Mountains, Mobilities and Movement

Mountains,
Mobilities &
Movement
Edited by
Christos Kakalis and Emily Goetsch
Mountains, Mobilities and Movement
Christos Kakalis • Emily Goetsch
Editors
Mountains,
Mobilities and
Movement
Editors
Christos Kakalis Emily Goetsch
School of Architecture History of Art Department
Newcastle University University of Edinburgh
Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom Edinburgh, United Kingdom
ISBN 978-1-137-58634-6 ISBN 978-1-137-58635-3 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952596
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To Leslie and Elisabeth
Foreword
I once heard a talk by one of the world’s greatest mountaineers, a man

who had been among the first to conquer some of the highest and most
challenging peaks on earth. He described his breath-taking exploits in
the language of exploration and discovery. And then he exclaimed, in
an unmistakeable tone of regret, ‘there are no explorers any more, only
cavers!’ Now that every mountain peak had been conquered, short of
starting afresh on another planet, the only future for exploration—he
thought—lay underground, a sort of upside-down mountaineering that
would carry the torch of humanity to ever greater depths rather than
to the most ascendant heights. For me, the great man’s remark set so
many discordant bells ringing that I paid scant attention to the rest of
the talk. While the audience listened spellbound to his stories, illustrated
by slides which predominantly featured panoramic shots of formidable
landforms or close-ups of men in gear and goggles, my mind was hooked
on the mountaineer’s regret. Why should he think the era of exploration
to be over? What leads us to believe that a mountain climbed once has
been climbed for ever? What does this say about our understandings of
perception, imagination and memory? Indeed this one remark seemed
to harbour within it a whole agenda for thinking about what mountains
really are, why they fascinate or repel, how they play on our conceptions
of humanity and what it means to be alive, how we experience earth, sky
and the ground between them, and how we measure up—in distance
vii
viii Foreword
and altitude—the space of human habitation. These are the themes of

the volume now in your hands. Before you embark on it, I would like to
enter with a few reflections of my own.
We all come into the world as infants, so let us start from there. For
every infant, the world that gradually opens up to their perception is a
source of continual astonishment. The allure of everything and everyone
around them motivates them to get moving, by whatever means are avail-
able, in order to discover more. Infants and small children are compulsive
explorers, and are making discoveries all the time. Nor do they have to
venture far from home to do so. Indeed they are more likely to discover
things close to home, where familiarity affords the freedom to wander
about in relative safety, unshackled by straps, harnesses and other pro-
tective gear. As grown-ups, however, we are convinced that everything
within the circle of the familiar is already known, and that to explore we
must go further, expand our horizons and gear ourselves up—mentally
as well as physically—for the challenge. The adult’s sense of exploration,
it seems, is the precise opposite of the child’s. One, the child’s, is centrip-
etal; the other, the adult’s, is centrifugal. For young children, perception
and imagination are one, not because their world is one of fantasy rather
than fact, but because they are themselves immersed in the process of
things becoming what they are. Everything and everyone has—or rather
is—their own story, their own way of becoming, and the child-explorer,
going on her way, joins her story with theirs in a correspondence that
can continue for as long as life goes on. The familiar world, for the child,
is an inexhaustible source of revelation. Adults, by contrast, understand
their world to be complete and fully formed. To convert imagination into
reality, or fantasy into fact, they therefore have to go beyond the limits of
the already known. This is what drives the would-be adult explorer ever
further afield.
Is there some point, then, in the life-cycle of a human being, when
childlike exploration ends and adult exploration begins? Or is it rather
that as we get older, a certain discourse—shot through with idioms of
territoriality, conquest and the human domination of nature—exerts an
increasing grip on the mind? In this discourse there are two sorts of explo-
ration, and two sorts of discovery. The first establishes a curriculum, in
the form of a condensed recapitulation of past human achievements, that
Foreword
ix
every child is expected to follow in the course of their education. In this

adultocentric conception of learning, children are merely playing catch-
up on their predecessors, discovering for themselves what earlier genera-
tions already knew, climbing mountains they had climbed. The second is
the sort of exploration and discovery of which we pretend that never in
all of human history has it been done or made before. Here the explorer-
discoverer—commonly assumed to be male—takes the first step, pulling
the rest of humanity in his wake. From these small steps, we say, is the
history of humankind made. This imagination of history, I believe, lay
behind the exclamation of the regretful mountaineer. If making history
means setting foot where no man has been before, then how can human
history continue if there are no more summits on which to stand for the
first time? The great man seemed almost to be offering an apology for the
fact that he had bagged so many mountains for himself, leaving none for
future generations. Are we now condemned to the endless recapitulation
of a once glorious past? Is the inverse mountaineering of the caver the
only remaining option, or would we do better to direct our ambition to
other planets? Might there be mountains to be climbed on Mars?
In the narrative of territorial conquest, peaks imagined are progres-
sively converted into peaks remembered; the eye-witness account paints
the mountain as a true story, a thing of fact rather than fiction. But to
paint it thus is also to deny the mountain any story of its own. To say
that once climbed, every subsequent climb is a repeat performance is to
assume that the mountain itself remains exactly as it was—that while his-
tory moves on, the mountain is on the side of an ever-constant nature. But
nature is not constant. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once
observed, there is no holding nature still and looking at it. Mountains
have their stories just as we do. A peak that had never seen a human
before our mountaineer arrived has, since then, seen many more humans.
They have built steps in its gullies, hammered spikes into its rock faces,
left their litter all over the place. But for a mountain that has been shaped
over aeons of time by earthquakes and eruptions, by immense forces of
descending ice and water and by extremes of weather, the human imprint
must seem of little consequence. For the great slumbering giant, the con-
quering hero is no more than a minor irritant, like a fly on the tip of
its nose. The mountain does not feel conquered or domesticated, con-
x Foreword
tacted by civilisation or incorporated into the human fold. It promptly

forgets—if it ever noticed—that someone was up there, waving his arms
ecstatically on the summit. It just goes on being there, doing its thing.
Indigenous people, for whom mountains are a familiar, everyday pres-
ence, know to treat them with respect. Often they have ascended their
mountains many times, long before explorers arrived to climb them ‘for
the first time’, not in order to claim them for themselves, but to petition
for their protection and prosperity, for clement weather and good crops.
In the sixth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus is alleged
to have declared that you cannot step twice into the same waters of a flow-
ing river. Is it not the same with the mountain? Is not every ascent the
first? This depends, of course, on how you define the mountain. Perhaps
you will identify it as the landform seen from afar, with its characteristic
profile. ‘Here is a picture of Everest’, you say; ‘Everest is a mountain’. It
looks like a mountain because you are far away from it. Any profile, of
course, will be one of many, often markedly different, viewed from dif-
ferent vantage points. But they all add up to a monumental presence
which gives every sign of permanence. Having once been climbed for
the first time, then every subsequent climb of the same mountain is a
repeat performance. The only way to introduce variation is by changing
the route, tackling this face rather than that. But for the climber on the
slopes or at the summit, the mountain is not a profile, or even a route.
Indeed it does not really look like a mountain at all. It rather feels like
one. And that feeling is one of immersion in a whole that comprises the
rock and earth beneath one’s feet, the sky above and between them the
carpet of vegetation, the waters of bubbling brooks and stagnant bog,
birds and beasts, rain and snow, clouds and swirling mists. Here you are
climbing, to be sure, but you are not climbing the mountain. Rather,
you are climbing in the mountain. What is more, you can never climb
twice in the same mountain. For if the mountain is all flow, then—just
as Heraclitus observed for the river—the idea that a mountain ascended
once is ascended for ever is simply absurd.
So when the regretful mountaineer told us that all peaks have been
climbed, and that none remain to conquer, it can only be because he
understood the mountain from the perspective of one who is not in it. He
does not inhabit the mountain but goes at it as a soldier might embark on
Foreword
xi
a campaign, fitting himself up against a perceived adversary and hoping to

prevail by force of arms. And then he leaves, having reached the summit
and secured his place in history. This explains why his pictures are either
distant shots with no people in them, or close-ups with people armed to
the teeth and laden with equipment. For inhabitants, mountains are part
of a familiar but ever-evolving world, where nothing is the same from one
moment to the next. Inhabitants get to know this world by making paths
through it. Life is measured out in steps and traced along the ground. The
mountaineer, however, is not an inhabitant but an occupant. His lines are
not traced in walking but are first projected, as a solution to the puzzle
of how to get from base to summit by a connected sequence of points,
and then enacted on site by means of ropes and spikes. Paradoxically, this
places the most distant peaks closer to metropolitan centres from which
every expedition typically starts, than to the inhabited rural areas in the
foothills. The mountaineer’s telescopic vision vaults the hills to reach the
summits, the angles of which are framed in the distant view. The lands in
between are merely to be passed through; their inhabitants maybe pressed
into service as porters for the expedition’s baggage. Even today, moun-
taineers tell of their exploits as if the odd sighting of a local person going
about their business, perhaps herding animals or cutting hay on steep
inclines, were an irrelevance.
People, in the practice of their livelihood, go along. But the mountain-
eer has only one aim, to go up. His ambition is framed by verticality. For
him it is the summit that counts, not the great, having mass of rock of
which the summit just happens to be the highpoint. If you are farmer or
herdsman, or even a traveller, and if you are more interested in making
your way through a landscape than in rising to the top, then do not call
it a mountain. Call it a hill! Where mountains are for climbing, hills are
for walking. Though climbers tend to speak of hills rather disdainfully, as
landforms of insufficient stature to qualify as proper mountains, the real
difference comes down to the question of how the relation between land
and form, or ground and feature, is understood. The walker, whether
going uphill, downhill or on the level, remains in continual contact with
the ground by way of the feet. Thus the ground itself appears corrugated,
and the hills and valleys are its folds. These corrugations are felt in the
muscles, whether straining with or against the force of gravity. Not so for
xii Foreword
the mountaineer, however. From his telescopic perspective the ground

figures as an isotropic plane, open to the horizon and level with the sea,
upon which forms and features are placed as if on a base. The earth itself
appears furnished, and among its furniture, mountains are by far the
biggest and most impressive features. In this perception the mountain
is not ground but a structure that rises from it, with base, sides and top.
As the climber scales the mountainsides, so he pulls himself ever further
up. Whereas hillwalking is a way of inhabiting the world, or a practice of
immanence, what the mountain offers the occupant climber is transcen-
dence. And for that, he is prepared to risk life and limb.
University of Aberdeen Tim Ingold

Aberdeen, Scotland
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Emily Goetsch and Christos Kakalis
Part 1 Performativity 13
2 Deep and Dark Play in the Alps: Daring Acts and Their

Retelling 15
Jonathan Pitches
3 In the Shadow of the Mountain: Tracing the Hesychast

Inhabitation of Mount Athos 37
Christos Kakalis
4 Reading Mountains: Performative Visual Language in

Tenth-Century Northern Iberian Monastic Communities 59
Emily Goetsch
5 ‘Ecosophic Cartographies’ of Mount Pentelicon 81

Maria Mitsoula
xiii
xiv Contents
Part 2 Changing Perspectives 105
6 Climbing the Invisible Mountain: The Apse

Mosaics of St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, and
Their Sixth-Century Viewers107
Andrew Paterson
7 How Can One Be a ‘Montagnard’? Social and Political

Expressions of Modern Imaginaries of Territoriality129
Bernard Debarbieux
8 A Difficult Line: The Aesthetics of Mountain

Climbing 1871–Present155
Anja-Karina Nydal
9 Untimely Mountains | Entangled Matter171

Kim W. Wilson
Part 3 Mobility 187
10 Mountains as a Way of Seeing: From Mount of

Temptation to Mont Blanc189
Veronica della Dora
11 Representing the Landscape of the Sierra Nevada

(Granada): A ‘Translated’ Mountain of Reception
of the Nineteenth-Century Alpine Geographical
Imaginations213
Carlos Cornejo-Nieto
Contents
xv
12 ‘I Lift Up My Eyes to the Hills …’237

George Pattison
13 Mountains Run Mad: Picturesque Signatures

in the Dolomites255
William Bainbridge
Index285
List of Contributors
William Bainbridge Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London,

UK
Carlos Cornejo-Nieto Independent Researcher, Madrid, Spain
Bernard Debarbieux University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Veronica Della Dora Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
Emily Goetsch History of Art Department, University of Edinburgh,
Edinburgh, UK
Christos Kakalis School of Architecture, Newcastle University,
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Anja Karina-Nydal Independent Scholar, Kent, UK
Maria Mitsoula University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
Andrew Paterson University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
George Pattison University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
Jonathan Pitches University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Kim W. Wilson University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
xvii
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Mapping the ascent to the peak of the mountain of Athos
in the silence of the landscape 43
Fig. 3.2 Mapping the search for silence of Elder Joseph the Hesychast 49
Fig. 4.1 Mappamundi from the Girona Beatus. Catedral de
Girona, Num. Inv. 7(11), ff. 54v–55r. Girona Cathedral
Chapter—all rights reserved 63
Fig. 4.2 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS. Lat. 6018, folios
63v–64r. ©Vatican Library 66
Fig. 4.3 Oxford, Bodleian, MS Laud. Or. 317, folios 10v–11r 67
Fig. 4.4 Beatus of Navarre map. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale,
nouv. Acq. Lat. 1366, ff. 24v–25r. Bibliothèque nationale
de France 68
Fig. 5.1 Southwest and northeast sides of Mount Pentelicon. Images
by the author, 2012 82
Fig. 5.2 The four prints produced for the ‘Moving Mountains’
exhibition in the Tent Gallery, Edinburgh College of
Art and a collection of slides from the Prezi presentation
‘Attic Marble Places’. Collage of images produced
by the author, 2014 84
Fig. 5.3 Opencast quarrying at Dionysos quarries. Image by the
author, 2012 86
Fig. 5.4 Underground quarrying at Dionysos quarries. Image by
the author, 2012 87
xix
xx List of Figures
Fig. 5.5 Attic Marble Landscape. Model by the author and images
produced by Google Earth software 2014 90
Fig. 5.6 Attic Marble Landscape. Drawing and installation by
the author, 2014–2016 96
Fig. 6.1 View of St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai 108
Fig. 6.2 The Transfiguration of Christ. c. 550–65. Apse Mosaic.
Sinai, Basilica of St. Catherine’s Monastery 114
Fig. 6.3 Moses and the Burning Bush. c. 550–65. Mosaic. Sinai,
Basilica of St. Catherine’s Monastery 116
Fig. 6.4 Moses receiving the Law. c. 550–65. Mosaic. Sinai, Basilica
of St. Catherine’s Monastery 117
Fig. 6.5 St. Peter. Detail of Fig. 6.2 122
Fig. 7.1 Camille Guy and Marcel Dubois, 1896, Album
géographique, Paris, A. Colin 135
Fig. 9.1 Wilson, K. W. (2015) ablation (sculpture) Generator Projects,
Dundee179
Fig. 9.2 Wilson, K. W. (2013) choler (work on paper) Edinburgh
Sculpture Workshop, Edinburgh 181
Fig. 9.3 Wilson, K. W. (2013) choler (work on paper, detail and
outline of subsequent bleed) Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop,
Edinburgh182
Fig. 10.1 Duccio da Buoninsegna, The Temptation of Christ on the
Mountain, 1308–1311, Frick Collection 191
Fig. 10.2 William Richard Smith, Mount of Temptation, 1829.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London 192
Fig. 10.3 The Madaba map, Jordan, sixth century, Alamy 194
Fig. 10.4 Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503–1514, Louvre 199
Fig. 10.5 Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander at Issus, 1529, Alte
Pinakothek, Munich Royal 201
Fig. 10.6 Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Marc-Théodore Bourrit,
Circular View of the Mountains from the Summit of the Bouët,
1779. Beinecke Library, Yale 205
Fig. 10.7 Fulton, Description explicative du Panorama ou Tableau
circulaire et sans borne ou manière de dessiner, peindre
et exhiber un tableau circulaire, Brevet April 16, 1799.
Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle, Paris 206
List of Figures
xxi
Fig. 11.1 Bird’s eye view of Granada, the irrigated land of the Vega,
and the snow-capped Sierra Nevada in the background.
Source: Google 214
Fig. 11.2 Landscape of Bellinzona. Lithography. Source: William
Beattie, La Suisse pittoresque: ornée de vues dessinées
spécialement pour cet ouvrage. London, 1836. Courtesy of
Viatimages/Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire –
Lausanne221
Fig. 11.3 T. H. S. Bucknall Estcourt. The Sierra Nevada from the
Alhambra, 1833. W. Westall, engraver. Lithography.
Source: T. H. S. Bucknall Estcourt, Alhambra/T.H.S.E.
London, 1832–1833. Courtesy of Archivo del Patronato
de la Alhambra y Generalife, Granada 225
Fig. 11.4 David Roberts, The Alhambra from the Albaycin. 1834.
E. Goodman, etcher. Steel engraving. Source: T. Roscoe and
D. Roberts, Jennings’ Landscape Annual for 1835, or, Tourist
in Spain Commencing with Granada. London, 1835.
Courtesy of Archivo del Patronato de la Alhambra y
Generalife, Granada 227
Fig. 13.1 Gustave Doré, La légende du juif errant, Paris, 1856, plate VIII 266
Fig. 13.2 Josiah Gilbert, Dolomite Forms in Titian and others of the
Venetian School, in Gilbert (1869, plate XII, page 74) 271
Fig. 13.3 Josef Madlener, The Berggeist, 1920s, ink, watercolour
and gouache, 675×508 cm, private collection, sold at
Sotheby’s in 2005 Image provided courtesy of Sotheby’s
London272
1
Introduction
Emily Goetsch and Christos Kakalis
Landscape is tension, the tension between perceiver and perceived, subject

and object.
Wylie et al. 2008, 202
Landscape isn’t either objective or subjective; it’s precisely an intertwining, a

simultaneous gathering and unfurling, through which versions of self and
world emerge as such.
Wylie et al., 203
E. Goetsch (*)
History of Art Department, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
C. Kakalis
School of Architecture, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
© The Author(s) 2018 1

C. Kakalis, E. Goetsch (eds.), Mountains, Mobilities and Movement,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_1
2 E. Goetsch and C. Kakalis
We often think of the landscape as something static or slowly changing,

endowed with a sense of stability that is only disrupted in moments of
crisis, such as natural or human disasters. Therefore, it is common for our
understanding of the landscape, which is developed and expressed
through both actual experience and representations, to refer to a static
topography, leading us to find security in the stable spatial context gener-
ated also by the unchanging landscapes of our thoughts and memories.
Furthermore, we often rely on maps and other visual references, which
we assume present an accurate and still representation of the world
around us. In this context, iconic geological features such as mountains
are usually considered to be stable, unmovable elements, landmarks that
are enhanced by their emblematic presence in the topography and their
often rough materiality, which allow for a number of both cultural and
historical axis mundi connotations to be attributed to them.
In spite of our ‘accurate’ representations of the world around us and
the assumed stability of geological features such as mountains, however,
it is not rare for us to lose track of where we are and how our position
relates to different directions, features of the landscape and other entities.
Our so-called accurate models, which are based on a stable Cartesian
understanding of space, lack the experiential qualities of a topography,
which are bodily inhabited by humans and therefore ever-changing in
terms of how people relate to and understand them. This Cartesian and
objective representational approach to geography opposes the non-
representational understanding of landscape, which was initially pro-
posed by Nigel Thrift in the 1990s (Thrift 1996) and then further
developed by numerous scholars such as J. D. Dewsbury and Derek
McCormack (Dewsbury 2000; McCormack 2005). Such non-
representational models embrace experiential spatiality and suggest how
it can be used to explore a range of new geographical understandings and
possibilities. Practice and performativity open fields of investigation in
which embodied movement plays an important role as the landscape
continually changes depending on our movement through and experi-
ence with it.
This tension between us and the landscape is a significant strain that
cannot only be grasped visually and abstractly. As such, representational
and non-representational approaches to geography are intertwined in this
1 Introduction 3
book in order to more holistically evaluate the friction between the indi-
vidual and their environs, suggesting the importance of mountainous
topographies within the realms of human experience and the humanities.
As human geographer John Wylie argues, the landscape emerges in the
tension between an objective and a subjective understanding of the world.
Indeed, for Wylie, the landscape is a tension between the perceiver and
the perceived. It is the reality shared between a moving individual and the
context that he/she moves through. Within this framework, landscape
becomes a phenomenological situation rather than a static image or back-
ground. The landscape is something living and changing through the
perception of the individual; it is the tension between an object being
experienced and the subject experiencing the object through his/her
senses. This multi-sensory condition is experienced to a great extent (and
almost to its limits) in the case of the mountains that from distant,
emblematic natural elements become the foldings of the earth’s skin as
perceived by the mountaineer climbing up to them, the thinker that
imagines them, the reader that interprets them, the artist or the architect
that depicts them.
Emphasising such a non-static understanding of natural elements,
which varies depending on how we inhabit and represent them, the
authors of this volume seek to answer questions about the moving char-
acteristics of mountains. Are mountains moving entities? How do we
move through mountains? Can we move mountains? How can we depict
a moving mountain? These diverse and complex questions call for an
interdisciplinary exploration of movement via experiential, representa-
tional as well as hermeneutical approaches.
Furthermore, the tensions that Wylie attributes to landscape, and this
understanding of mountains as key moments of a topography, raise other
questions that the chapters of this book seek to unfold: With what kind
of tensions are we dealing? How can we define these tensions in the
exploration of a physical element that has been thought as relatively
static, emblematic and aesthetically imposing? What are the different
approaches to such tensions?
Through examinations of different areas of cultural landscapes and
mountain studies, from mapping to practical experience, the authors of
this volume explore the different tensions found between mountainous
landscapes and agents of interpretation. Concepts of performance, practice

and mobility are deployed in order to demonstrate and explain the
non-static nature of mountains, as realised through inhabitation, inter-
pretation and communication.
Several areas of academic discourse have begun to explore these themes
more specifically. In particular, associations between performativity and
different theatrical actions such as writing a play, working on its scenog-
raphy, rehearsing and executing it have served as a common ground for
scholars as a means of unfolding the dynamics of landscape through
non-representational methods. Underlining the significance of the con-
nection between performance and theatricality, even as a way of under-
standing of everyday life, Carlson argues: ‘with performance as a kind of
critical wedge, the metaphor of theatricality has moved out of the arts
into almost every aspect of modern attempts to understand our condi-
tion and activities, into every branch of human sciences […] performa-
tivity and theatricality have developed in these fields, both as metaphors
and as analytic tools’ (Carlson 1996, 6). Challenging traditional theatri-
cal praxis through interdisciplinary and intercultural comparisons,
moreover, Richard Schechner also highlights the performative intercon-
nection between theatre and real life. The notions of the ‘presentation
self ’, ‘restored behaviour’ and ‘expressive culture’ underpin his ideas,
making way for interpretations of both theatre and role-playing in real
life, which are based on transformations happening from culture to cul-
ture and from historical period to historical period (Schechner 1985,
35–116).
For Schechner, theatrical performance has the ability to transform the
performer through the narrative of its production, something that can be
so powerful that it is also transformative for the audience. Building upon
Schechner’s arguments and focusing on the narrative aspects of theatre,
Jonathan Pitches explores in his chapter the performative dynamics
which are inherent to the narration and re-tellings of ‘dark play’ as related
to three different mountains: Mont Blanc, the Eiger and the Matterhorn.
Covering a wide span of time, from 1852 to 2014, Pitches examines the
tension found in dangerous performances which require risky move-
ments through the spaces of these mountains, as viewed and recorded
through telescopes and headcams.
1 Introduction 5
Following a similar track, the connection between performativity and

