrian schoolteacher Eugen Guido Lammer, and the contemporary mountaineer, Reinhold Messner, who many regard as the most accomplished mountaineer of all time. These figures, for Echtler, turn to mountains to fill ‘a God-shaped void’ not otherwise filled by traditional religion or disenchanted naturalist worldviews. To this extent, both mountaineering and the cinematic representation of it, provide liminoid spaces wherein various aspects of social identity and one’s existential commitments are renegotiated, and strengthened.

Usual accounts of the history of Alpinism in Europe posit a linear model of secularisation, wherein a growing natural scientific disposition motivates an exploratory impulse within early climbers. These climbers would often summit mountains for the sake of dispelling superstitions involving dragons, and other mythical creatures, once believed to live atop various peaks. In the fifth article, ‘Killing Dragons: Religionisations in the Alps’, David Atwood gives attention to this linear model of events, but troubles it as well through the notion of ‘religionisation’, the discursive positing of Alpinism and mountaineering as ‘religious’. When considered in such terms, it seems as though religion becomes a means of organising one’s perspective towards mountaineering, such that both affirmative and critical religionisations occur across Modernity. Two examples explored by Atwood include Stutfield, who in 1918 concretely refers to mountaineering as a religion, and that of Swiss writer Carl Spitteler, whose religionisations were used to argue against the pursuit of mountaineering, going so far as to criticise the ‘sacralisation of nature’. With these and other examples, Atwood gives nuanced attention to the history of European mountaineering, its relationship to religion, as well as considerable theoretical attention of interest to contemporary scholars of religion and mountains.

While most of the articles of the Special Issue emphasise the actual vertical ascent aspect of mountaineering, descent is a pivotal and precarious aspect of the overall mountain pursuit. In fact, it is the more dangerous side of the alpinism activity, in that most climbing accidents occur in descent. In the final article, ‘Descent from the Peak: Mystical Navigations of Paradox and Trauma on the Down-Climb’, Linda C. Ceriello gives attention to the formation of descent as a mystical wrestling with issues related to existential paradox and embodied trauma. Ceriello looks to narrative use of mountains as metaphor, and overlays it onto the mountaineering pursuit, finding that something of descent often brings with it a collapse of certain assumed philosophical and ontological distinctions, including subject and object, self and other, and more. Specifically, she examines the cases of naturalist and conservationist John Muir, Ramana Maharshi, and Rob Schultheis. A story from Schultheis’ time in the mountains sets the general stage. One day while climbing, Schultheis fell and experienced debilitating injuries. Nevertheless, he managed to descend seemingly impossible terrain while simultaneously experiencing a sense of the loss of self, ultimately refinding that lost self upon completion of the descent. Ceriello juxtaposes Schultheis with Ramana Maharshi’s preoccupation with the mountain Arunachala, a mountain sacred to many Hindus located in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu. Maharshi used the idea of oneness with the mountain as a means of permanently dissolving a sense of self. Ceriello then offers a critical account of certain experiences recounted by Muir, which may suggest a different relationship to the mountains. For Muir, these experiences may evoke qualities common to mystical encounters, but according to Ceriello, Muir does not evince the ‘ontological trauma’ common to the other examples. Ceriello then gives considerable attention to some of the issues and difficulties arising from such a cross-cultural comparative approach.

This perspective on the descent as an often-neglected aspect of the history of mountaineering closes our Special Issue on mountaineering religion. The focus on these many ways of escaping from the ordinary brings in different perspectives, from cultural history, postcolonial and critical whiteness as well as critical religious studies perspectives. There are many aspects of the history of mountaineering with regard to its ‘religion’ that cannot be addressed here. This Special Issue constitutes the early moments of a conversation just beginning. We have brought together a critique of secular accounts of Alpinism that are a result of the (over-)identification of ‘religion’ with Christendom, working to show what can be depicted as the attempt to decolonise both mountaineering as well as its religious undergirding. We invite you to join the conversation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See, for instance, A Ban on Climbing Australia’s Sacred Mountain Uluru. Accessed 16 July 2020. https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/0000015f-799b-d30d-a5df-79bb86bf0000.

2. See, for instance, Çam, Deniz. ‘Meet The Safariland Multimillionaire Getting Rich Off Tear Gas and More In The Defense Industry.’ Accessed 16 July 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/denizcam/2018/12/06/meet-the-safariland-multimillionaire-getting-rich-off-tear-gas-and-more-in-the-defence-industry/#2af6ffb37b0a.