religious topography has been greatly explored by numerous scholars.
Repetitively conducting symbolic actions, rituals are believed to be
performative ways for people to contact the ‘sacred’ (Baker 2010, 41).
Religious topographies (including both the architecture and the natural
landscape of a site) become the spaces in which a number of built, unbuilt
and human components are harmoniously combined according to the
employment of ritual practices. The body-subject is always in a dialectical
relationship with its context, inscribing ritual performances in place and
becoming both author and reader at the same time.
Rituals have their own spatial and temporal characteristics that com-
municate diverse messages in a multi-sensory way. Meaningfully per-
forming a given act or idea, the individual participates in a ritual praxis,
constantly moving between individual and collective levels of embodied
interpretation. Therefore, in his chapter, Christos Kakalis explains how
Mount Athos becomes a space for silent prayer and ritual actions to take
place. The Athonite landscape emerges through the reciprocal interrela-
tion between silence and communal ritual, stasis and movement. By
examining the interpretation of both the ascetics and the visitors, Kakalis
explores a mountainous religious topography as a place of religious move-
ments and pauses, an eventual spatiality also expressed in his experiential
visualisations, to echo Wylie’s argument:
I think space still speaks of emptiness, absence, interval. The stillness and silence
of juxtaposition. Place, by contrast, and even despite all the attempts to think of
it differently, relationally, globally, is always already too full, too full of itself
and the others: a whole congregation; everybody present. But I think that land-
scape works precisely amidst and through both of them: presence/absence.
Landscape sits precisely on this tipping-point, both joining and dividing. It
tears things apart, and maybe even sometimes threads them together again.
(Wylie et al. 2008, 203)
Expanding on Wylie’s aforementioned theme of place, Emily Goetsch

examines the tension between the compromised circumstances of Iberian
Christian communities who migrated to Christian strongholds in the
mountainous, northern regions of the peninsula during Muslim occupation
of the Iberian Peninsula and their fundamental belief in salvation and tri-
umph. Through close examination of medieval Iberian cartography, namely
the Beatus Mappaemundi, and relevant textual material, the author argues
that the mountainous landscape was used by medieval Iberian Christians as
a way of resolving or rationalising the tensions between the political, social
and religious uncertainty they experienced and the salvational context of
Christian ideology. By unpacking cartographic iconography and texts from
the period, Goetsch argues for the performative transposition of historical
and biblical narratives on ascetic triumphs in the mountains, citing the City
on a Hill (Jerusalem) as a prototype for the behaviours and considerations
of those communities.
Goetsch’s discussion of cartographic features extends from earlier lit-
erature on the ways in which maps are structured in relation to particular
kinds of historically situated interests (power, legal title, symbolic claims,
etc.). Since the late 1980s an important shift has taken place within stud-
ies of cartography and we have become acutely aware of the contingent
nature of data and the partiality of all kinds of maps and the codes they
use to communicate the elements of a territory. Cartographers such as
J.B. Harley, J. Corner, J. Crampton and J. Pickles have led the academic
discourse on the topic, which aims to redefine the philosophical and
practical approaches to cartography. Considering the importance of per-
formativity and embodiment, they argue for the role of maps as agents of
an ‘eventful’ world, the creation of which is an unfinished process,
remaining always open to further interpretations (Harley 1992, 1–20).
Maria Mitsoula’s chapter also challenges traditional cartographic meth-
ods and their role in design process. The depiction of topography is
mainly connected to cartography which represents the earth’s relief
through schematic models such as hutching, contour lines and physiog-
raphy. Mapping is recognised to be on the boundary between conven-
tional encoding of spatiality and the meaningful embodied topography,
concepts which have played a key role in architecture since the 1980s,
with architects using mapping as a generative tool in architectural design
(Dorrian 2005, 61–72). Challenging these ideas, Mitsoula’s chapter
explores the dialogue between the architecture of Athens and Mount
Pentelikon through the agency of marble, also suggesting new ways of
representing the space graphically so as to indicate the critical roles that
1 Introduction 7
movement and performativity play in the landscape. Dynamically

responding to non-representational theories, this approach echoes the
Deleuzian tension between possibilities and virtualities that suggests
multiplicities in time and space that are ready to be grasped in actual
experience and interpreted in mapping explorations.
In addition to the ways in which performativity facilitates an under-
standing of the significance of mountains and the ways in which people
move through and according to them, different interpretations of moun-
tains in diverse cultural, historical, social and disciplinary contexts also
open new perspectives in their understanding with regards to the ways in
which mountains can change and shift. They describe events when the
individual (artist, author, missionary, mountaineer) begs questions of the
topography through his/her experience, while simultaneously being asked
different questions by the topography. As is suggested by German phi-
losopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, this exchange of queries and challenges
creates a discourse of changing perspectives (Gadamer 1989, 301). In this
sense, historical, social and cultural redefinitions of geography have influ-
enced the construction of mountaineer’s identity as it has been the subject
of discourse for more than 20 years now, something examined in Bernard
Debarbieux’s chapter. Imagination plays an important role in these pro-
cesses allowing even for contemporary scientific paradigms of mountains
to be explored as both real and invented elements of landscape.
Through shifting lines and changing barriers, mountaineering suggests
an ‘aesthetic pleasure’ as expressed in Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s
approach to climbing a mountain (1920s) and other mountaineering
manuals and testimonies from diverse areas, from late nineteenth century
to contemporary ones. Pleasure pre-occupation through the practical and
embodied conquering of the idea of line becomes a theme worthy of
further investigation. In climbing, Anja Karina Nydal suggests, the line is
ever-changing and always linked to the idea of difficulty, which is experi-
enced in the fatigue of the ascent and the achievement of a goal. These
arduous aesthetics of trekking up the ‘difficult line’ set the framework for
further investigation of these ideas in creative practices, such as literature,
art and architecture.
Apart from the more philosophical and theoretical approaches to
changing perspectives, mountains and mountaineering also become the
core of practical artistic and architectural processes which develop into

creative interpretations of natural and built landscape as a way of
understanding their conflicting elements and ideas. Questions of artists’
decision to include mountains in their narrative and to examine the sig-
nificance of cultural and historical contexts in their interpretations are of
vital importance, illuminating the dynamic nature of the theme of moun-
tains in the humanities. Interpretation of mountainous landscapes pro-
vides artists with the opportunity to address the tension between the
known and the unknown, the familiar pre-understanding and the new
other. It allows for a ‘real fusion of horizons’ to occur (Lebech 2006,
230). In this process, the interacting components are transformed to sug-
gest different understandings of their interrelations, something unfolded
both by each individual chapter and the section itself as a field of inter-
disciplinary discourse.
In line with this understanding, Andrew Paterson explores the role of
the sixth-century mosaic of Christ’s Transfiguration along the apse of the
basilica in the monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai. Paterson considers
this image within the pilgrimage tradition of the shrine, exploring the
mosaic as a kind of ‘treatise in a visual theology’. The chapter examines
the icon’s lack of an image of Mount Tabor, on which Transfiguration is
believed to have taken place, drawing connections to theological ideas
about divine contemplation, which is seen as a mystical climb of an
‘invisible mountain’. Exploring the polarity between presence and
absence, Paterson argues about a mountain that while invisible, it still
appears through its embodiment in pilgrimage and monastic practices.
Kim W. Wilson also uses art as a lens to examine the shifting perspec-
tives introduced by the study of mountains. Bridging past and present,
Wilson fuses theories of New Materialism and Feminism with artistic
approaches to oil-waste bings, which shaped her own understanding of
the mountainous (industrial) landscape that has contributed to her
understanding of the world since childhood. Illuminating the paradox of
‘becoming-while-not-becoming’ that is inherent to Niddry Bing, she
examines (through both theoretical and practice-based exploration) the
site and the oil waste. Moving back and forth between the whole and the
part, Wilson argues for the generative dynamics of matter and its politi-
cal, social, economic and environmental implications.
1 Introduction 9
Further developing the tension between polarities, William Bainbridge

suggests ‘madness’ as a ‘topographic trope’. Bainbridge examines
mountains that are striking because of their ‘aesthetic disorder’, their
‘strangeness’ and ‘unfamiliar juxtaposition of familiar ingredients’ as
demonstrated through the case of the Dolomites. The interaction between
order and disorder provides another understanding of mountains as a
tensive geography.
Continuing to address the examined tension of mountain geographies,
mobility in geography provides another way of evaluating the connec-
tions between peoples, ideas, objects and information, considering not
only how and why patterns of movement and exchange occur but also the
consequences of such interactions. Given the rising prominence of mobil-
ity theory across disciplines, the final three chapters in this volume
employ ideas of mobility in order to suggest how ideas and images of
mountains are transposed into different settings, indicating the concep-
tual and symbolic mobility of mountains.
Mobility theory came into prominence in the 1990s through the work
of scholars such as Mimi Sheller, John Urry and Tim Cresswell. Sheller
and Urry were particularly instrumental in defining and framing this
theoretical rise, as their 2006 article ‘The new mobilities paradigm’ dis-
pelled pre-existing static or sedentary approaches to the social sciences,
instead suggesting that ‘all places are tied into at least thin networks of
connections that stretch beyond each such place and mean that nowhere
can be an “island”’ (Sheller and Urry 2006, 209). Broad in its approach,
this paradigm is applied to a range of topics, from migration to the dis-
tribution of resources and from transportation routes to tourism. While
Shelly and Urry acknowledge that theories of mobility also include
‘movements of images and information’, the applications of mobility
theory have generally focused on ways of connecting and facilitating
access to different regions and peoples, with comparatively little emphasis
being placed on movement caused by changing perspectives, and the evo-
lution of geographical and geological forms, such as mountains (Sheller
and Urry 2006, 212), which lend themselves to cultural pressures and
changes in understanding.
Provided the limited consideration of mountains within the new
mobilities paradigm, it is worth examining the work of Georg Simmel,
whom Sheller and Urry cite as setting the stage for studies of mobility.
More specifically, in Simmel’s essay, ‘The Philosophy of Landscape’, he
describes nature as the ‘infinite interconnectedness of objects, the unin-
terrupted creation and destruction of forms, the flowing unity of an event
that finds expression in the continuity of temporal and spatial existence’
(Simmel 2007, 21). In discussing this fluid facet of landscape, Simmel
acknowledges that ‘the human gaze … divides things up and forms the
separated parts into specific unities’, suggesting that the status and posi-
tion of landscapes and natural forms change according to the viewer
(Simmel 2007, 22).
This sense of mobility through perspective is addressed specifically in
this book by Veronica della Dora, who suggests how mountains move
according to different vantage points, shifts in the gaze and ways of visu-
alising the world. Della Dora suggests that tensions arise as perspectives
and roles change according to how different individuals, cultures and
societies position themselves in relation to mountains, which shift accord-
ing to varying understandings and interpretations.
This concept of mobility through interaction with the landscape is
also explored in Carlos Cornejo-Nieto’s chapter, which addresses the
intercultural movement of mountain imagery through his analysis of
British travel accounts. Veronica della Dora has previously explained
that representations of landscapes do not just function as ‘visual texts’,
but rather can be ‘“enchanting” material objects’ which are ‘embedded
in different material supports which physically move through space and
time, and thus operate as vehicles for the circulation of places; worlds
in miniature visually and physically possessed by the beholder and yet
able to exercise their own agency’ (della Dora 2009, 334–335). It is in
this vein that Cornejo-Nieto argues for the mobility of seemingly static
English images and conceptions of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which
were made mobile via cultural media that was transported from the
English imagination into new interpretations of the Sierra Nevada
range.
Similar to the mobility of objects and representations, the movement
of symbols and ideas offers another fresh avenue for considering the
mobile potential of mountains. ‘Mobile Semiotics’, as first termed by Ole
B. Jensen, provides a new framework which can be used ‘to explore the
1 Introduction 11
symbolic meanings of the material environment’, and which ‘foregrounds

semiotics as a precondition to mobilities’ (Jensen 2014, 566). In line with
these considerations and basing his arguments on readings of Heidegger
and Ruskin, George Pattison presents the travelling of mountain inhabi-
tation from Holderlin’s poetry to Turner’s painting. Via comparison and
juxtaposition, movement becomes a way of linking places, creators and
theoreticians as well as real and fictive experiences. The chapter argues for
the significance of movement through multiple time-spaces, presenting
the differences that arise in interpretation and understanding of moun-
tain symbolism and imagery over the course of different periods.
Whether through considerations of performance in relation to topog-
raphy, hermeneutical analyses of geological forms or the mobility of
mountains through fluid interactions and exchange of images, texts and
ideas, the chapters that follow highlight the significance of the dynamic
combination of representational and non-representational approaches to
the understanding of mountainous landscape. Exploring mountains
through the lenses of performativity, hermeneutics and mobility, the
chapters of this book draw out tensions between peoples and their envi-
ronments, which have not been discussed previously and which can only
be deeply analysed through interdisciplinary exploration. Understanding
the strains between different groups and their ways of understanding
their places in the world and those of others is a necessary step towards
more harmonious interactions between peoples, as well as between
humans and the environment.
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Baker, V. G. (2010). Women’s pilgrimage as repertoiric performance: Creating gen-
der and spiritual identity through ritual. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
Graduate College of Bowling Green, State University.
Carlson, M. (1996). Performance: A critical introduction. New York: Routledge.
Corner, J. (1998). The agency of mapping: Speculation, critique and invention.
In D. Cosgrove (Ed.), Mappings (pp. 213–252). London: Reaktion Books.
Crampton, J. (2003). The political mapping of cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Della Dora, V. (2009). Travelling landscape-objects. Progress in Human

Geography, 33(3), 334–354.
Dewsbury, J. D. (2000). Performativity and the event: Enacting a philosophy of
difference. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18, 473–496.
Dorrian, M. (2005). Architecture’s cartographic turn. In F. Pousin (Ed.), Figures
de la Ville et Construction des Savoirs: Architecture, Urbanisme, Geographie
(pp. 61–72). Paris: CNRS Editions.
Franklin, A. (2014). Tourism studies. In P. Adey, D. Bissell, K. Hannam,
P. Merriman, & M. Sheller (Eds.), Routledge handbook of mobilities
(pp. 74–84). London: Routledge.
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Anthropology Institute, 6(1), 63–79.
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P. Merriman, & M. Sheller (Eds.), Routledge handbook of mobilities
(pp. 566–574). London: Routledge.
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and Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 119–148.
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Wylie, J. (2008). Landscape, mobility, practice. Social & Cultural Geography,
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coded world. London: Routledge.
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of thinking. London: Routledge.
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Part 1
Performativity
2
Deep and Dark Play in the Alps: Daring
Acts and Their Retelling
Jonathan Pitches
Introduction: Defining and Reassessing Deep

and Dark Play
Conceptions of dark play, ‘playing that emphasizes risk, deception, and
sheer thrill’, (Schechner 2006, 119) were formulated in the discipline of
performance studies by Richard Schechner (1993) and described by him as
‘closely related’ to the much more established term of deep play—intense,
if not addictive play, stimulated by close odds (Schechner 2006, 119). As
early as 1985 Schechner invited his graduate students to document their
own experiences of dark play, and, amongst examples of impetuous drug
use and of ‘playing chicken’ with New York traffic, he records an instance
J. Pitches (*)
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_2
16 J. Pitches
of particular interest to the discussion proposed here, dark play in the

iconic mountain environment of the Yosemite National Park:
Female: I was 16 years old and on vacation at Yosemite with my father. I

climbed out over the guard rail to get a better view of the waterfall. When
I realised that my father was crying for me to come back, I went to the very
edge and did an arabesque. I continued balancing on one leg until he got
onto his knees, crying, begging for me to come back. Ten years later, in the
Sierra Nevada range I repeated the same act in front of my husband who
shouted at me to think of our daughter as a motherless child. My initial
inspiration for dancing on the edge was in both cases the thrill of the
beauty and the danger of the dance. (Schechner 1993, 37)
In a very literal testing of boundaries, the student’s taunting of succes-

sive significant men in her life is striking. Of more interest to this discus-
sion, however, is the layering of representation and narrative construction
indicated in this example of dark play, particularly given its repetition and
multiple restaging in the specialized context of mountains. As Schechner
points out after he published a picture of the restaged event, ‘The scene
was played, replayed, documented and now made public. At each itera-
tion it becomes more of a performance’ (2006, 120). This idea of represen-
tation and its relationship to storytelling, performance and mountains is
fundamental to the ensuing discussion, and will be tested in this chapter in
three case studies from three different eras of representation, all drawn from
Alpine history (1852–7, 1936–8, 2009–12). Taking such an approach will
help me develop a longer view of the activity of dark play than has thus far
been attempted; it will necessitate a re-evaluation of the roots of deep play
theory and clearer distinctions being drawn between deep and dark play;
and it will involve a scrutiny of the evolving technologies used to mediate
mountains—from nineteenth-century stage technology to twenty-first-
century uses of digital documentation and social media.
The framing of risky behaviour as performance and its conscientious
documentation and replaying to an audience is consistent with readings
in other mountain-related disciplines such as Lifestyle Sports, specifically
those at the extreme end of the lifestyle continuum—BASE jumping1 and
wingsuiting for instance. Sociologist of sport and leisure, Belinda Wheaton,
suggests two important features for this chapter: (1) that ‘most lifestyle
2 Deep and Dark Play in the Alps: Daring Acts and Their Retelling 17
sports emphasize the creative, aesthetic and performative expressions of

their activities’ and (2) that ‘[Lifestyle Sports] practitioners are self-con-
sciously aware of “being seen”, and presentation of self to others – whether
in lived settings or mediated forms – seems to be part of the experience’.
The sometimes-fatal sports of BASE jumping or wingsuiting are clearly
recent developments in the wider category of dark play, but the chapter
will argue here that this so-called postmodern desire to mediate or retell
the extreme experiences provoked by mountain landscapes is far from new.
Indeed, the performative celebration and remediation of the mountain
range in focus here—the Alps—ubiquitously present on social media sites
today in 2017, can be traced back to the explosion of interest in the Mont
Blanc massif occasioned by Albert Smith’s 1851 climb of the highest peak
in the Alps and, subsequently documented in a series of performed lectures
for a Victorian audience at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. Using this early
example of performed retelling as context, the chapter will move to exam-
ine two locations of mediated dark play: the Eiger’s notorious North face
and the Hörnli ridge on the Matterhorn. For the former, the Eiger, it will
examine the unique geological conditions that create its reputation as a
‘great black amphitheatre’ (Simpson 2003, 140), unpicking the gruesome
tradition of Eiger watching; for the latter, the Matterhorn, the chapter will
consider the relationship of social media and wearable technology to dark
play, testing Wheaton’s assertion that self-presentation is fundamental to
contemporary lifestyle sports and by extension to current modes of moun-
tain representation.
This chapter will begin by outlining the etymology of the terms ‘deep
play’ and ‘dark play’ in both performance and mountain studies, and,
in doing so, it is necessary to unravel some misrepresentations. It is cus-
tomary to ascribe the first use of deep play to the utilitarian philosopher
Jeremy Bentham—and specifically to his Theory of Legislation, posthu-
mously published in 1840 from a French translation of his work. Diane
Ackermann’s introduction to her book Deep Play (1999) is indicative:
I’ve borrowed the phrase deep play from Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
[…] who dismisses as ‘deep play’ any activity in which ‘the stakes are so
high that it is … irrational for men to engage in it at all, since the marginal
utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of
what you stand to lose’. (Ackerman 1999, 18, emphasis in original)
18 J. Pitches
Ackerman is, in turn, citing Al Alvarez’s climbing book, Feeding the Rat
(1988, 30–31), a definition that is repeated verbatim in his later Risky
Business (2007, 11). But both Ackermann and Alvarez are, in fact, mak-
ing an error of attribution; these are not Jeremy Bentham’s words at all
but Clifford Geertz’s, extending Bentham’s concept in his famous essay
‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’ (1972), later published in
The Interpretation of Cultures (1973).2 Where Bentham’s engagement with
the term is restricted to a moralizing footnote—‘it is to this head that the
evils of deep play ought to be referred’ (Bentham 1840, 131)—Geertz
elaborates on and extrapolates from Bentham’s term to advance an elo-
quent and lively description of the gambling habits of Balinese cockfight-
ing audiences. Central to Geertz’s argument is that the best, the deepest,
play is only achieved when there is next to nothing to separate the prow-
ess of the unfortunate cocks—that is to say when it is nigh impossible to
predict the result of the gruesome match. Accordingly, the owners of the
cocks themselves—the central gambling pair—are also bound together in
a desperately hard-to-call game; or as Geertz suggests: ‘In genuine deep
play … they are both in over their heads’ (Geertz 1972, 15). Especially in
the deepest fights, these players are almost always leaders of their commu-
nities and play out regional status games and personal politics through
the agency of the fight.
Mountain writers have been quick to appropriate Bentham’s deep
play in trying to articulate the psychology of the climber, a psychology
which is prepared to face odds little better than one of Geertz’s fighting
cocks judging by the fatality rates on some of the Himalayan 8000-metre
peaks.3 Joe Simpson (1997), Paul Pritchard (1997), Al Alvarez (1988,
2007) and Diane Ackerman (1999) all use the term with varying levels
of accuracy. But surprisingly none of them reference Geertz, even though
his is a far more nuanced and pertinent conceptualization. It is argued
here that a careful look at Geertz’s notion of deep play is considerably
more useful for understanding how mountains are mediated than the
opaque footnote of Bentham, for the following reasons: (1) Geertz’s high-
lighting of the emotional intensity and absorption within the audience
at a cockfight; (2) Geertz’s reading of the means by which status, hier-
archy and masculinity are constructed in relation to the cockfight; and
(3) Geertz’s sensitivity to the cockfight as performance—where melodra-

matic conflict, baying crowds and close identification between cock and
owner (player and witness) define the experience.
On this last point Geertz is particularly interesting, drawing as he does
on the explicit fictionality of the conflict, at least for the human players:
The cockfight is ‘really real’ only to the cocks – it does not kill anyone,
castrate anyone, reduce anyone to animal status … what it does is what, for
other peoples with other temperaments and other conventions, Lear and
Crime and Punishment do; it catches up these themes – deaths, masculinity,
rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance – and, ordering them into an encom-
passing structure, presents them in such a way as to throw into relief a
particular view of their essential nature. (Geertz 1972, 23)
Whilst mountaineering writers have appropriated the term ‘deep

play’ to describe an addictive attitude to risk-taking (symbolized in
Alvarez’s colourful title Feeding the Rat) or to evoke the thinnest of
lines between life and death (in Joe Simpson’s Dark Shadows Falling
for instance4), Geertz’s interest in defining deep play, ironically, is not
in stressing death and danger but in the layers of theatricalized human
conflict which surround these mortal facts. The cocks are simply a vehi-
cle for the presentation of death, masculinity and chance, witnessed,
beyond the edges of the gory pit, in the safe realm of human interac-
tion. This is not to say that deep play as a theoretical concept is without
utility for the examination of mountain behaviours—far from it—but
to argue, crucially, that the acts of witnessing, presentation and repre-
sentation are essential to a fuller understanding of deep play’s defining
characteristics.
It is perhaps for this reason that deep play is linked so readily with dark
play—both Geertz and Schechner emphasize elements of inherent the-
atricality, related of course to the shared term, play. Focusing on notions
of ‘deep’ and ‘dark’, however, does allow for some important distinctions
to be drawn. ‘Deep’ for Geertz and for Ackermann refers to the level of
intensity involved in the activity, stimulated by risk but paralleled by
skill: ‘In [deep play’s] thrall, all the play elements are visible, but they’re
20 J. Pitches
taken to intense and transcendent heights’, argues Diane Ackermann

(1999, 12), identifying parachuting, hang gliding and mountain climb-
ing as activities which are ‘prone’ to this level of intensity. ‘Dark’, on
the other hand, refers to the kind of play being practised, an indication
of which is embedded in the opening example of the teasing daughter/
wife in Yosemite. This is mocking, dangerous and subversive behaviour
as much as it is playful. Practitioner and academic, Claire Hind, apply-
ing both deep and dark play theories to her own practice-led research in
confessional performance, makes the distinction explicit:
To separate the terms out more clearly, dark play is a particular activity that
subverts rules, or ‘normal’ codes of behaviour and in the case of creative
works, is the fictional or non-fictional play frame that drives the narrative
or task, performer and participant. Deep play is the mode of playing a
person achieves whilst in the midst of playing itself. (Hind 2010, 15)
Positioned as such, dark play relates to other forms of dark culture,

such as ‘dark tourism’, first coined as a term by John Lennon and Malcolm
Foley (in 1996) and developed by them (2000) and by Richard Sharpley
and Philip Stone (2009). Dark tourism, defined by Sharpley, as ‘the act of
travel to sites associated with death, suffering and the seemingly macabre’
(Sharpley and Stone 2009, 10), is clearly a subversion of the ‘“normal”
codes of behaviour’ (Hind 2010, 15), associated with holidaying but may
also help frame the behaviours to be outlined and analysed below, specifi-
cally in Kleine Scheidegg at the foot of the Eiger. Sharpley outlines five
subcategories of dark tourism, the first of which is travel to ‘dangerous
destinations from the past and the present’ (2009, 11), a fitting moniker
for the Eigerwand or North face, as will be argued later.5
It should now be clear how the terms ‘deep play’ and ‘dark play’ have
been misconceived in some mountain writing. It remains to be seen what
this theatricalized reading of Geertz offers the mountain analyst and how
both deep play and dark play are acted out on the mountainside. In sum,
and to use Geertz’s alluring terminology, what kinds of ‘encompassing
structures’ surround mountain culture in the Alps since the middle of the
nineteenth century and how have they been presented (and represented)
using contemporary technologies of mediation?
erformed Retellings of Dark Play: Mont Blanc,

P
the Eiger and the Matterhorn
Mont Blanc
All 4810 metres of Mont Blanc,6 the highest peak in the Alps and in
the European Union, were first climbed in 1786 by mountaineer guide
Jacques Balmat and physician, Michel-Gabriel Paccard (Newby 1977,
20–26). But whilst this remarkable feat is often aligned with the birth
of modern mountaineering, it was not until the middle of the following
century that Mont Blanc was truly popularized and became the ‘go-to’
peak on the French-Italian border. Albert Smith was central to this uplift
in interest and an unlikely progenitor of the golden age of mountaineer-
ing (1854–65). Smith, a Victorian showman and satirical author, finally
climbed Mont Blanc in 1851, 13 years after his first inspirational encoun-
ter with the mountain in 1838 (Fitzsimmons 1967, 31). He wrote about
his experience in The Story of Mont Blanc, published in 1853, including
some extraordinary details of the (now ludicrous) provisions taken on
the trip.7 But it was his stage show, or more accurately his series of the-
atricalized lectures (from 1852 to 18608), that had the largest impact on
mountaineering culture and on visitor numbers to the region, and it is for
this reason that his work is relevant to a chapter on mediated dark play.
As a revue writer and theatre producer, Smith was familiar with the
theatrical resources of the period, and he mustered as many of them as he
could lay his hands on for his series of lectures titled: Mr. Albert Smith’s
Ascent of Mont Blanc. His biographer, Raymund Fitzsimons, outlines the
mise-en-scène for the second season (November 1852):
The exterior of a two-storied chalet with projecting eaves, carved balcony

and green shutters … filled the centre of the stage. … The walls of the
chalet rose out of sight when the views were shown and lowered again dur-
ing the intervals … to the left was an inn with wooden roof tiles and a
patterned balcony that was an exact copy of the balcony of the Aigle Noir
Hotel at Grindelwald9 […] Between the inn and the centre chalet a water-
fall tumbled over rocks … Alpine plants fringed the pool [and] were
banked up to screen a small piano to the right […] the walls of the lecture
22 J. Pitches
room were decorated with chamois skins, knapsacks and flags of the Swiss
Cantons. Edelweiss hung from the lampshades. At 8 o’clock the door of the
chalet opened and Smith came out. (1967, 125)
The ‘views’ referred to here were in fact dioramas, created by William

Beverley—stunning vistas of the mountain, painted on transparent mate-
rial through which light was shone and manipulated, creating a three-
dimensional ‘immersive’ effect (Bevin 2008, 187). These dioramas were
central to the experience of the event, subtly exaggerating the threat of
the original climb but translating this danger for the urban sensibilities of
his London audience. As Joe Kember comments:
Beverley’s brilliantly backlit images of the climbers sought to bring the

exaggerated dangers of mountaineering into the secure and comfortable
confines of the Egyptian Hall. … These entertainments mediated the
mountain adventure for city-dwellers. (cited in Bevin 2008, 188 and 189)
As the seasons progressed, the novelty began to wear off, and by 1856
The Times was demonstrably antipathetic to any more accounts of Mont
Blanc summiting:
The frequency with which the feat is performed constitutes the best evi-
dence of that, at least in these days, it is attended with but little danger and
not much fatigue. It seems to be as easy a matter, nowadays, to go up Mont
Blanc as to go up the Rhine. (The Times, 6 October 1856, 8)
But Smith did not abandon his show. Instead, he gradually reduced
the story of the ascent until Beverley’s dioramas were self-sustaining
and denuded of commentary and Smith could develop his whimsical
accounts of European (and later Chinese) travel underpinned by witty
characterization and slick storytelling. By the end of his last show, early in
1860, the golden age of mountaineering was well under way, with count-
less Alpine peaks falling predominantly to British climbers supported by
French and Swiss guides (Frison-Rouche and Jouty 1996, 62). Whilst
mountaineering activity for the skilful few had increased significantly in
the Alps in this period, back home Smith had succeeded in unlocking
Mont Blanc and its environs for a much larger cross-section of society
in London, contributing significantly to what Peter Hansen has called
the construction of an ‘assertive masculinity to uphold [the] imagined
sense of Britain’s imperial power’ (Hansen 1995, 304).10 In doing so, his
use of theatrical devices even extended beyond the walls of the Egyptian
Hall as Smith produced several spin-off objects of merchandise, includ-
ing a portable lantern show to be used at home to recreate several of the
exhilarating scenes elaborated upon in the stage performance (Hansen
2013, 175–6). These take-home spin-offs were some of the first examples
of a practice of domesticated dark play, kindled by the technology of the
day, a practice which, as we shall see, reaches its apogee in the viewing of
extreme sports posted on social media.
Smith’s stage show has been the subject of many extended studies
(Hansen 1995, 2013; Bevin 2008; Conefrey and Jordan 2001; McNee
2015), but viewing his work in the context of deep and dark play, and as
Geertz suggests, as an ‘encompassing structure’ shaped around the per-
formative potential of death and destruction, helps illuminate an impor-
tant part of Smith’s project—one which is echoed strongly in my later
examples. The Ascent of Mont Blanc was shamelessly exploitative of the-
atrical technology, complicit in the construction of a particular mode
of masculinity and heroism, and consciously designed to manipulate its
audience’s emotions, creating a safe–danger, which immersed them fur-
ther in the experience. As the most recent study of Smith’s artistry identi-
fies: ‘Beverley’s descending panorama was so effective that “the spectator
seems, step-by-step, to accompany the daring travellers in a hazardous
journey, while Mr Albert Smith, with graphic description, tells every cir-
cumstance of the interesting deed”’ (McNee 2015, 139).
The Eiger
Christian Almer, Peter Bohren and Charles Barrington first climbed the
Eiger in 1858, whilst Smith was still performing his lectures at the Egyptian
hall. But it was 80 years later before the notorious North face was con-
quered by a quartet of Austrian and German climbers, Anderl Heckmair,
Fritz Kasparek, Ludwig Vörg and Heinrich Harrer, following a spate of
24 J. Pitches
terrible tragedies earlier that decade.11 These deaths and the first success-
ful summit have passed into mountaineering history and are referenced
by more than one contemporary climber, often citing Harrer’s bestselling
account of the 1938 ascent, White Spider (originally published in 1959),
as a (perhaps perverse) stimulus for pursuing a mountaineering career. Joe
Simpson, author of Touching the Void (1988), is typical of this trend:
This gripping account of the first ascent … and the subsequent often disas-
trous attempts that followed should really have put me off mountaineering
for life. … I [nevertheless] became a mountaineer inspired by the most
gripping and frightening mountaineering book I have ever read. (in Harrer
2005, 7)12
One of the remarkable features of the North face of the Eiger is its
incredible proximity to civilization. The pain, elation, progress and fail-
ure of every climber attempting the Eigerwand fall under the poten-
tial scrutiny of hoards of hotel visitors, hikers and journalists in Kleine
Scheidegg, nestling at the foot of the 1800-metre face. This fact has led
to the morbid phenomenon of ‘Eiger watching’, the close tracking of
climbers from telescopes on the balconies of hotels in the valley below.13
Heinrich Harrer was one of many to find this spectacle theatrical:
This particular face … has become an arena, a natural stage, in which every
movement of the actors can be followed. And the applause accorded to
successful climbers on their return is argued as another outward sign of
their inward decay. (Harrer 2005, 24)
As Harrer notes, it is not the climbers themselves who seek out the
burden of performing; instead, it is visited upon them by the audiences
gathered in the mountain pass. In this example, the technology of medi-
ation is not in the hands of the artist—Beverley and his dioramas of
Mont Blanc for instance—but in the long-distance view of the spectator
handling the telescope. As the balcony dweller frames an image of the
climber in their viewfinder, the art of storytelling is shifted from actor
to viewer, either for personal titillation or—if it happens to be a journal-
ist’s eye—for more public enjoyment. Harrer records the latter process
in White Spider, citing journalist Ulrich Link’s eyewitness account of the
Eigerwand climb from afar, written ‘in a manner which would grip a lay-
man, but without uncalled for dramatization’:
From 3 to 3.30 p.m. the face was once again enveloped in cloud. Then it
cleared again and everyone rushed to the telescopes. The leader of the sec-
ond rope was just traversing from the rocks onto the ‘spider’ […] it was
4:10. Mist came down on the face again, and we were left cut-off with our
fears and our hopes […] At 4:25 it began to rain gently, and exactly 5 min-
utes later a violent, noisy downpour set in, as if the clouds had been torn
apart. It must be hitting the face and the four climbers on it like a tidal
wave. One could hear many voices raised in a confused gasp of alarm.
(2005, 109)
Gripping it is, and all the more so as the same telescopes had wit-
nessed the drawn-out, frozen death of Toni Kurtz and the rest of his
party, two years earlier. It is also highly dramatized, despite what Harrer
might say. The telescopic perspective, punctuated by moments of obscu-
rity occasioned by the weather, is a classic viewpoint in mountain dramas.
It is seen in the tracking of Irvine and Mallory by Noel Odell on the
highest slopes of Everest in 1924, before the ‘mist close[d] around them’
(McFarlane 2003, 268) and they disappeared for 75 years.14 And it was
evident earlier, in the mid-century, when the long-distanced telescopic
pursuit of Albert Smith’s Mont Blanc climb provided the stuff of drama
for journalists and their readers. Smith’s actual ascent (not the performed
account of it) was reported in The Observer:
After their departure, telescopes were fixed from the windows of the inn,
and in other places, to watch the progress of their toilsome ascent, and
before 6 o’clock it was evident the voyagers had crossed the great glacier
and had arrived at their resting place for the night – on the Grands Mulets.
Yesterday morning, as soon as daylight afforded a clear view, the adventur-
ers were again visible by aid of a good glass and by 12 o’clock were seen
making the final ascent. (Observer, 25 August 1851, 3)
The good news occasioned by this long view then sparked extensive
partying in Chamonix, bankrolled by Sir Robert Peel, many hours before
the climbing party themselves returned.
26 J. Pitches
In 1966, when the next mountaineering challenge after climbing the

North face was to find the most direct line up it, journalists still drew
on the telescope as dramatic mediator, as reporter Peter Gillman later
reflected:
For decades, every fresh drama brought journalists flocking to the scene,
ready to bestow their headlines on the latest success or death. In February
1966, I was one of them, covering the attempt for the Daily Mail, the
newspaper backing Harlin’s team, talking to the climbers by radio and
watching through a telescope on a hotel terrace at Kleine Scheidegg as the
two teams climbed, often only yards apart. (MailOnline, 31 May 2015)
Gillman was unfortunate enough to witness the death of US climber

John Harlin ‘live’, through the eyepiece of his telescope, as Harlin fell
from the face racing to beat the German team to the prize of ‘Eiger direct’.
Some 40 years later in 2005, Harlin’s son John Junior sought to bury his
demons by climbing the North face himself, creating another layer of
mediation with the production of the docudrama The Alps, scripted by
English mountaineer Stephen Venables (2007).
Ten years after Harlin Senior’s death in 1976, climber Joe Tasker
described how the phenomenon of ‘Eiger watching’ had liberated itself
from the constraints of the Kleine Scheidegg balconies, bringing an even-
greater sense of theatrical voyeurism:
A distant speck, small as a fly, came towards us growing larger and larger – a
helicopter. It hovered a few hundred feet away from us. We could see the
occupants, cameras or binoculars masking their faces, and I could not move.
The best way he could find to express the intrusion was to cast himself
as leading actor on the rock face:
From stage fright at realising I was a performer in a gigantic vertical arena

my feelings turned to resentment that our very private world should
become the focus of the curiosity and pastime of others. I could not con-
centrate until it was gone, could not rid myself of the thought that those
visitors, anonymous and safe in their plastic bubble, would’ve had the most
perfect outing if they could only have seen one of us fall. (Boardman and
Tasker 1995, 33)
With tourist guide Lonely Planet: Switzerland noting the history of

Eiger watching at the Bellevue Hotel as part of its draw as a ‘world-beating
location’ (Williams and Walker 2009, 183), the fusion of leisure, locale
and licentious voyeurism observed by Tasker in the 1970s is still an essen-
tial part of Kleine Scheidegg’s cultural offer today, affirming its status as
a dark tourist hotspot and illustrative of what Stone and Sharpley iden-
tify as one of its most important functions: the ‘opportunity to confront
and contemplate “mortality moments” from a perceived safe distance and
environment’ (2008, 590).15 In optical terms, the telescope may shorten
the distance between witness on the balcony and ‘actor’ on the face, but
in socio-psychological terms it remains a key tool for retaining that dis-
tance, shifting the responsibility for mediation onto the storyteller-viewer
whilst maintaining the conditions for deep and dark play.
The Matterhorn
If the Eigerwand has a grim past of failed attempts, there is an equally

tragic (and well-known) history associated with the Matterhorn, spe-
cifically its maiden ascent by the egoist- engraver, Edward Whymper.
Whymper had seen Albert Smith’s lecture in 1858 and inspired (if not
intoxicated) climbed the Matterhorn for the first time seven years later
from the Swiss side, via the Hörnli ridge. On the descent, he lost four of
his party—Lord Francis Douglas, Douglas Hadow, guide Michel Croz
and Charles Hudson—immortalizing the experience in his mountain-
eering classic, Scrambles Amongst the Alps (1871), replete with his own
engravings of the climb and, even, of the broken rope once attached to
the luckless quartet.16
Historical interest notwithstanding, this section moves forward from
dioramas, telescopes and helicopters to the technology of the twenty-first
century: social media, headcams and wingsuits. In doing so, it will get
closer to an understanding of the dynamics of deep and dark play, today,
and specifically to the idea raised at the beginning of the chapter: that
deep play ‘catches up’, in Geertz’s words, themes of ‘deaths masculin-
ity, rage, pride, loss’—wrapping them up in an ‘encompassing structure’
(1972, 23) which mediates their danger to an audience in theatricalized
form. In this final example, a particularly extreme form of dark play in
28 J. Pitches
the Alps will be examined—wingsuiting from the Matterhorn—to reveal

how practitioners of this new sport17 treat the mediation of their dar-
ing acts almost as seriously as the acts themselves, to reiterate Belinda
Wheaton’s key criteria for understanding postmodern lifestyle sports,
‘presentation of self […] seems to be part of the experience’ (2004, 12).
In one way, the act of mediation in the twenty-first century has come
full circle from Albert Smith’s Egyptian Hall lectures: we are back to self-
produced, narrative accounts of daring acts in the Alps. But the means by
which these stories are relayed has of course been transformed by moving
online. Video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo are crammed
with audiovisual materials culled from mountain experiences, often cre-
ated with the use of head-mounted cameras or headcams, the most ubiq-
uitous of these being the GoPro brand of cameras. GoPros have been
used to document a long list of signature climbing routes: from Crib
Goch in Snowdonia to the Striding and Sharp edges in Cumbria, and
from the Khumbu ice fall on the approach to Everest to the sunrise over
Mount Kilimanjaro.18 Many of the materials produced in this way evi-
dence what has been termed the ‘lifecaching’ tendency of this century:
collecting, storing and displaying one’s entire life, for private use, or for
friends, family, even the entire world to peruse (Bruns 2008, 228).
Such user-led production and publication signals what Bruns calls a
paradigm shift, away from an industrial model of product development
and consumption towards a much more ‘fluid movement of produsers
[sic] between roles as leaders, participants, and users of content’ (Bruns
2007, n.p.). Expressions of mountain culture offer excellent examples of
this ‘produsage’ in social media (mountaineer bloggers, YouTube filmmak-
ers, mountain ‘Instagrammers’), providing numerous illustrations of the
presentational prerogative of postmodern sports suggested in Wheaton’s
work. If, as Patrick Lonergan has recently argued, ‘social media is a space
for the performance of identities – a space that can be seen in many ways
as theatrical’ (2016, 3), then how does that urge for self-presentation play
out in the context of contemporary mountain media?
To offer on answer to this question this chapter considers the following
short video, Wingsuit Jump in the North Wall of the Matterhorn,19 created
with a headcam and posted on YouTube by Russian BASE jumper and
wingsuiter, Valery Rozov. It is one of several movies capturing wingsuit-
ing from or around the Matterhorn. As a headcam video, it naturally

locates the jumper pivotally in the movie using two mounted-camera
perspectives on his helmet spliced together with a little footage from the
mountainside. From a launch point lower than the summit, the wing-
suiter heads down the north face of the mountain for a descent lasting
little more than a minute of film time (and not much more in real time).
The stunt concludes with Rozov landing softly in the green pastures of
Switzerland, backed by the image of the mountain behind. He ends the
video with a brief statement to camera in Russian: ‘First jump in the
wingsuit from the northern wall of the Matterhorn’,20 claiming what is in
effect a first descent in a wingsuit, and marking the peak in a vernacular
more commonly associated with lines up the mountain, which are dis-
cussed in greater depth in this volume by Anja Karina-Nydal. Whilst this
is clearly a celebration of one man’s daring, masculinity (and, perhaps,
madness21), the mountain is far from lost in Rozov’s extreme filmmaking.
Indeed, the reverse view of the landscape is preferred to the view ahead
with the iconic triangular summit of the Matterhorn a constant reference
point.
This celebration of mountain iconography is typical of videos docu-
menting wingsuiting from the Matterhorn, and can be seen in the films
of American Jeb Corliss, Rozov’s wingsuiter rival in the Alps. From a
helicopter launch Corliss speeds down the Hörnli ridge in his wingsuit,
retracing Edward Whymper’s steps at a speed the Victorian engraver
would not have thought imaginable.22 Indeed, this is arguably less about
lifecaching as it is about ‘cachet-caching’, though the status achieved by
the wingsuiters through the massive distribution of these digital assets
is not solely accomplished through their own sporting audacity.23 It is
also achieved through the carefully stage-managed associations with the
mountain, its history, its aesthetic and its far more mature record of dark-
ness and danger. This style of wingsuiting is called ‘proximity flying’ and
defines itself in terms of the very close distances between land features
and flyer.24 Following a world-famous ridge, steeped in history and trag-
edy, adds an additional value to this proximity, beyond the raw danger
of flying past, over and through environmental obstacles at high speed.
One might call it topographical capital. Jeb Corliss expands, justifying
his choice of the Matterhorn:
30 J. Pitches
It’s very interesting for me to fly from icons. It symbolizes an area, it sym-
bolizes a place so when you do something there, you are becoming part of
that place. (Daredevils: The Human Bird 2009)
For Rozov, Corliss and the other flyers operating in the Alps, their
audience may have shifted online, away from the Egyptian hall or from
the Kleine Scheidegg balconies, but the motivation of a captive audi-
ence remains a fundamental driver for this act of dark play. It is dif-
ficult to imagine anyone taking such risks without a permanent record
‘cached’ for future prosperity—and the sponsors emblazoned on the
underside of Rozov’s parachute would not, of course, be involved with-
out it.25 In the critical context of this chapter, social media allows for
an almost-infinite iteration of the dark play cycle Schechner outlines:
‘played, replayed, documented and now made public’ (2006, 120). It
also offers a new, digital, type of ‘encompassing structure’ which Geertz
could never have been able to foresee, but which nevertheless retains his
distinction between the deadly game in the centre of the activity (there
are numerous wingsuit deaths, each year) and the frisson of safe–danger
we experience watching it.
Conclusion
These three examples of mountainous activities, hailing from different
eras and utilizing very different technologies for their retelling, help to
illustrate an enduring theme of what has been called ‘deep and dark
play mediation’ in this chapter. As Geertz acknowledges, the audience of
deep play events will never experience the immediacy in the midst of the
feather-flying cockfight but it is precisely this mediated play (the experi-
ence of ‘safe–danger’, as I have termed it, here) which can in some ways
enhance the appreciation of extremity. As this chapter has moved from
the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, the available technologies have
engaged audiences in different ways: Smith via the proto-immersive stage
space of the Egyptian hall and his canny use of take-home slide sets; the
Bellevue hotel with its tempting telescopes and focus for international
journalism; and Valery Rozov with the largest potential audience of all
thanks to the connecting technologies of the internet, YouTube’s facility

for ‘mass-self communication’ (Van Dijk 2012, 182). Whilst it is unsur-
prising that audiences have grown exponentially over these three separate
centuries, it is enlightening that they remain consistent in their pursuit of
a mediated form of danger, a translated experience of depth and darkness.
One way to explain this consistency in the motivations behind deep
and dark play is to align it with ideas of the sublime, so often associ-
ated with mountains and culture. As Robert McFarlane identifies in his
Mountains of the Mind:
It would be impossible to appreciate the Sublime if one were, say, hanging

by a handhold from a cliff face. But if you came just near enough to a
waterfall or a cliff edge to suggest to your imagination the possibility of
self-destruction, then you would feel a sublime rush. (McFarlane 2003, 75)
Irrespective of the technology being used, it is this notion of the ‘just

near-enough’ that characterizes the theatrical mediations of deep and
dark play considered here, suggesting that Geertz’s contribution to long-
standing debates about mountain experience and spectatorship is sig-
nificantly more valuable than the oft-quoted Jeremy Bentham. Geertz’s
understanding of deep play’s emotional intensity, constructions of mas-
culinity and consistent wrapping up of mortal themes in various ‘encom-
passing’ (hence distancing) structures helps define a theatrical reading of
risk-taking in the mountains which is remarkable in its consistency over
three centuries. No one needs to get hurt in this space of mediated risk.
Just do not try telling the cocks that.
Notes
1. BASE jumping is the sport of using a parachute to jump from fixed objects.
‘BASE’ is an acronym that stands for the four categories of objects from
which one can jump; Building, Antenna, Span (the word used for a bridge)
and Earth (the word used for a cliff). The term was coined by Carl (BASE
#4) and Jean Boenish (BASE #3), Phil Smith (BASE #1) and Phil Mayfield
(BASE #2), regarded as the forefathers of modern BASE jumping, and in
1981 Carl began issuing sequential numbers for those who completed a
32 J. Pitches
jump from each of the four categories of objects, should they choose to
apply. http://www.basenumbers.org/
2. Compare Ackermann’s citation of Alvarez with Geertz’s actual words:
‘Bentham’s concept of deep play is found in his Theory of Legislation. By it
he means play in which the stakes are so high that it is, from his utilitarian
standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all. If a man whose for-
tune is a 1000 pounds (or ringgits) wages, 500 of it on an even bet, the
marginal utility of the pound he stands to win is clearly less than the
marginal disutility of the one who stands to lose. In genuine deep play,
this is the case for both parties’ (1972, 15).
3. Annapurna’s fatality to summit ratio rate is 38%; K2’s is 23.2%. Source:
http://www.nerverush.com/the-14-highest-peaks-in-the-world/
4. ‘Climbers have a rare ability to gamble the rest of their lives on one step,
and for this they are both admired and sometimes regarded as vainly stu-
pid. They take to the extreme the notion of Deep Play, whereby what they
stand to win from their gamble can never be equaled by the enormity of
what they will lose’ (Simpson 1997, 196).
5. The other categories are ‘houses of horror’, ‘fields of fatality’, ‘tours of tor-
ment’ and ‘themed thanatos’, by which he means museum collections
based on death and suffering (2009, 11).
6. There is some dispute over the height of Mont Blanc (White Mountain)
with a remeasuring happening every two years. It is possible to find heights
for the mountain ranging from 4807 to 4810 metres. http://www.chamo-
nix.net/english/news/mont-blanc-shrinks
7. Sixty bottles of Vin Ordinaire, 6 of Bordeaux, 10 of St. George, 15 of St.
Jean, 8 of cognac, 1 bottle of syrup of raspberries, 6 bottles of lemonade,
2 of champagne, 20 loaves, 10 small cheeses, 6 packets of chocolate, sugar,
prunes, raisins and salt, 4 wax candles, 6 lemons, 4 legs and shoulders of
mutton, 6 pieces of veal, 1 of beef, 11 large and 35 small fowls, spread
amongst 16 guides (cf. Smith 1853, 154–5).
8. There is a record of a farewell lecture dated Tuesday 6 July 1858 (in
Brotherton Special Collections, Leeds), but Smith returned from travel-
ling in China and downplayed the Mont Blanc content in favour of
reportage of his travels further afield after the summer of 1858, perform-
ing right up until he died on 23 May 1860 (Fitzsimmons 1967, 185).
9. Clearly, authenticity was not an essential criterion for Smith, as the village
overlooked by Mont Blanc, from which Smith launched his ascent, is
Chamonix not Grindelwald. Thanks are due to Dr Scott Palmer for point-
ing this out to me.
10. There is insufficient space to deal with the complex and fascinating area
of British mountaineering, colonialism and empire in this chapter, which
reached its peak in the middle of the twentieth century and the coinci-
dence of the first ascent of Everest and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth
II in 1953. Peter Hansen’s The Summits of Modern Man is an excellent
beginning to reading around this subject and specifically Chapter Nine,
pages 245–74.
11. Most notably the deaths of Toni Kurz, Andreas Hinterstoisser, Willy
Angerer and Edi Rainer (in 1936) and Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer
(in 1935).
12. In the same vein, cf. Joe Tasker in the Savage Arena: describing another
Eiger classic, The Climb up to Hell: ‘Rather than being deterred by the
dangers. … The book provided an inspiration for my own first steps’
(Boardman and Tasker 1995, 18).
13. Hotel Bellevue is the most famous and long-standing Kleine Scheidegg
hotel, having held a position at the foot of the Eiger since 1840. http://
scheidegg-hotels.ch/index1eng.php
14. Mallory’s body was found by Conrad Anker on an expedition in 1999.
Irvine’s body remains undiscovered.
15. The Bellevue hotel is clearly aware of its international status as a viewing
spot and centre for the climbing history of the Eigerwand enshrined in
the Guardian’s review of 2010 posted on the site: ‘The Bellevue’s corri-
dors heave with climbing lore and the ghosts of Eiger Alpinists, long
lost’. http://scheidegg-hotels.ch/berichte/guardian2010.pdf
16. The rope is still available for view at the Matterhorn Museum, Zermatt.
17. Wingsuits have been commercially available since 1998 (Davis 2013,
278).
18. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRrLwT8Im8g; https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1llLj2q0k8; https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=moBJMGNSql4; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
6VLI5iIs0Qo; http://www.climbkilimanjaroguide.com/gopro-kilimanjaro/
19. The film is located here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2IkI4Qu
CuM&feature=youtu.be
20. My thanks are extended to Olya Petrakova for providing a translation for
me.
21. Brymer (2010) points to research done by Storry on extreme sports
which counters this perspective—that in fact BASE jumping has a much
lower fatality rate (1:2317) than motorbike riding (1:500) and evidences
34 J. Pitches
high levels of planning and organization on behalf of its practitioners

(218).
22. https://youtu.be/h-lQh1_tUYM
23. Rozov’s Matterhorn jump has had 23,700 hits; his wingsuit leap from
Everest has had 1.4 million hits (as of January 2016).
24. Jeb Corliss explains the appeal of proximity flying in the Channel 4 doc-
umentary Daredevils: The Human Bird: ‘When I did the Christ Statue [in
Rio de Janeiro] I was only close for a split second. When we get to
Matterhorn, the entire flight down the ridge you are close to things.’
25. Red Bull have built their brand on associations with high-risk sports,
including Formula 1, snowboarding, BMX and wingsuiting.
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3
In the Shadow of the Mountain: Tracing
the Hesychast Inhabitation of Mount
Athos
Christos Kakalis
Introduction
This chapter examines the role of silence and communal ritual in the
experience of the southern part of Mount Athos, a semi-independent
peninsula in north-eastern Greece, which is home to the world’s largest
Orthodox monastic community and one of the most important Christian
pilgrimage sites.1 The focus is on the so-called desert of the peninsula, its
mountainous end (the area between Karmelion Mountain and the Skete
of Agia Anna) that rises into a peak of 2033 metres in height. The moun-
tain is a natural magnet for the Athonites’ attention and a number of
ascetics have chosen to live there as either cave/hermitage-dwellers or
wandering ascetics practising hesychasm, an ascetic way of life with intense
meditational qualities.
The chapter seeks to unfold the performative qualities of the moun-
tainous Athonite desert as a field of religious inhabitation. One of the
C. Kakalis (*)
School of Architecture, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_3
38 C. Kakalis
most important ascetic practices that the monks and pilgrims undertake
is an annual pilgrimage to the summit of the mountain on the sixth of
August, the day dedicated to Christ’s Transfiguration. This feast day com-
memorates the possibility of communication with the divine through a
number of rituals. Moreover, the mountain of Athos opens as an ideal
setting for ascetic life. Athonite caves and hermitages are the smallest
(natural or man-made) spaces for the hermits to practise silent prayer
there. In the atmosphere of the mountainous Athonite desert, silence
plays a key role examined as a material condition in which intelligible
sounds come to consciousness and senses are fully engaged in a pilgrim-
age topography.
The relief of the peninsula is mainly mountainous (Kotoulas 1991,
47–56); there a very few, small plains and the coasts are extremely rocky
and steep. These conditions of geographical isolation have led to a primi-
tive, untouched landscape, inhabited by ascetics searching for solitude
(Sidiropoulos 2000, 18). The first written evidence of the presence of
ascetics on Mount Athos dates back to the ninth century (Papachrysanthou,
31–39) though it was in 943 that the boundaries of the peninsula as a
monastic realm were officially inscribed by the emperor’s ambassadors
(Speake 2002). Gradually, a network of huts (kalyves), cells (kellia),2
sketes3 and 20 coenobitic monasteries4 was organized on Athos, with the
structure built during the middle and late Byzantine period (Archim.;
Aimilianos 1991, 118). In the fourteenth century, Mount Athos became
an important centre of hesychasm, a practice which was intensively fol-
lowed by most of the Athonites. Since then, Mount Athos has been
considered an active field of hesychast practice in which hermits and coe-
nobitic monks seek salvation through prayer and which pilgrims visit to
draw from its religious character (Speake 2002, 157–194 and Sidiropoulos
2000, 145–155).
Besides a field for communal rituals to be performed, these conditions
of geographic isolation provide an ideal context for both human and
atmospheric qualities of silence to be experienced by the individual. The
former relate to our vocal silencing that involves an attentive listening
and opening to the surroundings and can be connected to meditation
and prayer practices. On the other hand, atmospheric silence regards the
silence and tranquillity of the environment and is usually connected
3 In the Shadow of the Mountain: Tracing the Hesychast... 39
to a soundscape that is different from what we are used to. Silence is a

material condition that enhances the performative dynamics of Mount
Athos. Ascetics seek to experience its atmospheric qualities in order to
pray in a more effective way and at the same time their silence and prayer
influence the religious character of the silent topography. This hesychast
combination of human and atmospheric silences opens to pilgrims that
are usually struck by the otherworldly feelings of the quiet landscape,
making the interaction with the Athonite silence part of their travel goal.
Echoing John Wylie’s definition of the landscape as the tension between
the perceiver and the perceived, therefore, this chapter argues about an
embodied topography found in the interaction between communal ritual
inhabitation, silent ascetic practices and mountainous landscapes. In this
tension the topography emerges as a situation of communal and indi-
vidual embodied inhabitations.
Exploring the annual ritual to its summit and the bodily perception of
silence, this chapter furthers the performative dynamics of the mountain
as an embodiment of hesychast ideas. This is also illustrated in a number
of visualizations that question the modern two-dimensional, ‘accurate’
and rather Cartesian, mapping techniques, arguing that it is impossible
for the performative aspects of the landscape to be accurately depicted as
they are always changing and can only be fully understood through bodily
experience.
The Mountain of Athos

The mountain of Athos plays an important role in monastic life there. It
is symbolically connected to the event of the Transfiguration and the pos-
sibility of theosis, on which the theology of hesychasm is based.
Hesychasm derives from the Greek word for ‘calmness’ or ‘tranquillity’
(ησυχία-hesychia). It is based on the co-existence of positive and negative
theology and involves the ceaseless, silent repetition of the Jesus prayer
(‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, the sinner’). Its
aim is the acquisition of a sense of stillness, a state of alertness and vigi-
lance through different ascetic techniques that consider the human body
as undivided from the soul (Chryssavgis 2004).
40 C. Kakalis
Hesychasm was gradually introduced by Christian writers such as St.

Dionysius the Areopagite, St. John Climacus and St. Symeon the New
Theologian, and was established as the main ascetic practice of Eastern
Christianity during the fourteenth century through the life and the writ-
ings of St. Gregory Palamas (Louth 1999, 2001; Chryssavgis 2004;
Meyendorff 1998). According to Eastern Christian theology, God is a
‘mystery’, for which humans should eternally search, a mystery that cannot
be fully disclosed and fully hidden at the same time (Evdokimof 1965,
17; Lossky 1957, 36–38). God is known and unknown at the same time
(Daniel 2007, 140). This is theologically related to the event of the
Transfiguration of Jesus Christ, which Andrew Paterson also discusses in
his chapter, in relation to the mosaics at Mt. Sinai. During the
Transfiguration, part of His holiness was witnessed by the apostles Peter
(Πέτρος), John (Ιωάννης) and James (Ιάκωβος) at the peak of Mount
Tabor (Mark 9:2–13). According to St. Gregory Palamas, Christ’s
Transfiguration paved the way for the possibility of divine contemplation
(theosis). Theosis for St. Gregory can be part of the devotee’s life, and it
usually involves the experience of the ‘uncreated light’: a white light that
can be felt, according to Athonite monks, on both the material and psy-
chological levels (Meyendorff 1998).
A chapel built at the summit of the mountain is, therefore, dedicated
to the Transfiguration of Christ and attracts a great number of monks and
pilgrims during its annual celebration. Moreover, Athos is a constant
point of reference for the monks, due to its symbolism and its imposing
presence in the topography. At the same time, its deserted, mountainous
rough relief provides the ideal physical conditions for hermits and wan-
dering ascetics to practise hesychasm. The bodily effort required to reach
the peak of the mountain, and at the same time the changes in atmo-
sphere and vision that follow the increasing altitude, leads to a feeling of
distance from the everyday world which has been connected to the com-
munication with the divine.
According to Mircea Eliade, a mountain can be a sacred place, a ‘cen-
tre’, an Axis Mundi, ‘where hierophanies and theophanies can occur and
where there exists the possibility of breaking through from the level of
earth to the level of heaven’ (Eliade 1952, 27–56). The sacred associations
of mountains were found as far back as prehistoric times when, according
to Walter Burkert, sanctuaries were organized on the peaks of mountains

located at small distances from human settlements (Burkert 1977, 26–28)
to facilitate ritual activities. Mountains in Scripture are points of the
relief where a divine aura can be shared through human inhabitation.
The sound of trumpets, the cloud around the peak, rain, earthquake and
especially the voice of God were included in Moses’ experience when he
went up to the peak of Mount Chorev to receive the Ten Commandments
(Exodus 19–20:21) or of Prophet Elijah when he sought shelter to pro-
tect himself from Emperor Achaav and his wife Iezavel in the same moun-
tain (1 Kings 19:11–12). Vision, hearing and touching (the stone tablets)
are interconnected with the ascent of the scriptural figures to the peak of
the mountains and their prayerful pauses there (40 days in the case of
Moses). This is also the case with Mount Tabor as the setting of Christ’s
Transfiguration. The key moments of these journeys involve the para-
doxical encounter with God, happening at the peak of a mountain
through a multisensory aural manifestation that becomes an important
sacred atmosphere. Traces of this atmosphere are also carried back, as they
return transformed, ready to transmit a divine message to the people left
behind.
The Holy Mountain that characterizes the peninsula is, for the monks,
an Axis Mundi, a ‘central point’ that stands as a threshold between the
sky and the earth, the seen and the unseen; it is an embodiment of the
idea of Transfiguration emphatically manifested through the small church
at its top, which is dedicated to the rituals that take place during the day
of the Transfiguration celebration. Therefore, whereas the mountain is
not part of the scriptural landscapes, it is connected to them through its
spiritual associations to Christ’s Transfiguration and theosis. As Father L.
from Gregoriou Monastery suggested during an August 2012 visit to
Mount Athos:
Arriving at Mount Athos and deciding to live here for the rest of his life,
the individual learns that the Mountain plays an important role in his life,
symbolizing the transformative experience of transfiguration. Gradually
the reference to the sacred dynamics of the mountain becomes part of his
daily cycle and the ascent to its peak is always felt as a great blessing and
worthy of being conducted.
42 C. Kakalis
The Annual Ascent to the Peak of the Mountain
These performative dynamics of the mountain are mainly manifested

today through the annual ascent of monks and pilgrims to the peak, the
all-night services held in the chapel and the following descent on the
sixth of August, when the event of the Transfiguration is celebrated.
In particular, monks from different Athonite monastic structures and
pilgrims ascend the mountain on the fifth of August to prepare for and
participate in the all-night vigils that are held in the chapel. Five different
paths meet at the middle of the route, where all the participants gather
and start ascending a steep, narrow path that passes through the thick
forest. The aim is to reach the recently restored ‘Shelter of The Mother of
God’, a small complex of a communal guest room, a kitchen and a chapel
dedicated to the Virgin (at about 1600 metres up the mountain). They
have some rest and an informal meal there, conduct Vespers in the chapel
and then continue the ascent to the peak in a processional way. Priests
and deacons wearing their vestments are followed by the rest of the devo-
tees carrying icons, candles or branches to be used during the service.
Chanting, censing and reading are also part of the procession.
At the peak there is the small Church of the Transfiguration, which is
still under construction. Its building started in 2012 to replace the
previous one (built in 1977), which was destroyed due to bad weather
conditions.5 Outside the chapel there is a small courtyard and a well. The
all-night vigils usually start with the Blessing of Holy Water at 20:30, and
finish around 06:00 the next morning. The devotees then go back to the
shelter of the Mother of God, where the celebration ends with a meal.
Besides this feast, the monks conduct pilgrimages to the shelter, combin-
ing the ascent and descent with their prayer.
This annual pilgrimage has a clear liturgical character with relatively
predefined movements that contrast with the freer movement usually
found along the footpaths of Mount Athos. The participants, mostly
monks and pilgrims, aim at a possible transformation through the interac-
tions that occur at different stages of this pilgrimage, the shared rituals and
silent prayer. Therefore, the interaction with the rough topography is fol-
lowed by the ritual procession that changes the experience by inscribing a
new aural line in the silence-scape of the mountain (chanting, reading,
censing). The individual body’s fatigue is dynamically combined with the

hesychast qualities of the topography into an initiation process. The silent
desert is inhabited by walking individuals who either go up to the shelter
or follow the litany to the summit. When one starts walking up, one feels
that it will be an experience of solitude and isolation. However, while
walking up to Panaghia, one keeps meeting other people and the path
becomes a field of pilgrimage walking that is replaced by a ritual walking
to the peak after the vespers.6 Standing on the summit of Athos, monks
and pilgrims feel that they have the possibility of being exposed to an
interaction with the divine. This is also connected to the cooler atmo-
sphere, the mist of the environment and the changing/panoptical views of
the horizon from above. It is the experience of the distance between the
land and the peak that narrates the possible communication with divine
qualities through the creation of a feeling of awe and sublime (Fig. 3.1).7
The possibility for visitors to participate in the procession underlines
the dynamic opening of communal rituals to the interpretation of the
outsiders, further enhancing the performative dynamics of the mountain.
This is described in travel accounts, such as those by Vasileios Stergioulis
and Dimitris Kyrou, who participated in the relevant rituals more than
once over the course of the last 20 years, illuminating communal ritual as
a shared/attuned reading of the natural landscape (Stergioulis 2005;
Kyrou 2001).
Fig. 3.1 Mapping the ascent to the peak of the mountain of Athos in the silence
of the landscape
44 C. Kakalis
he Silence of the Mountain: The Desert, the Cave

T
and the Hermitage
Part of the mountainous environment of the Athonite peninsula, caves

play an important role in the topography, as hesychast life in them has
been one of the forms of monastic practice on Athos for more than a
thousand years. They are the pores of a deserted mountainous rough
relief, whose dynamics attracted ascetics possibly even during the seventh
century, opening as an ‘antilandscape’, that, according to Veronica della
Dora, embodied qualities of negative (or apophatic) theology (Della
Dora 2011, 761–779). It is the absolute isolation and the difficult living
conditions that enhance the hermits’ need to alienate themselves from
the worldly environment:
Caves have served as privileged physical and metaphorical settings for both
mapping and enacting apophatic doctrine’s via negativa. Indeed, these
spaces are defined for what they are not rather than for what they are. (…)
Caves can be thus considered as metaphorical spaces in which vision is
partly interrupted; as pauses in the physical and spiritual landscape; as
silences. (…) They also provided hermits with both natural shelters and
privileged settings for their ascetic struggle to attain theosis through keno-
sis. They functioned as natural voids in which holy men who had renounced
the world could in turn become empty vessels to be filled with divine grace.
(Della Dora 2011, 764)
In the case of Athos, the dynamics of the caves, which are the porous
features of this rough mountainous relief, attracted ascetics possibly even
during the seventh century. They are the folds of the skin between the
earth and the sky, providing the ascetic with a sense of solitude and par-
tial protection from the weather due to their organic form. Being part of
the living organism of this natural environment, caves are connected to
the notions of unbuilt, indestructible, eternal. ‘Primitively eccentric’, these
dwellings of the hermits are, for the theorist G. Chatzinis, related to a
non-rational way of thinking, according to which the individual/hermit
builds his relationship to God (Chatzinis 1963, 132–133). It is the abso-
lute isolation and the difficult living conditions that enhance their need
to alienate themselves from the worldly environment through silence,
solitude and work on the repetition of the Jesus prayer. Caves become for
the hermits a kind of physical–spiritual ‘womb’ in which they live, seek-
ing rebirth and psychosomatic transformation through ascesis.
Monks who wanted to experience this completely secluded life went to
Athos and adjusted their spiritual demands to the existing landscape.
They used the mountain’s cavities that were most easily accessible to the
walker through the minimum of passages. During the Late Byzantine era,
asceteria were dispersed all over the Athos peninsula. Nowadays, still-
active hermitages are to be found mainly in the Athonite desert.
‘Cave-hermitages’ can be categorized into two types. The first one is
quite elaborate and is a result of a hermit’s own building work. These
dwellings have a small chapel, one or two rooms, and sometimes also
ancillary spaces. The second type stems from the minimum alteration of
the spaces of a cave or a smooth folding of the relief. The addition of built
boundaries should be minimal, as profane concerns have to be reduced.
Therefore, the extension of the natural space of a cave for the protection
of the hermit from the difficult weather conditions, the covering of his
needs or the housing of disciples that gather around him is not necessarily
related to a new structure. It is in-between the natural and the artificial
when a dry wall or a rectangular space made of wood closes the opening
of a cave.
These spaces constitute the smallest inhabitable spaces provided by
nature, and carry intense solitude dynamics, supporting hesychast prac-
tice, also enhanced by the minimization of built additions. The addition
of built boundaries should be minimal, as profane concerns have to be
reduced. Therefore, the extension of the natural space of a cave for the
protection of the hermit from the difficult weather conditions, the cover-
ing of his needs or the housing of disciples that gather around him is not
necessarily a new structure. It is in-between the natural and the artificial
when a dry wall or a rectangular space made of wood closes the opening
of a cave. Staying in a quasi-natural environment becomes, thus, part of
hesychast practice, contributing to their progress in communicating with
God through silent prayer.
Moreover, the practice of wandering also plays an important role in the
understanding of the Athonite desert. In this sense, some ascetics inhabit
a cave or a hermitage and abandon it when their silence is disturbed.
46 C. Kakalis
Wandering and need for solitude makes these places become part of the
landscape again, through either their total destruction or the smooth
incorporation of their ruins into the surrounding context. Hence, even
small huts built in the wild landscape as a shelter for one or two ascetics
are not considered to be permanent constructions. Their boundaries are
always in a process of a possible annulment and smooth reintegration in
the natural landscape. The combination of solitary–silent life and ascetic
wandering influences the way the landscape is experienced by the monks,
either through its inhabitation or through the structuring of the smallest
bounded spaces for the cover of their needs. Difficult to approach and
move in, hidden by the thick vegetation or always exposed to the weather
conditions, the rocky desert embodies the ideas of ephemeral, sacrifice
and unfamiliar.
Most of the time a hermitage is almost organically integrated into the
rough, mountainous environment. The intention of the hermits is to live
in an isolated, rough environment. Sometimes the transformation of a
cave is the beginning of such a monastic place. The structural evolution
of the complex is related to the development of the ascetic life in it.
In this sense, the inaccessible area of Karoulia is where the two types of
hermitages are mainly found. Even its name, which means ‘the place of
the pulleys’, reveals the hard, ascetic way of life. This relates to the old
way of accessing these hermitages, as hermits had to haul themselves up
by ropes or chains that passed over makeshift pulleys. The area contains
a number of separate hermitages, though the harshness of the environ-
ment and the intention of the ascetics to practise hesychasm did not allow
for the creation of a clear network of movement. It was difficult for the
paths to be opened and preserved, and for this reason the ascetics had to
struggle there, uninterrupted by outsiders. Now the different caves and
small huts are connected through a narrow mule track, hard to walk and
dangerous because of the sharp cliff. Ladders and pulleys are still used as
a way of accessing the hermitages, becoming extensions of the mule
track.
Silence plays an important role in this part of the peninsula. Ascending
the steep slope of the area, one finds himself in a mountainous rocky
context, whose harshness and, at times, vegetation intensifies a sense of
isolation. The only sounds are those of the sea, the wind and the birds.
It is very rare to see the hermits as they usually avoid interaction with
other people. The difficulty involved in approaching these hermitages
enhances this sense of solitude and silence through the creation of a clear
boundary between the insider and the outsider. Absence of noise and
limitation of vision are experienced both by the Athonites and by the visi-
tors, becoming an in-between zone in which they co-exist. On the one
hand, the ascetic practices silent prayer in the seclusion of his cave-her-
mitage. This condition of vigilance and anticipation is intensely commu-
nicated through the topography. On the other, the outsider interacts with
this uncanny environment, passing through an unfamiliar landscape
that, while not soundless, has the character of otherworldly isolation.
Discontinuities in the route towards a hermitage (when a ladder replaces
part of a path, or falling rocks obstruct the way) also make the outsider
experience feelings of disorientation and unfamiliarity. Exploring the
desert, the visitor is always aware and wondering what is going to happen
next. Wishing to hear a familiar noise or to become familiar with aspects
of the unfamiliar environment, he reads the landscape through a silent
conversation with its constituents:
Without a map to consult, I set off on what I later learned was the high trail
across the desert, the steep, sparsely inhabited southern slope of the moun-
tain, sometimes following a black plastic pipe that carried water from a
spring. But there were no spigots on the pipe. Even in the shade the air was
stifling.
The question of right relation to the earth is troubling for Christians, who
have a long history of interpreting God’s command to ‘have dominion over
the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing
that moves upon the earth’ (Genesis 1:28) in literal terms. (…) The vertical
desert of Athos was a tonic to a culture predicated on materialism. (…) In
the heat I realized how far I had strayed from my deepest self, having for-
gotten what was once an article of faith: the intimate connection between
the conservation of the earth and a good marriage- how each depends
upon recognizing limits. (…) My stiff neck and broken marriage, my hia-
tus from poetry and lost connection to the earth: they were of a piece.
(Merrill 2016, 138)
48 C. Kakalis
A combination of a solitary way of life and a more communal one in

the wider sphere of the Athonite desert becomes clear in the case of the
monk Joseph the Hesychast (1898–1959), an ascetic of the desert who
gradually attracted a number of disciples around him. Joseph the Hesychast
always tried to stay in isolated places in which, according to tradition,
great hermits had lived before. He thus spent his first summer on Athos
chasing around the peninsula and practising hesychasm under hard living
conditions, such as the ones of the Shelter of the Mother of God at the
beginning of the peak of Athos. He and another monk named Arsenios
decided to start a common ascetic life and settled in a hut at Katounakia,
an area close to Karoulia. They changed four different huts during the
course of their life, seeking always to find a quieter place to practise silent
prayer. For a long period of time they used to spend the winter in their hut
and wander in the desert for the rest of the year. Wandering helped them
feel like strangers (xenoi) in relation to their environment. Through their
wanderings and the repetition of the Jesus Prayer they tried to find a way
to depart from their mundane sphere and move towards God. The severity
of this ascetic way of life was a result of the dynamic interaction between
the elder and the distinct natural environment. This rough place permit-
ted Joseph the Hesychast to construct only the essential buildings required
to frame his hesychast life. The landscape and the people became part of
the same ascetic topography as the modest constructions filled the voids
left by the natural cavities of the mountain (Fig. 3.2).
Stories such as the one of Joseph the Hesychast create a mythical
framework in which wandering asceticism is a unique and difficult
hesychast practice. Τhe wanderer is a silent moving body-subject that is
only temporarily attached to a place. Athonite monks claim that there are
very few wandering ascetics today on the peninsula, mainly living in the
deserted parts of Karoulia and Kerasia.8 Crossing and transgressing
boundaries, the wanderer is a silent moving body-subject that is only
temporarily attached to a place and mainly inhabits the network of move-
ment in the peninsula, the pathways and few dirt roads. Qualities of
homelessness are therefore added to the performative dynamics of the
mountainous landscape, deepening its ascetic meaning.
It should be underlined here that technological development has
affected the more deserted areas of the peninsula, influencing its
Fig. 3.2 Mapping the search for silence of Elder Joseph the Hesychast
50 C. Kakalis
e xperiential spatiality. While at Karoulia one can still find the extreme,
deserted topography and life, the conditions in other parts such as Vigla,
which used to have a similar character, have now changed. Dirt roads
reach the area making them easier to approach (some hermits even have
their own cars) and changing the scale of the landscape formations. The
footpaths that lead to them are either partly replaced or suddenly inter-
rupted by the dirt roads, something that changes the landscape in an
intense way and compromises its hesychast dynamics.9
Hesychasm, Silence and Communal Ritual

The psychosomatic transformation towards a communication with God
suggested by hesychasm influences, therefore, the perception of the differ-
ent qualities of the Athonite natural and aural environment. In hesychasm,
repetitive (individual or communal) rituals are dynamically intercon-
nected with silent prayer, opening to the interpretation of the stranger,
something emphatically manifested in the inhabitation of the mountain
of Athos.10
According to Nick Crossley, rituals include ‘bodily activity, patterned
movements or postures’, the role of which becomes important in ritual as
connected to the manifestation of ‘a practical grasp upon our embodied
understanding of our incarnate, subjective or psychological state of
potentialities (…) of both our own subjectivity in an embodied way of
being-in-the-world and those of social world (…)’ (Crossley 2004, 33 &
40–47). Communal rituals are shared embodied recollections of scrip-
tural events or previous liturgical experiences that reaffirm the identity of
the community and open to their future re-actualization (Casey 1997,
238). Eastern Orthodox Christianity acknowledges the importance of
the embodied experience in the sacraments, underlining the undeniable
co-existence of the physical and the spiritual levels of the believer. As the
theologian Kallistos Ware characteristically argues: ‘Orthodoxy rejects
any attempt to diminish the materiality of the sacraments. The human
person is to be seen in holistic terms, as an integral unity of soul and
body, and so the sacramental worship in which we humans participate
should fully involve our bodies along with our minds’ (Ware 1997,
274–275). Therefore, Mount Athos opens as a dynamic field of ritual

choreographies in which important theological ideas are also bodily rec-
ollected through movements, gestures and interaction with the relevant
symbolic dynamics. Communal rituals taking place in the natural land-
scape, therefore, are processional inscriptions that interconnect the differ-
ent places of the topography through the narrative of an embodied,
liturgical choreography.
The annual ascent to the summit of Athos regards a ritual inhabitation
of the landscape the happening of which is directly connected to the
theological connotations of the mountain and its arduous nature. Most
of the people participating in it believe that this pilgrimage is a great
blessing, attributing to the landscape the sacred dynamics of the
Transfiguration: ‘It is the third time I am climbing up and I need to keep
focused and dedicated to what is happening here. I walk and I say the
Jesus Prayer rhythmically. Isn’t it like we are all becoming one body as we
gradually go up for the all-night vigils?’11 The service is the main phase of
the pilgrimage, which reaches its peak at the Holy Communion. The all-
night vigils are not limited to inside the four walls of the small church.
The surrounding landscape takes on worshipping qualities; the pilgrims
(monks and visitors) standing outside are participating in the liturgy even
if they cannot hear or watch the event happening inside. This experience
of worshipping in the landscape is further enhanced by the litany. The
rocky landscape opens an arena for pilgrims walking, praying and waiting
to receive the Holy Communion. Either sleeping, because of bodily tired-
ness, or carefully following the Liturgy in the cold night, they all eventu-
ally stand in the queue to receive the Holy Gifts and fulfil the aim of their
pilgrimage. The architecture of the shelter and the church is organically
combined with the natural landscape through the rituals testifying to the
worshipful aspects of the Athonite desert.
Climbing a mountain, therefore, involves arduous walking along the
‘difficult line’ of the path that leads to the peak. It is an almost ‘vertical
walk’, to use Rebecca Solnit’s term, that requires physical strength com-
bined with hope and anticipation in order to reach the destination (Solnit
2000, 133). As Anja Karina-Nydal suggests in her chapter, the dynamics
of mountaineering are connected to the ‘search for the “difficult” line and
the quest to master it’. This ‘line’ for Karina-Nydal ‘is simultaneously
52 C. Kakalis
that space within which the activity of climbing takes place, as well as that
space which climbers represent graphically through drawings and photo-
graphs’. Anticipation and intentionality are merged with these aspects of
concrete experience to suggest the pilgrimage qualities of the mountain-
ous Athonite landscape. The climbing up to the Shelter of the Mother of
God and the ritual climbing to the peak and the Chapel of the
Transfiguration assume the sacred connotations of the mountain, trans-
forming the ‘difficult line’ to the peak into an arena of religious worship.
On the other hand, silent prayer is intertwined with human and atmo-
spheric qualities of silence, which is not a completely soundless phenom-
enon. It is a material condition incorporated in the experience of both
architecture and the natural landscape. Besides sound and hearing, its
occurrence also involves a multisensory, performative interaction with
the environment as it is organically interconnected to the other phenom-
ena taking place in it. Either human or atmospheric, silence is both a space
ready to be filled and a substance filling a specific space in a meaningful
way (Kakalis 2016b, 304–305). It is connected to temporality, something
also enhanced in the case of hesychasm by a sense of rhythm that is pro-
duced by the recitation of the same phrase. Silence is therefore intensely
performative, as another way of understanding the surrounding context
and communicating with other individuals through shared prayer
practices.
Besides the conditions of solitude and isolation, the silence of the
rough landscape of Mount Athos is also connected to the exposure of the
individual to a natural atmosphere of wind, rain and sounds of the birds
and the sea that is significantly different from what we usually experience
in our everyday life in more urban areas. Silence is not perceived the
same way in all the parts of the peninsula. In the desert, the silence is
intense and even ‘unbearable’ for some outsiders (Fieldwork, September
2014). On the other hand, in a monastery silence is mixed with various
sounds, creating a different aural-scape. Silence, therefore, adds to the
existential qualities of the topography. It is a material condition of wait-
ing and openness that communicates various meanings (ascetic for the
Athonites, religious for the pilgrims and more profane for some other
visitors). In it sounds come to consciousness and senses are fully engaged.
In the hesychia of the mountain of Athos, the individual opens to the
communication with the divine through silent prayer, severe ascetic life
and unique pilgrimage experiences.
Approaching the meaning of hesychia, the theologian Kallistos Ware
thus talks about an experienced silence working at different levels, from
the more external to the more inward. In particular, the hermit has to
define his spatial relationship with other human beings and seclude him-
self in places of solitude, such as the caves and the hermitages of Mount
Athos’ desert (first level: Hesychia and Solitude). The monk who is a mem-
ber of a coenobitic community has the ability to depart from it and prac-
tises the silent prayer in his cell (second level: Hesychia and the spirituality
of the cell). Having demarcated the outward framework of their spiritual
struggles, both hermits and monks seek to ‘confine their incorporeal
within their bodily house’, striving to discover ‘the ladder that leads to the
Kingdom of God’ (third level: Hesychia and the ‘return into oneself ’) (Ware
2000, 89–98).
These levels of hesychia illuminate the role of silence in the Athonite
topography. Silence demarcates the personal sphere of the monks who
prefer quiet places such as the desert. They try neither to talk nor to hear
more words than necessary (Sherrard 1960, 92). The regulations of
entrance to the peninsula and the long Athonite monastic tradition have
led to the preservation of an untouched natural environment, which,
despite having been recently wounded by uncritically executed infra-
structural and building developments, is still experienced by the outsid-
ers as something different from the world outside of it. During their stay,
visitors are often forced to reconsider qualities of place, which are now
lost from our contemporary lives. One of them is silence, the atmo-
spheric experience of which enhances their explorations. A long walk in
a forest, a climb to the peak of the mountain, walking along the seashore
or a journey through the desert are all situations during which we can
feel involved in the occurrence of silence. The silence of the natural land-
scape is directly linked with its tangible components and soundscape.
The sound of the birds, the rustling of the leaves and the sound of water
may contribute to an eventful silent interaction with Athonite nature.
Natural phenomena, such as wind, rain, snow and the changes in tem-
perature, also take part in it. Alterations in their intensity may lead either
to the enhancement of solitude or to the sudden intrusion of noise.
54 C. Kakalis
Light, darkness and shadows can be also parts of a meaningful silence-

scape. Walking and direct interaction with the natural landscape enhance
our reading of the embodied traces of silence. It is through walking that
visitors at Athos usually read the silence of the landscape as an integral
component of the peninsula. Depending on their motivation, they may
interpret it as a sacred/hesychast quality (usually pilgrims) or even a phe-
nomenon with intense existential qualities.
Conclusions
Mount Athos embodies, therefore, important theological ideas, such as
the ones of Transfiguration and hesychasm, realized through the annual
pilgrimage to its peak and the rituals happening there on the fifth and
sixth of August, but also the hermetic inhabitation of its caves and steep
slopes. In its hesychast performativity, silence of nature plays an important
role as an atmospheric quality that contributes to the otherworldly,
sacred, dynamics of the landscape and its opening as an arena for self-
reflection and existential quests to happen. Hermits fill the pores and the
paths of the landscape with silent prayer, through either cave dwelling or
prayerful walking itineraries. Strangers interact with silence as bodily
fatigue is combined with the natural sounds of the rough environment to
create a feeling of solitude and isolation, which allows their journey to
happen within the performative dynamics of the Athonite topography.
Different strangers and Athonites meet on the fifth of August, walking
through the silent desert to transform the mountain into a common
ground of effort and worship.
Notes
1. I would like to express my gratitude to the Alexander S. Onassis Public
Benefit Foundation for partly funding the relevant research on both doc-
toral and postdoctoral levels.
2. The kellion is a small monastic structure surrounded by a piece of land,
directly related to one of the 20 coenobitic monasteries.
3. The sketes are monastic complexes that administratively ‘belong’ to one

of the 20 coenobitic monasteries, functioning partly independently.
Their organization is based on the model of the lavras and the connec-
tion between a central complex of communal buildings (church, refec-
tory, common room) and the cells spread in them. The ascetics live alone
in their cell and meet at the services every Saturday and Sunday.In addi-
tion, there are also two other types of sketes: one is a skete of a coenobitc
character, following the organization of a monastery; the other is about
the assembly of a number of huts that do not have a core of communal
buildings. Assemblies like this can be found in the Desert of Athos, like
the aforementioned Karoulia, and in the Kapsala situated near the capital
of Karyes, which is also known as ‘the desert of Kapsala’.
4. ‘Coenobitic’ monasticism is a monastic tradition of communal life.
Etymologically the word stems from the Greek words koinos (κοινός),
meaning common, and bios (βίος), meaning life. In Athos, there are 20
coenobitic monasteries that share a number of architectural principles,
opening as a field for a programmed common life of work and worship.
5. Little is known about the history of the chapel and the establishment of
the annual pilgrimage to the peak. The previous one was built in 1895,
and it is almost certain that it had replaced a previous one as a chapel is
even depicted in 1588 Pierre Belon’s map of Mount Athos and later
depictions of the peninsula. For more on this map, see Della Dora
(2006).
6. These observations come from the author’s discussions with visitors
walking up to the peak on 18 August 2015.
7. These insights derive from fieldwork on Mount Athos in August 2015.
8. This information was gleaned during the author’s fieldwork at Mount
Athos in August 2012.
9. These observations were made during the author’s August 2015 field-
work on Mount Athos.
10. For more on this, see also Kakalis (2016a, b).
11. Pilgrim N. at the celebration of the Transfiguration. Fieldwork at Mount
Athos, August 2015.
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4
Reading Mountains: Performative Visual
Language in Tenth-Century Northern
Iberian Monastic Communities
Emily Goetsch
Introduction
This chapter will examine medieval images and text to suggest that moun-
tain environments were essential features of performative experience in
tenth-century Iberia. The impact of and response to the mountainous
environment that was newly inhabited by Christian groups who migrated
from the Muslim-ruled South has not previously been examined in depth,
though a single contemporary source known as the Chronicle of 754 doc-
uments the invasion, specifically referencing the change in topography.
This document explains that the Muslim leader Musa:
devastated not only Hispania Ulterior, but Hispania Citerior up to and

beyond the ancient and once flourishing city of Zaragoza, which was now,
by the judgment of God, openly exposed to the sword, famine and captiv-
ity. … While he terrorized everyone … some of the cities that remained
E. Goetsch (*)
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_4
60 E. Goetsch
sued for peace under duress and, after persuading and mocking them with
a certain craftiness, the Saracens granted their requests without delay.
When the citizens subsequently rejected what they had been forced to
accept out of fear and terror, they tried to flee to the mountains where they
risked hunger and various forms of death. (Baxter Wolf 2011, 43)
While the reliability of and perspective embraced in the Chronicle of

754 has drawn criticism from scholars in the past, the reference to fleeing
to the mountains not only matches up with the establishment and revival
of Christian communities in northern Iberia after Muslim invasion in
711, but also calls direct attention to mountains as an impactful feature
of the Christian experience within Muslim-ruled Iberia.
With the aim of analysing how mountains were understood and inte-
grated into the Iberian Christian mindset, this chapter will examine key
illustrations from the most prominent Mozarabic manuscript tradition—
Beatus of Liébana’s illustrated Commentary on the Apocalypse. It will be
argued that the notable inclusion of mountain imagery in the earliest,
tenth-century editions of the Beatus manuscripts functioned as a visual
language, which translated and expressed the Christian condition in
northern Iberia in relation to biblical events, making mountain imagery
a viable way of articulating performed experiences. More specifically,
analysis of the images and relevant texts will show that Iberian Christians
considered themselves to be living out or performing biblical situations,
which occurred in mountain regions and the holy city of Jerusalem—the
city upon a hill. By regarding their circumstances in the mountains as a
re-enactment of biblical scenarios, the tenth-century monastic communi-
ties creating and using these manuscripts were able to contextualize,
rationalize and explain the hardships they incurred.
ountain Language, Materiality

M
and Representation
In order to understand and contextualize the linguistic function of
mountain imagery in the Beatus illustrations, it is necessary to examine
how mountains were integrated into Iberian literature as a way of
4 Reading Mountains: Performative Visual Language... 61
expressing specific ideals, qualities and conditions. Prior to Muslim

invasion, a range of sources discussed mountains with reverential lan-
guage and importance. For example, Isidore’s prologue to the ‘History
of the Kings of the Goths’, which is entitled, ‘In Praise of Spain’,
describes the abundance of Spain’s ‘mountains full of trees’ and the
‘rock, shining in the shadowy depths of the mountains, that is aflame
with radiance like the sun’ (Isidore 2011, 67–68). After Muslim inva-
sion, the northern mountain ranges are repeatedly referenced in terms of
their challenging terrain and protective capacities. For example, the
Chronicle of 754 offers instances of this, as it describes how Abd al-
Rahman was forced to ‘cut through the rocky mountains of the Basques’
in order to invade Frankish lands, a manoeuvre which ultimately led to
his defeat at the hands of Charles Martel and the European army. This
source also tells of Abd al-Malik’s need to ‘subdue the inhabitants of the
Pyrenean mountains’, suggesting that groups were identified because of
their location and the ways in which they used the mountains to their
advantage (Baxter Wolf 2011, 116–118).
Mountains also played a significant role in foundation stories of the
region and in accounts of significant Christian victories over Muslim
forces. The Chronicle of Alfonso III of Asturias, which was written in 883,
recounts how the celebrated figure of Pelayo, who is credited with found-
ing the Kingdom of Asturias, bravely evaded Muslim capture by climbing
deep into the mountains and up Mount Asueva, where he ‘took refuge in
a cave on a hillside which he knew to be safe’ (Baxter Wolf 2011, 134).
While the following explanation oversimplifies the story, Pelayo’s faith
and adherence to the Christian God allowed him to fend off an army of
185,000 Muslim soldiers and adverse Christian groups from his position
in the mountains. After Pelayo declared his firm belief in Christianity,
God shook the mountains, which launched Pelayo’s adversaries into the
river and then crushed them. Thus, in this capacity, mountains played an
active role in accounts of Christian victory over Muslims and also facili-
tated the development of heroic lore surrounding this celebrated north-
ern Iberian founder.
The small selection of descriptions provided above begins to suggest the
ways in which mountains became active elements in texts where Iberian
Christian interacted with their Muslim neighbours and p erformed great
62 E. Goetsch
feats to enhance and preserve the Christian cause. Iberian Christians inte-
grated aspects of their new geographical placement on the peninsula into
these texts as a way of demonstrating how they related to their Muslim
neighbours and the global Christian community. Provided that it is pos-
sible to glean an understanding of Iberian ideas related to identity, history
and security through the specific inclusion of mountains in texts, it is
worth examining how images of mountains were used to demonstrate the
ways in which Iberian Christians conceived of themselves, their experi-
ences and other communities. As will be argued throughout the rest of this
section, images of mountains formed part of a visual language, articulat-
ing, contextualizing and explaining circumstances on the Iberian Peninsula,
particularly in relation to living out or performing Christian narratives.
As mentioned in the introductory section, analysis in this chapter will
draw on prominent illustrations from manuscripts of Beatus of Liébana’s
Commentary on the Apocalypse. The Beatus manuscripts are particularly
appropriate for this discussion as they were produced prolifically over the
course of tenth to thirteenth centuries, becoming more prominent than
even illustrated manuscripts of the Bible in Iberia during this time
(Williams 1977, 24). This long period and frequency of production, in
tandem with the extensive nature of their illustrative programme, offer
the potential for more consistent analysis, which cannot be achieved by
studying disparately produced works. In essence, examining the illustra-
tive features included across several manuscripts, which are temporally
and structurally similar, offers the opportunity to see repeated and
emphasized messages, patterns that cannot be gleaned from exploring
more isolated works. Furthermore, the earliest extant manuscripts—
those dating from the tenth century—provide evidence of how Iberian
Christians understood and responded to their physical environs during
the Golden Age of Muslim rule in Iberia, which lasted to the end of the
tenth century. By focusing on text and image from this period, the analy-
sis that follows can provide insight into the Christian perspective during
the time in which Christian communities were perhaps most challenged
by Muslim presence.
More specifically, this chapter will focus on the Mappaemundi from
the four most complete, early Beatus manuscripts, which include the
Morgan, Valladolid, Girona and Urgell Beatus manuscripts (see Fig. 4.1
Fig. 4.1 Mappamundi from the Girona Beatus. Catedral de Girona, Num. Inv.
7(11), ff. 54v–55r. Girona Cathedral Chapter—all rights reserved
for an example of these images). These representations are significant

within cartographic history as they are considered to form their own
distinct tradition and feature elements, which separate them from other
early cartographic traditions. Within these works, the importance of
these images is indicated through their prominent placement within the
illustrative programme. As the first double-page scenes, the maps are
arresting representations of the world, which are particularly striking as
one progresses through the manuscript due to the considerably smaller
size of the preceding images and the numerous pages of image-free text
which lead up to the maps.1
Additionally, within the context of the Beatus narrative, the
Mappaemundi are used to establish a key framework, which structures the
rest of the text and illustrative programme. Occurring in the Prologue to
the Second Book of the Commentary, which seeks to define the church
and all opposition to it, the maps represent the Mission of the Apostles
64 E. Goetsch
and, significantly, the image is specifically referenced in the text,2 thereby

visually and textually asserting the extent of the church on earth. In the
text, the church is juxtaposed against the synagogue, which is taken to
mean all opposition to the church; the Commentary text explains that the
prologue was written ‘concerning the Church and the Synagogue so that
you, O Reader, may know in the fullest way what their respective charac-
teristics are and who may be regarded as dwelling in each’ (Beatus 2000,
403).
These themes of the good and the heretical permeate the text and illus-
trative programmes of these manuscripts, and thus the maps are central
to establishing the concepts and dichotomies which structure the narra-
tive of this important text and the affiliated images. Furthermore, the
prominent placement, structure, size and context of these scenes indicate
that they were developed to deliver ideas and themes, which were impor-
tant to their artists and patrons. Thus, as the Mappaemundi assume a
prominent role in the expression of ideas developed throughout the com-
mentary text, the details of these visual representations become essential
to articulating and delivering ideas about the Church and its status.
Certainly, this instructive element is not unique to the Beatus maps.
It almost goes without saying that scholars of cartography, and map
readers generally, widely accept that form, colour, line, pattern and
spatial relationships communicate ideas and messages. Similar to the
ways in which written and spoken languages use words to articulate
meaning, the graphic devices or symbols on a map become the words
within each cartographic phrase, facilitating the transmission of ideas
to viewers (Robinson et al. 1978, 2–3). While interest in cartosemiot-
ics and the communicative potential of maps has flourished over the
last 10 to 15 years, studies have focused on contemporary maps and
the most effective ways of expressing spatial and geographic informa-
tion through new media and to new audiences with a greater breadth
of technological knowledge and understanding.3 Despite this general
focus on the communicative potential of maps today, this linguistic
conception of and approach to cartography is a fruitful way of consid-
ering the symbols, forms and shapes employed in early map imagery
which has not been fully explored; the consideration of the symbols
and signs on the Beatus maps as a language in their own right opens up
the possibility of new interpretations of Iberian Christian understand-

ing. As the French linguist Antoine Meillet wrote, ‘Every language
expresses whatever is necessary for the society of which it is an organ’
(Ortega y Gasset 1992, 102).
As the rest of this chapter will argue, in the case of the Beatus maps,
which were prominently placed and incorporated into this highly popu-
lar manuscript tradition of tenth-century Iberia, the symbols and forms
deliberately included on these large representations of the Christian land-
scape served as a way of explaining and rectifying the experiences of
Christian communities in Northern Iberia during this period. As Octavio
Paz wrote, ‘Language has become a landscape, and that landscape, in
turn, is a creation, the metaphor of a nation or of an individual, a verbal
topography that communicates fully, that translates fully’ (Paz 1992,
157). By analysing the forms included on these tenth-century landscapes
as a cartographic linguistic system, this chapter will translate the articu-
lated symbols in the context of the northern Iberian communities pro-
ducing these manuscripts, suggesting that the features of the map point
to an understanding of performed biblical experiences.
Interpretation and Performance
Admittedly, and despite the significance of the maps within these works,
the iconography included on the tenth-century mappaemundi is relatively
sparse. Mountains, rivers, a small depiction of Adam and Eve in paradise,
some vegetation and text are shown on the represented earth, though
much of the page is left empty. While this could be one reason that so
little attention has been paid to the features of these maps, the lack of
extensive illustration allows the images that are depicted, such as the
mountains, to be accentuated. Aside from the oceanic borders in the
Morgan, Valladolid and Girona images, which are blue in colour and
populated with fish and boats, the background of the interiors of these
images have largely been left blank. As such, the mountains, rivers and
the image of Eden in the top, easterly regions, dominate the scenes, form-
ing pronounced and specific statements against the blank parchment of
the represented earth.
66 E. Goetsch
This lack of additional ornamentation and detail is striking when com-

pared to other early medieval maps and later Beatus maps, which are
similarly shaped and formatted, though filled with significantly more
illustration and text. For example, the sixth-century Cosmas world map
(Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat.gr. 699, folio 40v) is rectan-
gular in shape, with a tan border. The interior of the map features blue
ocean and tan earth in the centre, which renders the backdrops of the
tenth-century Beatus maps strikingly bare in comparison.
The scarcity of colour and detail in the Beatus scenes is further accen-
tuated when they are compared to the eighth-century Vatican world map,
which is found in a volume of Isidore’s Etymologies (Fig. 4.2). While this
image lacks the solid coverage of the painted background seen in the
Cosmas map, the illustrated rivers, islands cities and text almost entirely
fill the interior of the earth. Similarly, non-western maps produced
Fig. 4.2 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS. Lat. 6018, folios 63v–64r.
©Vatican Library
around the same time also combine colour, detailed depictions of land-
masses and text, which fill the interior of the map, exhibiting consider-
able detail and use of colour that is not evident in the Beatus Mappaemundi.
For example, the Balkhi School world map seen in Fig. 4.3 presents a rich
blue ocean surrounding islands and large blocks of land, which include
red mountain ranges and considerable amounts of Arabic text. Thus
again, the empty space included on the Beatus maps is significant when
compared to the detailed images found in medieval cartographic images
from both western and relevant non-western traditions.
Notably, later Beatus mappaemundi are also much more elaborate and
ornamental than the tenth-century images. When compared to the world
maps from the eleventh-century Osma and Saint-Sever Beatus manu-
scripts and the late twelfth-century Beatus of Navarre, among others, the
tenth-century maps are decidedly less colourful and less detailed, featuring
fewer structures and fewer figures. Both the Osma Beatus map (Burgo de
Fig. 4.3 Oxford, Bodleian, MS Laud. Or. 317, folios 10v–11r

68 E. Goetsch
Osma, Archivo de la Catedral, Cod. 1, folios 34v–35r) and the Saint-

Sever Beatus map (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 8878, folios
44v–45r) present considerably more detail than is found in the earlier
Beatus images. Rivers and lakes are presented in a deep blue colour,
numerous buildings and mountain ranges stretch across the represented
earth and, in the case of the Osma Beatus, busts of the apostles are
included on the map as well. While the earth is still presented as blank
parchment on these images, considerably more details and images are
presented on these images, drawing less specific attention to any one
feature.
The images found on the interior of the Beatus of Navarre map (Paris,
Bibliothèque Nationale, nouv. Acq. Lat. 1366, ff. 24v–25r; Fig. 4.4) are
even further developed, with comparatively little blank parchment left on
the interior. Here, light blue rivers, orange and brown mountains and a
wealth of architectural renderings dominate the map. While mountain
Fig. 4.4 Beatus of Navarre map. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, nouv. Acq. Lat.
1366, ff. 24v–25r. Bibliothèque nationale de France
ranges are shown, they are visually overtaken by brightly coloured rivers
that weave their way through an explosion of architectural renderings,
which fill the majority of the map. In this twelfth-century image, the
colours, types of depictions and suggested movement of the waterways
create a busy and eccentric image, which contrasts with the compara-
tively static representations of mountains and rivers of the tenth-century
maps.
As the tenth-century Beatus images are so much less detailed than
these other cartographic images, it would seem that the early Beatus maps
were deliberately developed to emphasize features, such as the moun-
tains, which contrast with the emptiness of the blank parchment back-
ground. The visual emphasis placed on these specifically developed
elements allows them to pictorially convey ideas and key messages,
thereby acting as a linguistic system to translate the priorities and beliefs
of the Iberian Christian communities producing the manuscripts.
That mountains are visually emphasized within this system of signifiers
is important, though, on some level, not entirely surprising. In one sense,
these are terrestrial images and the presentation of geological features,
such as mountains, allows viewers to identify the images as earthly
representations. Perhaps more significantly, however, mountains were
extremely popular tropes in both scripture and in patristic writings. For
example, God and his protection are frequently compared to mountains,
as evidenced in Psalm 125:1–2, which declares: ‘They that trust in the
Lord shall be as Mount Sion: he shall not be moved forever that dwelleth
in Jerusalem. Mountains are round about his people from henceforth
now and for ever.’
Mountains also signalled Christian power and authority throughout
the world, which is evidenced in Isaiah 2: ‘In the last days the mountain
of the house of the Lord shall be prepared on the top of mountains, and
it shall be exalted above the hills and all nations shall flow unto it.’ In
scripture, mountains also attest to the importance of belief in the faith, as
is suggested through Matthew 17:19: ‘Jesus said to them … For, amen I
say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you shall say to
this mountain, Remove from hence hither, and it shall remove; and noth-
ing shall be impossible for you.’ While these excerpts in no way form a
comprehensive account of the references to mountains that are found in
70 E. Goetsch
biblical and patristic texts, they do suggest the prevalence of mountains

in Christian doctrine, demonstrating that these geological forms were
used to promote certain concepts and express Christian ideals.
In terms of the Beatus Mappaemundi, another common biblical asso-
ciation with mountains is particularly important—the connection
between mountains and the apostles. As mentioned earlier, the maps
were included in the text as an image of the Mission of the Apostles and
therefore represent the extent of the earthly Church, which was founded
through the work of the apostles who evangelized the world. Within the
context of these manuscripts, the maps occur next to a list of the apostles
and the regions they evangelized, and are actually referenced at the end of
that list: ‘And how [the Apostle] reap with their sickles these grains of
seed throughout the field of this world, which the prophets prepared, the
following picture shows’ (Edson 1999, 148).
This link between the mountains and the apostles is explored in detail
in a number of texts, including, for example, John’s Gospel and associ-
ated exegesis written by Gregory and Augustine (Gregory the Great 1990,
246; Augustine 1988, 44–45). While these texts lend insight into the
Christian understanding of mountains and the apostles, this discussion
will focus on references to these topics from the Psalms, which formed a
direct and important part of the Mozarabic liturgy. Unlike other rites
where the recitation of the Psalms was regularly distributed throughout
the week or, in some cases, a single day, the Mozarabic Rite lacks a fixed
structure. Thus, while the Psalms are introduced into the liturgy in vary-
ing orders and with varying degrees of frequency, they were and are cen-
tral to the performance of the Mozarabic liturgy.
One prominent mountain reference occurs in Psalm 45, which states:
Unto the end, for the sons of Core, for the hidden.
Our God is our refuge and strength: a helper in troubles which have
found us exceedingly.
Therefore we will not fear, when the earth shall be troubled; and the
mountains shall be removed into the heart of the sea.
Their waters roared and were troubled: the mountains were troubled
with his strength.
The stream of the river maketh the city of God joyful: the most high
hath sanctified his own tabernacle.
When analysing this passage, Augustine explained when the ‘earth

shall be confounded … It shall come to pass in the last days that the
mountain of the Lord shall be manifest’ and furthermore:
this mountain placed above other mountains; because the Apostles also are
mountains, supporting this Mountain (my italics). Therefore followest, ‘In
the last days the Mountain of the Lord shall be manifest, established in the
top of the mountains.’ Therefore passeth It tops of all mountains, and on
the top of all mountains is It placed; because the mountains are preaching
The mountain. (Augustine 1857, Vol. 2, 265)
Cassiodorus also detailed the relationship between the apostles and

mountains when he commented on the section of Psalm 45 that reads,
‘And the mountains shall be removed into the heart of the sea’. He wrote:
‘This happened at the moment when the mountains, in other words, the
apostles, abandoned the unbelieving Jews and crossed over into the heart
of the sea, that is, to preach to the Gentiles’ (Cassiodorus 1990, Vol. I,
454). Cassiodorus then continued, ‘We note that following the example
of these spokesmen, the mountains jutting out with their holy peak and
most secure in the firmness of their faith, were removed to the heart of
the sea, that is, to instil belief in all nations’ (Ibid., 454).
Provided this direct connection between the apostles and mountains,
the distribution of mountains across the rectangular images of the Beatus
Mappaemundi would seem to represent the apostles themselves, who also
were dispersed throughout the world in order to spread the faith.4 This
visual suggestion of preaching Christianity and behaving or performing
in the way of the apostles would have been particularly relevant for
Christian communities in northern Iberia, whose population and regional
control were compromised by Muslim rule in the South. While much has
been made of the relatively copasetic relationship between Christians and
Muslims in the South, the northern Christian regions were essentially
frontier zones during the ninth and tenth centuries. Texts such as the
Chronicle of 754 and the Chronicle of Alfonso III, which was written in the
early tenth century, recount a number of the battles, skirmishes and dis-
plays of military and political prowess that occurred between Muslims
and Christians during this period, describing, as was referenced earlier,
72 E. Goetsch
the ‘refugees’ that fled ‘to the mountains where they risked various forms
of death’ and hardship (Baxter Wolf 2011, 43, 54 and 134).
In addition to military insecurity, Muslim rule enforced cultural and
social restrictions on Christian communities, which included high taxes,
marriage restrictions and limitations on worship. For example, the
Chronicle of 754 explains that in 721, the Muslim leader Anbasah ‘bur-
dened the Christians by doubling their taxes’ (Baxter Wolf 2011, 113)
and that in 723, Walid was ‘seized with greed and a greater collection of
money was made, east and west, by the generals he sent out than has been
gathered by any king at any time before him’ (Baxter Wolf 2011, 114).
The implications of these restrictions are evidenced in a number of ways,
including through conversion rates to Islam on the Peninsula, which are
estimated to have peaked in the tenth century; Richard Bulliet’s study
projected that the conversion in Spain peaked around the year 913, just
prior to the creation of the manuscripts discussed here (Bulliet 1979,
117). This increase in conversions during the tenth century suggests that
there was some degree of pressure on Christian communities to maintain
their population numbers.
More broadly, the production of these four manuscripts coincides with
the Golden Age of the Córdoban Caliphate, which saw tremendous
expansion and cultural development during the tenth century. With the
long reign of Abd al-Rahman III (912–961) came a period of great
Muslim organization, development and success on the Peninsula, which
lasted throughout the tenth century. Assuming the title of caliph and
asserting his dominion over spiritual and worldly domains, Abd al-
Rahman III inspired a sense of loyalty in his subjects, bringing together
the diverse but thriving population and establishing Cordoba as a cul-
tural and commercial centre. While Abd al-Rahman did not destroy the
Christian states in the North, there was little opportunity for Christians
to challenge the Muslim presence, let alone drive Islam from Iberia. The
combination of sovereign authority in al-Andalus and political strife
within Asturias brought about by a series of unsuccessful and incompe-
tent rulers contributed to an inauspicious century for Christian commu-
nities inhabiting the northern Iberian mountains (O’Callaghan 1975,
120–126).
Thus, during a time of great challenge, these representations of moun-

tains, with their link to the Mission of the Apostles and the environment
surrounding these Christian communities, would have expressed the
benefits of behaving in the way of the apostles by preaching Christianity
and emphasized the benefits of endurance, protection and triumph that
come with the faith. These images would have served not only as mes-
sages of reassurance in the stability of Christian life and practice, visually
countering the threats of dominance, conversion and invasion brought
about by Muslim rule, but also would have encouraged acting in the
manner of the apostles, figures which took the form of the mountainous
environs of northern Iberia.
The significance of the apostles and these messages of an enduring
faith are made increasingly apparent in later editions of the manuscripts
where images of the apostles were included. In the Las Huelgas Beatus, a
full-page illustration just before the maps is devoted to the images of the
apostles. Additionally, in the Osma Beatus busts of the apostles are placed
on the map in relation to the areas that they evangelized. With nimbused
heads set atop a pedestal of sorts, these busts resemble the shape of the
mountains included on the earlier works and fill the spaces on the map
which had previously occupied by the mountain representations. Thus,
the link between the mountains and the apostles is further extended
within the Beatus tradition, more directly promoting the actions of the
apostles and Christian dominance, which was brought about by the
Mission of the Apostles.
In addition to the Mission of the Apostles, other Christological asso-
ciations with mountains would have contributed to the ways in which
these monastic communities understood and interpreted their circum-
stances. More specifically, Christ declares in the Sermon on the Mount
from Matthew 5:14: ‘You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a
hill cannot be hidden.’ This reference and the exegesis on this verse suggest
the positive associations with the concept of a city upon a hill. More spe-
cifically, Augustine explains that this city is ‘founded upon a singularly
great holiness, which is signified by the very mountain whereon the Lord
spoke’ (Augustine 1848, 25). These biblical and exegetical endorsements
of existing in mountainous regions established a positive precedent of
74 E. Goetsch
inhabiting mountains, which could be adopted and emulated by the

Iberian Christian communities.
More specifically, however, the city on the hill referenced in the Sermon
on the Mount was and is generally considered to be Jerusalem. Psalm
121:2–3 explains, ‘Jerusalem, which is built as a city, which is compact
together. For thither did the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord: the tes-
timony of Israel, to praise the name of the Lord.’ This act of climbing up
the hill to this lofty city was central to the concepts associated with the
‘city on the hill’ and was actively embraced in medieval practice. In one
sense, this ascension could be performed through contemplation, which
is developed through Psalms 120–134, also known as the ‘Songs of
Ascent’ or the ‘Gradual Psalms’. Within this series, the early Psalms intro-
duce themes of strife and trouble in this life and progress towards ideas of
contemplation in the latter part of the series (Barrie 2010, 105–107).
Towards the end of the series of Psalms, when contemplation and
Jerusalem are reached, Psalm 132 acknowledges ‘Behold, how good and
how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity’. In his
Commentary on Psalm 132, Augustine wrote:
For these same words of the Psalter, this sweet sound, that honeyed melody,
as well of the mind as of the hymn, did even beget the monasteries. By this
sound were stirred up the brethren who longed to dwell together. This verse
was their trumpet. It sounded throughout the whole earth, and they who
had been divided were gathered together. (Augustine 1857, Vol. 1, 116)
Augustine continued by explaining that because the Psalm acknowl-

edged, ‘“Behold, how good and how pleasant is it, that brethren should
dwell together in one”, why then should we not call Monks so? … They
… live together as to make one man, so that they really possess what is
written, one mind and one heart, many bodies’ (Augustine 1857, Vol. 1,
116).
For the monastic communities in the northern Iberian mountains, this
notion of building and existing in a city upon a hill would have been
uniting and important. By drawing parallels between their communities
and Jerusalem, these groups of Iberian Christians could promote their
own status in line with the sacred city, constructing a pious identity by
performing acts of literal and spiritual ascension associated with the nar-
rative of the city upon a hill. In this sense, mountains became a part of
the performative experience of these monastic communities, allowing
them to assert their importance within Christendom as an entity in line
with Jerusalem and justifying the hardships that came with the move into
the mountains and Islamic rule.
This connection between the monastic communities in Iberia and
Jerusalem extends beyond these theological links, as Jerusalem was also
under Muslim rule during the tenth century. Muslim forces first took
Jerusalem in 638, maintaining control until 1099, when the crusaders
captured they city. During this period the same sort of taxes and restric-
tions on worship, which spurred Iberian Christians to migrate to the
mountains, were enforced in Jerusalem (Gil 2002, 101–120). Throughout
the more than 400 years of Muslim rule in Jerusalem, numerous churches
were damaged or destroyed; surprise attacks, murders and robberies were
carried out on Christians by Muslim villagers; priests and monks were
harassed; and heavy taxes were levied on churches and monasteries
(Prawer and Ben-Shammai 1996, 139–142). As a result of persecution
and restrictions, significant emigration from Jerusalem to Cyprus, south-
ern Anatolia and Constantinople began in the ninth century (Prawer and
Ben-Shammai 1996, 141–143), again paralleling the experience of
Christians in Iberia at that time.
Furthermore, the Christians that remained in Jerusalem underwent a
period of Arabicization or Islamicization, which saw Christian communi-
ties embrace Arabic language and text, merging traditions in a way that
was similar to the cultural fusion occurring in al-Andalus. Thus, in addi-
tion to referencing instances of biblical hardships to justify their own
position on the Peninsula, Iberian Christians also used mountains to
forge links between their circumstances and the Muslim occupation in
the tenth century and the experiences of those in other realms of
Christendom at the same time. By referencing Jerusalem in particular,
Iberian Christians created ties between their small and relatively new
communities to the most important and holy of cities, further legitimiz-
ing their own beliefs and practices through such comparisons.
Thus, the prominent inclusion of mountains on the world maps from
the tenth-century Beatus manuscripts was not only a way of illustrating
76 E. Goetsch
and encouraging behaviour similar to that of the apostolic mission, which

is prominently addressed in the text of the Beatus Commentary. These
scenes also draw attention to Christological interpretations of mountains,
creating links between mountainous terrains across Christendom.
Through these correlations, members of the Iberian monastic communi-
ties could contextualize their existence and rationalize their circumstances
in relation to Jerusalem, the city upon the hill, whose faithful believers
endured various forms of captivity and persecution to eventually be
rewarded with God’s grace. For these communities, these ties would have
provided reassurance of God’s favour for the Church, suggesting how
maintaining and promoting the Christian faith in spite of adversity
would help to ensure favour at judgement.
Conclusions
As has been suggested throughout this chapter, the commonly over-
looked, yet deliberate, features included on the Beatus Mappaemundi are
significant in the way that they form a cartographic language, relaying
concepts and ideas which were central to not only the Christian faith, but
also to the specific practices and experiences of the communities creating
the manuscripts. The ‘reading’ of these maps through representations
such as the mountains reveals the ideals of Christian endurance, strength
and evangelism, providing not only reassurance for the communities
newly inhabiting the mountains in the tenth century, but also drawing
connections between the Christian situation in Northern Iberia to bibli-
cal lessons and events or situations within Christendom. This way of ana-
lysing these cartographic symbols offers a new approach to understanding
how Christians and Muslims related to one another, which can be
extended to the other illustrations and details.
Additionally, however, the suggestion that these tenth-century
Christian communities likened themselves to the holy City upon the Hill
is important, as such references and parallels were sustained through to
the end of the Reconquista, as Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella
brought ‘an upsurge in political prophecy and messianism’ with them as
they ascended their thrones (Edwards 2000, 224). Aragonese poetry
touted Ferdinand to be the ruler of the world even before he was known
outside of Sicily, and, in 1486, Rodrigo Ponce de León asserted that he
had been told by ‘a very knowledgeable man and Catholic Christian’ that
Ferdinand of Aragon would succeed in running the Muslims out of
Spain, conquering all of Africa, eliminating Islam and reconquering
Jerusalem (Edwards 2000, 224). Motivated by this aim of taking
Jerusalem back into Christian hands, eliminating Muslim forces there
and demonstrating the weakness of Judaism, Ferdinand and Isabella
invested heavily in exploration through the likes of figures such as
Christopher Columbus, for example, to reassert Christian control in the
Holy Land (Edwards 2000, 224). Therefore, the suggestion that Iberian
Christian communities were performing or living out an experience on
par with Jerusalem during the tenth-century indicates that these m
onastic
communities initiated a prophetic way of understanding Iberian
Christianity, which lasted for hundreds of years, leading into the Early
Modern period. This reading of the Beatus images lends further signifi-
cance to the manuscripts as a whole, offering perhaps a stronger link to
the ideas of the Reconquista than has previously been suggested.
Thus, despite their limited presence in earlier studies of medieval
Christian Iberia, mountains played an important role in the positioning
of Christian communities, and in the ways they behaved, expressed and
considered themselves. While this discussion forms only an initial exami-
nation of such themes, it is hoped that future studies will continue to
explore the impact of geography on performative experiences and how
they were communicated in both text and image.
Notes
1. In the Morgan Beatus, there are 12 interrupted pages of text between the
world map and the preceding image of the Commission to Write, which is
vertical and single page. The Valladolid Beatus features 32 text pages
between the map and the same preceding image, while the Girona Beatus
has 35 pages between those two images.
2. The Beatus text references the map image, explaining: ‘This is the Church
extending throughout the whole earthly globe. This is the holy and elect
78 E. Goetsch
seed, the regal priesthood, that was sown over the whole world. They were
few, but select. The picture appended to the text more clearly illustrates
the grains sown in the field of this world, that the prophets prepared and
sowed there’ (Beatus 2000, 406). This explicit mention of the map sug-
gests the importance of the image from the beginnings of the Beatus
tradition.
3. For more on Cartosemiotics and the study of cartographic languages, see
Jānis Štrauhmanis, ‘Thematic Cartography and Cartosemiotics: Common
and Distinctive Features’, Scientific Journal of RCU, 8 (2012): pp. 25–29;
Alexander Kent and Peter Vujakovic, ‘Cartographic Language: Towards a
New Paradigm for Understanding Topographic Maps’, Cartographic
Journal 48/1 (2011): pp. 21–40; and Arthur Wolodtschenko, ‘Cartography
and Cartosemiotics: Conception Vision’, Journal of the Japan Cartographers
Associations 43/2 (2005): pp. 17–19.
4. Both Augustine and Cassiodorus were read widely in medieval Iberia.
This is evidenced in the library inventories from Oviedo, Burgo de Osma,
Oña, Ripoll and Burgos, as well as by extant illustrated manuscripts such
as Cassiodorus’ Commentary on the Psalms, Madrid, R.A.H., 8, which
was produced in the tenth century.
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Barrie, T. (2010). The sacred in-between: The mediating roles of architecture. Oxon:
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Baxter Wolf, K. (Trans.). (2011). Conquerors and chroniclers of early medieval
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(Eds.), Theories of translation: An anthology of essays from Dryden to Derrida
(pp. 52–162). London: University of Chicago Press.
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5
‘Ecosophic Cartographies’ of Mount
Pentelicon
Maria Mitsoula
Attic Marble Landscape

This chapter emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between Mount
Pentelicon and Athens as it draws on the performativity of their material
exchange. White marble, the geological matter of Mount Pentelicon, has
been persistently called upon to construct the grounds (literally) and the
myths of the Athenian metropolis. At the same time, the marble materi-
ality of Athens moulds images of the mountain. Herman Melville’s poem
The Attic Landscape (1857) highlights this historic reciprocity. In the
mid-nineteenth century when Melville visited Athens and Attica—the
geographic and historical territory that encompasses both the Athenian
city and the city’s broader landscape—one could clearly see the mountain
facing the ancient marble monuments of the metropolis (and vice versa).
Melville’s poem muses upon ‘the clear-cut hills’ of Mount Pentelicon that
Athens’ ‘carved temples face’, noting that the mountain and the temples
M. Mitsoula (*)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_5
82 M. Mitsoula
represent ‘Art and Nature lodged together’, responding to one another

(Robillard 2000, 332).1 As the poem illustrates, the fascination with the
imagery of the quarried landscape of Mount Pentelicon as a touristic
attraction was as powerful as the attraction of the classical monuments.
Today, the excessive urbanization of Athens—buildings are encroach-
ing on the mountain—and the relocation of the productive landscape
(Dionysos quarries) to the northeast side of Mount Pentelicon prevent any
direct visual connection. As Mount Pentelicon’s innards are removed and
the city spreads, the outer landscape of Mount Pentelicon becomes an
increasingly overtextured and overwritten place; as historian William
Hoskins would argue, the mountain becomes a material palimpsest
which carries the traces—as material absences—of a plethora of places.2
As a result, despite the quarries being hidden from the city, a romanti-
cized imaginary still exists of a reciprocity between Athens and Mount
Pentelicon, an imaginary that is still the dominant narrative associated
with the mountain’s material (Fig. 5.1).
Throughout this chapter, the space between Mount Pentelicon and
Athens is redrawn through marble as a complex historical, social, politi-
cal, material image-landscape. In re-imaging and reimagining a (specula-
tive) Attic marble landscape, this chapter moves away from the romantic
image of mountain and city to explore the specificity of the Athenian
situation and to provide both an elaboration and a testing of Félix
Guattari’s notion of ‘ecosophic cartographies’. However, rather than
Fig. 5.1 Southwest and northeast sides of Mount Pentelicon. Images by the
author, 2012
rioritizing a reading of Guattari’s theorization, this chapter explores sit-

p
uation and representation as instigators of theorization.
The chapter starts with a detailed portrayal of the current central ‘place’
of marble production, which delineates the methodologies practised and
technologies employed during contemporary underground excavations
on Mount Pentelicon. Key transformations in the mountain’s natural
environment are, then, unfolded as the chapter focuses on the historical
emergence and constitution of Mount Pentelicon’s ancient and modern
quarries. Although analytical, these two historiographies are rather tell-
ing; they underline the role that the various imagings of the mountain
have played in technological advancements of quarrying, as well as the
sociocultural and political formation of the city, therefore invoking the
mobility of the term ‘landscape’ (in response to ubiquitous readings of
the term ‘employed’ in the disciplines of cultural geography and visual
culture). These two historiographies are further explored, alongside this
chapter, through a Prezi presentation entitled ‘Attic Marble Places’, which
accompanied the paper presented in the ‘Moving Mountains: Studies in
Place, Society and Cultural Representation’ conference and exhibition
held in Edinburgh between 18 and 27 June 2014. This Prezi revisualizes
a more polyvocal imagery of these two historiographies. It becomes a
cartographic exercise that maps a series of epochs, scales, sites and situa-
tions—associated with the intricate and mutually constitutive relation-
ship between the mountain and the metropolis—in the ‘infinitive’
two-dimensional surface that the Prezi software provides. When brought
into proximity, epochs-scales-sites-situations illustrate an active network
of Mount Pentelicon’s marble in Athens and Attica that allows for a series
of non-linear readings of the relationship between the mountain and the
city (Fig. 5.2).3
The chapter concludes with a closer reading of Guattari’s ‘eco-logical
praxis’, a praxis that the psychiatrist/philosopher developed through a
theoretical transversal metamodel, namely ‘the ecosophic object’.
Prompted by Guattari’s theorizations, which mobilize sensibilities, lead-
ing to different ways of representing the ‘asperity of alterity’, the genera-
tive index of Mount Pentelicon’s marble which emerges in this chapter,
and in the Prezi, disrupts traditional schemes for depicting the rich, ideo-
logically charged relationship between Mount Pentelicon and Athens.
84
M. Mitsoula
Fig. 5.2 The four prints produced for the ‘Moving Mountains’ exhibition in the Tent Gallery, Edinburgh College of Art and
a collection of slides from the Prezi presentation ‘Attic Marble Places’. Collage of images produced by the author, 2014
This chapter, in conjunction with the Prezi presentation, archives and

activates the ‘dense agency’ of Mount Pentelicon.4
uarrying, Representing, Imagining

Q
and Imaging Mount Pentelicon’s Marble
Dionysos quarries are situated on the northeast slopes of Mount
Pentelicon, at an altitude of 460 metres.5 At the time of writing, nine
opencast operations performed through bench quarrying methods and
three underground operations carried out by pillared chamber quarrying
methods inform the materiality of this landscape. The landscape formed
by the opencast operations resembles stepped constructions; each bench
(step) is slightly angled, and its height usually reaches up to 10 metres.
Walkways that facilitate the hauling of the material are created on each
bench, and ramps connect one bench to the other, ultimately leading to
a sunken ‘square’ at the lowest level of these manufactured construc-
tions. The landscape formed by underground operations creates labyrin-
thine networks. As operations extend, the tunnels produced in the
bedrock of the earth turn into polyhedral chambers that retreat deeper
and deeper inside the mountain. In both cases, these irregularly ‘designed’
spaces are mere by-products that patently reveal the material that is
absent; these spaces are sublime. The exposure of absence, in conjunc-
tion with the overwhelming haptic character of the present marble, trig-
gers a profound sensory response. Being in the gigantic underground
chambers of Mount Pentelicon intensifies and stimulates all senses: these
spaces generate a specific smell, humidity, temperature, darkness, noise
and echo. This aura and the inhuman scale of the rooms are contrasted
with various anthropomorphic registers, such as the ladders used by the
labourers, the numerical writings or the steel plates that mark most of
the exposed marble surfaces.6 However, what became apparent during a
fieldtrip in 2012, is that these immediate sensory impressions become
secondary. The allure and awe of this marble landscape lies in the ways
its material is cut, in observing the choreographed and non-verbal hand
gestures employed by the quarrymen who direct the enormous e xcavators,
86 M. Mitsoula
Fig. 5.3 Opencast quarrying at Dionysos quarries. Image by the author, 2012
and in engaging in discussions with engineers and geologists who pre-

pare, through digital re-presentations of the mountain, the drawings
that today always precede the act of underground quarrying (Figs. 5.3
and 5.4).
Underground exploitation was established here in the mid-1990s.
Starting from the highest bench of an existing opencast quarry, the first
incision on the vertical surface of the mountain subsequently turns into
a tunnel, a chamber and then a series of chambers. Technical regulations
set a height limit for these chambers; and when the chambers reach this
height, a horizontal slab is retained, allowing excavation to proceed
beneath and creating multilevel structures inside the mountain. The
material quarried from the body of the mountain is to be as regular as
possible (as the Latin origin of the word quadrum suggests) and must be
Fig. 5.4 Underground quarrying at Dionysos quarries. Image by the author, 2012
drawn from the ‘healthy’ areas of the mountain. It thus becomes impor-
tant to recognize the faults embedded in the mass of the stone. After the
removal of the ‘healthy’ marble what remains in the chambers is the ‘less
healthy’ stone that becomes the structural pillars permitting further
excavation. Pre-tensioned cables are surgically inserted into the r emaining
88 M. Mitsoula
mass as reinforcement, preventing movement between the volumes of

rock that could lead to failure. Consequently, the methodologies required
have a twofold aim: first, to ascertain the precise measurement of the
planes of weakness, ensuring consistent (in terms of quality) marble
blocks, which in turn guarantees not only the value of the blocks but
also the safe spatial developments underground which allow for contin-
ued extraction of the marble. As a result, the natural phenomenal lan-
guage of the hollowed-out mountain—materialized and made visible
through those marble faults that exhibit the material’s flows, striations
and resistances—becomes overwritten by a diagram that projects an eco-
nomic (rather an ecologic) rationale from the outset.
This economic approach is perpetuated by three-dimensional digital
technological means (Vanneschi et al. 2014). Traditional planimetric
mappings and geological cross sections of the mountain, which record
information regarding the natural bedding and foliation, are combined
with satellite views and interior surveys of the underground chambers,
which are conducted through terrestrial laser scans and photographic
panoramic illustrations. Superimposing the scanning data and photo-
graphic images with the topographic–geological mappings, a more accu-
rate imagining of the faults is fathomed by means of stereographic
projections. These representational methods that result in the construc-
tion of a three-dimensional digital model of Mount Pentelicon are, today,
essential for resolving stability and safety issues of the remaining marble
walls inside the mountain. Such representations, however, enact strange
oscillations between material and immaterial imaging processes, as the
imaged mountain provides a more reliable imaging of the mountain than
any image that we can draw from the actual stone. Put differently, such
procedures become more effective than operating in the real landscape.
Hence, while quarrying is literally an extraction of material from the
body of the mountain, these recent representations of Mount Pentelicon,
drenched in empiricist epistemologies and driven by capitalist produc-
tion, gesture towards an abstraction of quarrying and the ultimate com-
modification of the mountain. Representation, material and economics
become intertwined, and the mountain is refigured, re-made, and re-
imagined as a result.
Mappings of Mount Pentelicon, such as these outlined above, are

objective and reductive; they resonate with the measured and mathemati-
cal concerns advanced by eighteenth-century principles of cartography.7
In order to break away from these conventional depictions, while
acknowledging the diverse ways in which the mountain affects the city, I
experiment with a drawing enquiry that also incorporates the subjective,
virtual and immaterial dimensions of Mount Pentelicon. Motivated by
architect and archaeologist Manolis Korres’ speculative mapping of litha-
gogia road, presented in From Pentelicon to the Parthenon (1995), I develop
a series of material, drawn and animated explorations of the relationship
between this landscape and the city of Athens.8 Korres’ survey produced
a new imagery of this metropolitan landscape, coupling specific traces left
by the tools of the ancient and modern quarrymen on the mountain to
specific architectures in the city. Oscillating between a narration of a
‘myth’ and a quasi-scientific, factual research, Korres introduced a grid in
the Attic landscape stretching from the field of Marathon to the port of
Piraeus. I further extrapolate on this investigation as I resurface and fur-
ther ‘mobilize’ the flows and energies of Mount Pentelicon’s marble in
Attica. Here, I will offer a brief, and in this instance chronologically nar-
rated, reading of this complex network (Fig. 5.5).
The emergence of the marble quarries on Mount Pentelicon after the
Greco-Persian wars (449 BC) marked a perceptible change in the Attic
landscape. At least 30 ancient quarries altered the physical slopes of a
ridge of the mountain that runs from northeast to southwest, corre-
sponding to the belt of metamorphic rocks that lies underneath.9
According to stratigraphic studies, the oldest and deepest quarry of this
ancient complex—known as Spelia (cave) quarry—provided the marble
required for the construction of the Parthenon. For many centuries,
Mount Pentelicon retained its ancient marks; the quarries remained
inactive until 1836. From the mid-seventeenth century, however, the
mountain was in o peration, albeit in a different manner. Spelia quarry
had already transformed into a sacred place where asceticism flourished,
and Spelia and the Parthenon had become the places in Attica most vis-
ited by Western travellers (artists, intellectuals and ‘grand’ tourists).
Numerous pictorial and verbal representations of the mountain are
90 M. Mitsoula
Fig. 5.5 Attic Marble Landscape. Model by the author and images produced by
Google Earth software 2014
found in travel journals, paintings and essays, depicting the quarried

landscape of Mount Pentelicon as a cultural symbol of classical ideals
and a pastoral, seductively beautiful, project.10 These depictions, William
J. T. Mitchell would argue, illustrate a meditative and contemplative
understanding of Mount Pentelicon, since their ‘aim is the […] presenta-
tion of an image designed for transcendental consciousness’ (2002, 1).In
the mid-nineteenth century, modern quarrying began in Spelia quarry,
and extended along the ridge on which the ancient operations developed
exclusively to provide the marble for the embellishment of the then
Royal Palace (today’s Hellenic Parliament). Thus, the reopening of the
quarry served political ends. Athens was established as the modern
Hellenic capital in 1834, and Pentelic marble was used as it represented
Athens’ ‘purest’ material, and evoked the city’s lost ancient political iden-
tities. Today, such imaging of an ideal ‘White City’ has been chal-
lenged—characterized as ‘a heterotopia of Hellenism’, the archaeologist
Plantzos (2011, 613) notes—on the basis that this is a myth forged
through a materiality that is, in fact, a rediscovery of an imaging of
ancient Athens through Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s eighteenth-cen-
tury writings.11 This myth developed elsewhere in Europe before return-
ing to Greece. As Alex Potts explains, Winckelmann’s ideas of an ideal
materiality that imitated the Parthenon’s elements spread into Europe
throughout the Enlightment contributing to neoclassicism becoming
the internationally adopted architectural style for the majority of public
buildings (2000). By the nineteenth century then, when Greece began
construction of its new political identity, an idealized image of Mount
Pentelicon’s materiality born of the classical monuments of Athens had
gestated abroad, only to reappear and prevail as a reputable aesthetic
system in and for the Athenian metropolis.An international export of the
Pentelic marble trade was fully established by 1897, as Attica’s infrastruc-
ture expanded to facilitate exports, connecting the edge of the mountain
with the ports.12 In the wake of this rapid expansion, the absence of any
proper design strategy for preserving the natural environment of Mount
Pentelicon, along with the emergence of capitalist relations of produc-
tion based solely on gain and profit-making, proved immensely destruc-
tive.13 Modern operations covered the traces of previous operations until
the late 1980s, when quarrying was completely banned on the historic
side of Mount Pentelicon. With the closure of the quarrying operations
on the southwest side of the mountain, a landscape reclamation scheme
began transforming the now disused quarried landscape into a place for
recreation. The scheme put forward by the landscape architect Aspasia
Kouzoupi and landscape sculptor Nella Golanda (2001) blurs the dis-
tinctions between human-made activities and natural environment, as
the designers ‘revive’ the network of pathways worn into the ground by
the constant passage of quarrying activities. A marble lookout point was
also constructed, offering a staged view over the Attic landscape, while all
surfaces of the modern and ancient quarries are exposed for the ‘tourists’
gaze’, the sociologist John Urry (1990) would argue. Today, then, touris-
tic excursions and cultural activities continue the consumption and ide-
92 M. Mitsoula
alization of the materiality of the southwest side of the mountain begun

in the nineteenth century, while the privatized quarrying operations
described earlier on the northeast side mobilize the landscape of Mount
Pentelicon to conform with economic ends.
‘Geological and Geographic [and Ecological]

Landscapism’14
Throughout the centuries, Mount Pentelicon has thus become an
imaginary sight, a symbol of culture and a political signifier as well as
a ‘practiced space’. Mount Pentelicon is, in other words, a transdisci-
plinary landscape, challenging those profuse understandings of land-
scape as both ‘word and image’ that have emerged through the
renaissance of cultural geography and visual culture in the twenty-first
century. Among the growing body of literature that sheds light on
these academic reorientations of the hybrid nature of landscape is the
collection of essays Deterritorialisations … Revisioning Landscapes and
Politics (2003), edited by Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose. The
Deleuzian term employed in the title underlines the intention of the
authors to ‘uproot [landscape] from its location within fixed ways of
signification’ and stress landscape’s intrinsic fertility. Dorrian and Rose
(2003, 16) write:
[Landscapes] are often understood as repositories of the past, holding his-

tory in their contours and textures. […] Looking at landscapes as evidence
of past processes and events seems a strong temptation, much stronger than
seeing landscapes as offering possibilities for the future. But the meanings
of landscape, whether historical or for the future, are never simply there,
inherent and voluble. […] the process of practicing landscape […] always
places landscape in a present moment. This presentism is a crucial one and
a political one, for it disrupts accounts of landscape which seek to ground
certain claims, and identities in a self-evident earth. Landscapes are always
perceived in a particular way at a particular time. They are mobilized, and
in that mobilization may become productive: productive in relation to a
past or to a future, but that relation is always drawn with regard to a
present.
Dorrian and Rose’s suggestion that we re-vision and reimagine land-

scape as an instantiation of process, which is always instrumental and
constitutive instead of merely historic, is further supported by Denis
Cosgrove’s geographical writings. Influenced by a Marxian tradition, as
well as Raymond Williams’ theorizations of a ‘lived culture’, in Social
Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984) Cosgrove portrays a ‘way of
seeing’ landscape as that which constructs a spatial and visual organiza-
tion of view that entangles issues of subjectivity with politics.15 Such
discourse on landscape, along with the increasing interest in the projec-
tive possibilities of mapping through philosophy, advanced by the writ-
ings of Deleuze and Guattari, and extrapolated, among others, by the
landscape architect James Corner, promote ways of deterritorializing
fixed and linear modes of perceiving and representing landscapes. In
‘The Agency of Mapping’, for instance, Corner calls attention to the
distinction between ‘maps’ and ‘tracings’ while he unfolds Deleuze and
Guattari’s rhizomatic and diagrammatic thinking.16 Corner (1999, 214)
writes:
Mapping unfolds potential; it remakes territory over and over again, each
time with new and diverse consequences. Not all maps accomplish this,
however; some simply reproduce what is already known. These are more
‘tracings’ than maps, delineating patterns but revealing nothing new. In
describing and advocating more open-ended forms of creativity, philoso-
phers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari declare: ‘Make a map not a
tracing!’17
For Corner then, the constructive art of mapping enriches the intri-
cacy and contradiction that is already embedded in landscapes, whereas
tracings, on the other hand, merely expose redundancies that ‘always
come back to “the same”’, that is, conventional, linear and hierarchical
systems of order (1999, 244). The imaginative tradition of mapping,
Corner continues, is attached to the drawing out of new lines of pos-
sibilities and potentialities for an alternative practice that ‘produces a
“re-territorialization” of sites’ (1999, 230). Simultaneously analogous
and abstract, mappings map cultural constructions that embrace com-
plexity and fluidity as they oscillate between procedures of ‘accumula-
94 M. Mitsoula
tion, disassembly and reassembly’ (Corner 1999, 231). As Corner,

similar to Dorrian and Rose, return to Guattari and Deleuze’s A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987), so architect
Mohsen Mostafavi more recently supplements these readings with
Guattari’s later ecological considerations. Guattari’s transversal hypoth-
esis of an ‘autopoietic becoming’ presented in The Three Ecologies
(1989) becomes for Mostafavi the key ‘ethico-political-aesthetic’ refer-
ence upon which to base a new ‘cartography’ that puts forward a politi-
cized ‘philosophy of subjectivity’. Guattari’s ecosophic principles,
Mostafavi continues, hold the capacity to revitalize ‘the very methods
of thinking that we apply to the development’ of design practices
(2010, 24).
By way of a conclusion to this chapter, I will expand a little on Guattari’s
‘eco-logical praxis’—or ecosophy (eco—dwelling and sophia—wisdom)—
as a further prompt for rethinking Mount Pentelicon’s role in Attica.
Moving away from Ernst Haeckel’s modern definition, which was pre-
sented in his Generelle Morphologie (1866) as an economy of nature that
continues the Darwinian model of natural selection, Guattari clarifies
that he does not regard ecology as ‘being associated with the image of a
small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists’ (2000, 52). On
the contrary, ecology for Guattari, ‘questions the whole of subjectivity
and capitalist power formations’ (2000, 52). Drawing upon Gregory
Bateson’s cybernetic writings, Guattari (2000, 41) opens The Three
Ecologies with an extract from Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972),
which highlights the ‘epistemological pathologies’ that have wrongly
focused on those ancient dualities (separating environment from man or
mind from body), in order to suggest that what comes under the ‘ethico-
aesthetic aegis of an ecosophy’ activates society, individual and collective
human praxes as well as environment.18 Guattari argues that ‘integrated
world capitalism’ (Guattari’s term for global capitalism) has resulted in
diminutions to three fundamental ecological networks: the erosion of
social relations (the first: ‘social ecology’); the disequilibrium of the natu-
ral world (the second: ‘mental ecology’); and their invisible penetration
into people’s perceptions (the third: ‘environmental ecology’). The result
is such that all forms of production, axes of value and ways of living are
flattened out to the extent that alterity [l’altéritè] ‘tends to lose all its
asperity’ (Guattari 2000, 27). In order to avoid such homogenization,

Guattari focuses on the importance of the production of subjectivity
while he analyses its reappropriation through his concept of the ‘the eco-
sophic object’.19 Initially presented in Chaosmosis (1992), ‘the ecosophic
object’ is a schizoanalytic metamodel which seeks to respond to redun-
dant schemes that control the production of subjectivity by encouraging
‘assemblages of enunciation capable of capturing the points of singularity
of a situation’ (Guattari 1995, 128). Put simply, Guattari advocates a
‘making-specific’ in the face of an overwhelming trend towards the
generic (for Guattari a result of ‘integrated world capitalism’). Four onto-
logical factors constitute such a situationally attuned metamodel, namely
in Guattari’s terms: (i) ‘material, energetic and semiotic Fluxes’; (ii) ‘con-
crete and abstract machinic Phylums’; (iii) ‘virtual Universes of value’;
and (iv) ‘finite existential Territories’ (Guattari 1995, 124). Guattari’s
quadrants of subjectification map the complex interactions between
actual domains (what Guattari calls ‘Fluxes’ and ‘Phylums’) and virtual
domains (those incorporeal ‘Universes’ of reference and existential
‘Territories’ that exist beyond the actuality of a given situation) of action
that can lead to a process of ‘ontological heterogenesis’, a process in which
we recognize and foster the sensibilities that promote different ways of
seeing, reading and making the world. As such, Guattari promotes a
rereading of the world as specific and multiple that also constitutes a
remaking of a world that is already complex with a view to increasing
(rather than flattening) complexity and heterogeneity. As Janel Watson
(2012, 97) notes in other words, Guattari’s ‘ecosophic cartographies’ offer
a constructive reformulation of the ‘subject’ through strategies for ‘ana-
lyzing, creating, producing, recreating, and reproducing […] subjectivity’
that enrich uncertainty while preserving singularity. Summarizing his
chapter on ‘the ecosophic object’, Guattari writes (Fig. 5.6):
Psychoanalysis, institutional analysis, film, literature, poetry, innovative

pedagogies, town planning and architecture – all the disciplines will have
to combine their creativity to ward off the ordeals of barbarism, the mental
implosion and chaosmic spasms looming on the horizon, and transform
them into riches and unforeseen pleasures, the promises of which, for all
that, are all too tangible. (1995, 135)
96 M. Mitsoula
Fig. 5.6 Attic Marble Landscape. Drawing and installation by the author,
2014–2016
Following Watson’s and Mostafavi’s reading of Guattari’s ‘ecologies’, I

would argue that Guattari’s ‘ecosophic cartographies’ can offer another
way of seeing, reading and reconstituting Mount Pentelicon’s particulari-
ties and diversities in Attica. In so doing, we further enrich the complex
relationship between Mount Pentelicon and Athens that has been the
focus of this chapter. Scientific, technological, bureaucratic and economic
‘Flows’ and ‘Phylums’ on their own cannot eschew the reductive depic-
tions of Mount Pentelicon’s multiplicity and forces, which today regulate
the mountain’s matter, as these were for instance seen through the reading
of the current underground quarrying operations on Mount Pentelicon.
By adopting Guattari’s four-dimensional conceptual assemblage, we can
however see that these actualized domains always operate in conjunction
with the virtual ‘Universes’ of value embodied in existential ‘Territories’.

Such an understanding could ensure that our representations of the rela-
tionship between city and landscape challenge nostalgic approaches while
positively asserting potential means for Mount Pentelicon’s materiality to
develop further in Athens, as integrated with its Attic landscape—in this
sense that Dorian Wiszniewski (2013, 67) calls us to see and represent
‘the city as integrated with its [loving] metropolitan landscape’.20
As representation is implicated in how we occupy, construct, imagine
and image, any recasting of an ‘ecosophic cartography’ is predicated upon
representation. The prints presented in the exhibition ‘Moving Mountains:
Studies in Place, Society and Cultural Representation’, the Prezi presenta-
tion that accompanied the conference paper, as well as the architectural
installation built upon the Prezi presentation, represent drawing explora-
tions into how we might present, map, imagine and image the reciprocal
relationship between Mount Pentelicon and Athens, not as a conclusion
to this theorization but rather as a prompt for and simultaneously an
extension to it. These three forms, along with this chapter, aim to offer
shifts in our perception of Mount Pentelicon’s matter while simultane-
ously broadening our field of vision for Athens’ marble materiality.
Mount Pentelicon’s ‘ecosophic cartographies’ are actively implicated in
both the reconstitution of the marble image for Athens and the ‘recreat-
ing and reproducing subjectivity’ in the Attic marble landscape.
Notes
1. Melville’s poem reads as a kind of traveller’s advisory:
Tourist, spare the avid glance
That greedy roves the sight to see:
Little here of ‘Old Romance’,
Or Picturesque of Tivoli
No flushful tint the sense to warm—
Pure outline pale, a linear charm.
The clear-cut hills carved temples face,
Respond, and share their sculptural grace.
98 M. Mitsoula
‘Tis Art and Nature lodged together,

Sister by sister, cheek to cheek;
Such Art, such Nature, and such weather
The All-in-All seems here a Greek.
2. Looking at the English landscapes, dating from prehistory to the
Industrial Revolution, Hoskins examines the traces left in those land-
scape as the product of man’s activities; each generation registers on the
landscape its own story while simultaneously erasing remnants of earlier
economic, political and social forces. ‘[T]o those who know how to read
it aright, [the landscape] is the richest historical document we possess’,
Hoskins (1955, 14) notes.
3. The zooming user interface of the Prezi software extends beyond the
linearity of any specific narration, allowing each viewer to exercise one’s
imaginative power to animate further spatial connections of the relation-
ship between Mount Pentelicon and Athens. For the Prezi presentation,
see <https://prezi.com/0tnk3igiumoq/attic-marble-places/> (accessed
26 June 2016). The intention is that the Prezi is read alongside this
chapter.
4. In the chapter ‘Geophilia, or The Love of Stone’, professor of English
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2015, 12) employs the term ‘dense agency’ as he
writes, ‘Stone holds a dense agency […] [that] figures the real, and figur-
ing is an active process’.
5. The complex of these quarries, named as the adjacent low-density resi-
dential suburb of Dionysos, got its name after the excavations of 1888,
under the guidance of archaeologist Carl D. Buck, who uncovered ruins
of a sanctuary dedicated to the Olympian God Dionysos.
6. The coded ‘graffiti’ inscribed on the marble surfaces of the quarries hold
information regarding the local coordinates, from which each extracted
block is originated, along with an archiving system of the loose marble
units.
7. During the end of the nineteenth century, the first official topographic
depiction of the quarried landscape of Mount Pentelicon is realized. This
representation is part of a broader mapping entitled Karten von Attica
(1895–1903), conducted by the German geographer Johannes A. Kaupert
and archaeologist Ernst Curtius. Curtius had already started surveying
Athens, focusing on registering the city’s marble ruination through
research that had begun in 1875 and that was subsequently published as
Atlas von Athens in 1878. Although Kaupert and Curtius’ mappings were
originally conceived as a historical and archaeological project, it devel-

oped into a national one that was of primary importance at that time,
offering the basis for several redrawings of modern Athens.
8. Lithagogia road is the ancient route that connected the quarried land-
scape of Mount Pentelicon to the Athenian metropolis, and employed
for the transport of the material.
9. A complex of Aegean islands (i.e. Paros, Naxos, Tinos) lie on that same
Attico-Cycladic geotectonic fault line.
10. For examples of such representations, see Lange, L. 1836. ‘Steinbruch c
zu Pentele’ and Ross, L. 1836. ‘Das Pentelikon bei Athen und seine
Marmarobrüche’.
11. White City (1968) is Giannis Hristodoulou’s documentary, commis-
sioned by the Greek National Tourism Organization, which emphasizes
on marble as the matter to rebrand the Hellenic capital as a ‘bright’ city.
12. Renwick (1909, 52–53) records that the Anglo-Greek company Grecian
Marbles (or Marmor) Limited purchased the quarrying rights on Mount
Pentelicon with a capital of £350,000 (equivalent to approximately
£19,971,000 today, calculated using the ‘Old money to new’ currency
converter developed by the British National Archives), and became one
of the largest productive units of marble quarrying in Europe.
13. According to topographic depictions, produced by the geologist Scott
Pike (1995), at least 172 discrete quarries are now identified as existing
on the mountain.
14. This title is taken from the note (as cited in Sanouillet and Peterson
1973, 78–79) that Marcel Duchamp wrote in 1934:
a geographic ‘landscapism’ – ‘in the manner’ of
geographic maps
– but
The landscapist from the height of an aeroplane – Then the field trip
(400km). … The geographic landscape (with perspective, or without
perspective, seen from above like maps) could record all kinds of things,
have a caption, take on a statistical look.
There is also ‘geological landscapism’: Different formations, differ-
ent – A mine of information!
Duchamp’s note is linked to his famous The Large Glass (The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), produced between 1915 and 1923,
which by 1934 Duchamp had abandoned as ‘definitely incomplete’
100 M. Mitsoula
until, as James Housefield (2005, 99–111) notes, Duchamp’s interest in

representations of landscape through the eyes of cartographers and cul-
tural geographers reactivated it.
15. According to Cosgrove, ‘[l]andscape is not merely the world we see, it is
a construction, a composition of that world. Landscape is a way of seeing
the world’ (1984, 11).
16. Deleuze argues that the rhizomatic diagram ‘is no longer an auditory or
visual archive but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole
social field. It is an abstract machine. […] a diagram is a map, or rather
several superimposed maps. And from one diagram to the next, new
maps are drawn. Thus, there is no diagram that does not also include,
besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound
points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with
these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture’
(1990, 30 and 37).
17. As he quotes from Guattari and Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, Corner continues: ‘The rhizome is altogether differ-
ent, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. […] What dis-
tinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward
an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not repro-
duce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious.
It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies
without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a
plane of consistency. […] The map has to do with performance, whereas
the tracing always involves an “alleged competence”’ (1999, 214).
In a similar manner, Bateson had argued even earlier, ‘Let us go back to
the original statement for which Korzybski is most famous – the state-
ment that the map is not the territory. […] We know the territory does
not get onto the map. […] What gets onto the map, in fact, is difference,
be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in
population structure, difference in surface, or what-ever. Differences are
the things that get onto a map’ (2000, 318).
18. Bateson articulates ecology in the following way: ‘Formerly we thought
of a hierarchy of taxa – individual, family line, subspecies, species, etc. –
as units of survival. We now see a different hierarchy of units – gene-in-
organism, organism-in-environment, ecosystem, etc. Ecology, in the
widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of
ideas and programs (i.e., differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in
circuits’ (2000, 340).
19. The term ecosophy first appeared in the texts of Norwegian philosopher
Arne Naess. As John Tinnel explains, however, Naess’ definition is rather
different to Guattari’s: ‘Naess calls for an expansion of the self via identi-
fication’ (‘Self-realization’), whereas Guattari valorizes autopoietic pro-
cesses that perform a dissolution of the self via disjunction
(‘becoming-other’) (2011, 36).
20. Wiszniewski employs the term ‘metropolitan landscape’ in order ‘to give
a sense of the urban to questions of landscape and that of landscape to
questions of urbanity. […] If we are to accept the ancient formulation
that the landscape must feed the city as much as the city feeds the land-
scape, then, we need to renegotiate the relations based on a deeper
understanding of how specific contextual histories and inherent potenti-
ality may inform, and where necessary resist, the territorial claims of
cultural and commodity productions driven by the homogenizing
national, trans- and supranational forces of what either Félix Guattari
calls Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) or what Hardt and Negri call
Empire’ (2013, 67). As for the notion of loving, Wiszniewski, following
Alain Badiou, promotes ‘the loving process as reciprocal; an enquiry into
how one should elicit love and care for the other […] [affecting] both the
dynamics of subjectivation and the apparatuses that are implicated in
establishing our dispositions’.
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Part 2
Changing Perspectives
6
Climbing the Invisible Mountain:
The Apse Mosaics of St. Catherine’s
Monastery, Sinai, and Their Sixth-
Century Viewers
Andrew Paterson
Since the third century CE, a mountain cluster in the southern region of
the Sinai Peninsula, known in Hebrew as Horeb, has been identified
with the location of sacred narratives from the Hebrew Scriptures which
underpin the concept of theophany, or divine self-revelation, essential to
both the Judaic and the Christian religions. One of the summits of
Horeb in particular, known today in Arabic as Jabal Mūsā, was desig-
nated as the site where Moses had received the divine Law (the Decalogue)
from the hand of God (Exodus 24: 12–18), and had also been granted a
glimpse of God himself (Exodus 33: 18–23). The lower slopes of Jabal
Mūsā were also identified as the location of the Burning Bush, where
God had earlier announced his presence to Moses for the first time
(Exodus 3: 1–6).
This holy mountain came to be known variously as the Mount of the
Law, the Mount of God, or simply and more commonly Mount Sinai,
and as such has been a major Christian pilgrimage destination as well as
A. Paterson (*)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_6
108 A. Paterson
a centre of monasticism ever since. The famous monastic compound at

the foot of the mountain, known since the eleventh century as the
Monastery of St. Catherine, was erected in the sixth century in a some-
what awkward position on the lowest slopes of the mountain (Fig. 6.1),
because of the need to accommodate within its walls the site of the
Burning Bush. The compound as we see it today was built as a fortress,
with a new basilica at its heart, at the orders of the Byzantine Emperor
Justinian (r. 527–65), both to cater for the ever-increasing volume of
pilgrim traffic at the time and to protect pilgrims and monks from Saracen
raiders along the southeastern fringes of the Byzantine Empire (Coleman
and Elsner 1994, 77).
Pilgrims have continued to flock to this sacred site to the present day,
and it is the summit which nowadays forms the main objective of most
visitors. The monastery sits at an elevation of just over 5000 feet above sea
level, while the summit of Jabal Mūsā is at about 7500 feet. Many present-
day visitors climb the mountain in the evening and camp on the summit
overnight in order to witness the desert sunrise, after which they descend
Fig. 6.1 View of St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai
6 Climbing the Invisible Mountain: The Apse Mosaics... 109
for breakfast to the simple coffee houses conveniently located just outside
the monastery. This secular ‘ritual’ represents a striking contrast to the
holy fear with which the summit was regarded in the sixth century.
Procopius of Caesarea, in his description of the mountain and Justinian’s
building programme there (composed c.560), asserted: ‘It is impossible
for a man to pass the night on the summit, since constant crashes of
thunder and other terrifying manifestations of divine power are heard at
night, striking terror into man’s body and soul’ (Procopius of Caesarea,
On Buildings V. 8.).
This chapter will analyse the ways in which this mountain was effectively
sacralized by the devotional actions of its earliest visitors and residents—pil-
grims and monks both before and after Justinian’s building programme—
to such an extent that the geological object was subsumed into a construct
of religious ideology. Jabal Mūsā came to stand as a metaphor for a spiritual
ideal, and the act of climbing the mountain became interiorized as a spiri-
tual quest. As well as adducing literary and archaeological evidence of this
process of sacralization, the chapter will offer an interpretation of three
sixth-century images located at the heart of the sacred site, forming part of
the mosaic scheme in the monastery’s basilica. These depict three biblical
theophanies: two of Moses’s encounters with God on Mount Sinai, and the
Transfiguration of Christ, which according to the Gospel accounts took
place on Mount Tabor in Palestine, and in which Moses appears once again.
As we shall see, together these theophanies may be taken as marking pro-
gressive stages in the spiritualized form of ‘ascent’ which constituted the
monastic vocation. In particular, I shall highlight an unusual aspect of the
mosaic of the Transfiguration, namely that the mountain on which the
episode occurred is not depicted. What could these images, and particularly
this absent or invisible mountain, tell us about the complex relationship
between Mount Sinai and its residents and visitors at this period?
As already indicated, for at least two centuries before Justinian’s build-
ing programme Horeb was both established as an important pilgrimage
destination and inhabited by scores of anchorites who, apart from con-
gregating for worship on Sundays, lived largely eremitical lives in very
rudimentary cells (often caves in the mountain sides) interconnected by
laurai (‘pathways’)—hence the term laura, generally used for this loose-
knit type of monastic community. The only building known to have
110 A. Paterson
been used by the monks for regular corporate worship at this period was
located on the summit of Jabal Mūsā—according to Theodoret of
Cyrrhus’s A History of the Monks of Syria (composed in the fifth century)
this was a small chapel built by the Syrian Julian Saba between 360 and
367, which appears to have been gradually expanded in a succession of
building phases until it was replaced by a new basilica on the same site
as part of Justinian’s programme (Manginis 2016, 66–70).1
Mount Sinai became one of the great biblical loca sancta (‘sacred sites’),
most of them located in the Holy Land, which were cultivated as pilgrim-
age destinations from the fourth century onwards, often sponsored by
imperial patrons such as Constantine (r. 324–37) and Justinian (Abel
1952, 267–72 and 359–63; Chitty 1966, 168–78). For the first time,
large numbers of Christians were able to see for themselves the holy places
they had previously only heard about. In the memoria or commemorative
churches built at these sites, the relevant biblical narratives were brought
to life liturgically through readings and prayers, and pilgrims were thus
enabled not only to visualize the events in situ, but to experience them as
present happenings, as they took on the vividness of historical actuality
(Loerke 1984, 32–33). For example, St. Jerome (347–420) describes the
visits of a nun named Paula to such places—in the grotto at Bethlehem,
Paula ‘swore she saw with the eyes of faith the Child, wrapped in swad-
dling clothes, lying in a manger’ (Jerome, Epistles 108, 9).2
The earliest surviving account of pilgrimage at Mount Sinai was writ-
ten by a Spanish nun called Egeria, who travelled to a number of loca
sancta in the Near East between 380 and 384 (Egeria 1981, 108–14).
Egeria gives a detailed description of her party’s ascent of Horeb, guided
by resident anchorites, in December 383—describing the various sum-
mits of the cluster which they climbed in turn, she writes:
They are hard to climb. You do not go round and round them, spiralling
up gently, but straight at each one as if you were going up a wall, and then
straight down to the foot, till you reach the foot of the central mountain,
Sinai itself. Here, then, impelled by Christ our God and assisted by the
prayers of the holy men who accompanied us, we made the great effort of
the climb. It was quite impossible to ride up, but though I had to go on
foot I was not conscious of the effort – in fact I hardly noticed it because,
by God’s will, I was seeing my hopes coming true. (Egeria 1981, 109)
This description is notable for the way an emphasis on physical effort

becomes subsumed into the excited anticipation of finally seeing the
place which had already assumed such a sacred status in Egeria’s imagina-
tion. She then describes how her experience of the summit itself was
modulated by the scriptural readings and liturgical worship provided by
her monastic guides, who were led by an elder (presbyter) appointed to
service the chapel:
All there is on the summit of the central mountain is the church and the
cave of holy Moses. No one lives there. So when the whole passage had
been read to us from the Book of Moses (on the very spot!) we made the
Offering in the usual way and received Communion. As we were coming
out of church the presbyters of the place gave us ‘blessings’, some fruits
which grow on the mountain itself.
[Then the anchorites] showed us the cave where holy Moses was when
for the second time he went up into the Mount of God and a second time
received the tablets of stone after breaking the first ones when the people
sinned. (Egeria 1981, 109–110)
Egeria records that this ritualized structuring of the viewing of the

sacred site was typical: a reading of the passage of scripture relevant to
the specific site was followed by a celebration of the Eucharist (‘the
Offering’), after which visitors were presented with eulogiae (‘blessings’)
as tokens of monastic hospitality. A second Eucharist was offered later
the same day in a chapel on a neighbouring mountain next to the cave
where Elijah (the other great prophet associated with Horeb) hid while
fleeing from King Ahab and also experienced a theophany (1 Kings 19,
9–12). On the following morning a third Eucharist took place in the
small church at the site of the Burning Bush. Egeria’s guides also showed
her and her fellow pilgrims numerous other sacred spots associated
with specific episodes from the Books of Exodus, Numbers, and 1
Kings (Egeria 1981, 111–14). It may reasonably be inferred that the
anchoritic residents of Horeb regularly provided hospitality and ‘guided
tours’ in this way, following a specific itinerary, and that a sacred topog-
raphy of the area had thus become well established by the end of the
fourth century.
112 A. Paterson
Other devotional actions on the mountain from this period have been
recorded. According to Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Symeon the Elder (d. c.390)
spent a week on the summit of Jabal Mūsā as a devotional exercise:
It is related that, when they reached the mountain they desired, this won-
derful old man, on the very spot where Moses was counted worthy to see
God and beheld him as far as was possible for human nature, knelt down
and did not get up until he heard a divine voice announcing to him the
Master’s favour. He had spent the whole cycle of a week bent double in this
way and taking not a scrap of food when the voice sounded and bade him
take what was offered him and eat it willingly. (Theodoret 1985, 67)
The element of imitation in this action is significant: the devotee

aspires not only to see the place where Moses had contemplated the pres-
ence of God but to re-enact the prophet’s own actions in the hope of
attracting the same divine favour. At the same time, this literal ‘following
in the footsteps’ of Symeon’s biblical hero carries a penitential dimension
(fasting, immobility) typical of desert asceticism—the ascent of the
mountain is paradoxically undertaken as an act of self-abasement on the
part of the climber.
Two centuries later, an anonymous pilgrim from Piacenza visited the
site just after the Justinianic compound had been built. His account (com-
posed c. 570) mentions another penitential ritual: many pilgrims, once
they reached the summit, ‘out of devotion, cut off their hair and beard,
and throw them away’ (Manginis 2016, 46). This pilgrim also records that
he took a new path to the summit, known as the Path of Moses or ‘Stairway
of Repentance’, which was built as a staircase of 3700 steps hewn out of
the granite mountainside (a considerable devotional labour in its own
right), probably in the sixth century. Towards the lower end of the stair-
way, pilgrims pass through two stone archways of similar date, called the
Gateway of Confession and the Gateway of St. Stephen. The first of these
is so named presumably because pilgrims were required to take part in the
sacrament of Confession before proceeding further; this requirement of
purification may have been inspired by verses three and four from Psalm
24: ‘Who may ascend the hill of the Lord, who may stand in his holy
place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his
soul to an idol or swear by what is false’ (Manginis 2016, 46). The second
archway is named after a sixth-century holy man who reputedly tested the
piety of pilgrims at this spot before allowing them to continue their ascent
(Graves 1996, 64). (It may be noted that most present-day climbers of the
mountain elect not to take this particularly strenuous route but the more
circuitous ‘camel path’, created in the nineteenth century, which begins
outside the main gate of the monastic compound.)
Further archaeological evidence indicates the centrality of the summit
of Jabal Mūsā as the devotional focal point of both pilgrims and monks.
Fourteen cave-like prayer niches, all dated to this early period, have been
discovered scattered around the slopes of Horeb, with a further nine
niches on nearby mountains (Manginis 2016, 43). These mark various
significant spots such as the junction of two paths, and perhaps the places
where earlier pilgrims stopped to pray during their ascent of the holy
mountain—at any rate, it seems significant that they are oriented towards
the summit of Jabal Mūsā, the views they afford of the pilgrim’s goal thus
constituting ‘a succession of mini-goals’ in their own right (Coleman and
Elsner 1994, 78).
Thus, we have literary and archaeological evidence of a complex of
devotional practices which had already become well established before
Justinian’s restructuring of the holy site in the mid-sixth century. These
practices effectively fused geological terrain with sacred narrative to pro-
duce a symbolic construct (‘Mount Sinai’), which engaged the body and
senses of the devotee as well as their mind and spirit. As we shall see, a
further level of sacralization seems to have taken place around the sixth
century, on the evidence of the narrative images created as the visual focal
point of the monastery’s basilica.
Between 550 and 565, the Justinianic basilica was decorated with
an ambitious mosaic scheme in its sanctuary, which has survived in
remarkably good condition (Weitzmann 1982, 5–18). The artists who
produced these mosaics are likely to have been sent from Constantinople
at the emperor’s behest, simply because such quality of execution in
this medium is unsurpassed anywhere else at this time (Forsyth and
Weitzmann 1973, 14). However, the devising of the iconographical
scheme itself is not n ecessarily to be attributed to an imperial source.
In fact, the prominent Greek inscription which frames the scene of
114 A. Paterson
the Transfiguration of Christ in the apse conch seems to imply monas-

tic sponsorship (Fig. 6.2):
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, this entire work was made
for the salvation of those who have endowed it, in the lifetime of Longinos
the most holy priest and abbot … with the help of Theodore the priest and
second in command, in indiction 14. (Török 2005, 339)
The scheme’s particular combination of biblical narratives, already

mentioned above, cannot be traced to any known theological text, but is
so appropriate to the site that it is reasonable to attribute it to a theolo-
gian or cleric associated with the Sinai monastic community itself (Elsner
and Wolf 2011, 52). Hence, it may be assumed that the scheme reflects
the monks’ own understanding of the metaphorical significance of the
holy mountain in relation to their own vocation.
Fig. 6.2 The Transfiguration of Christ. c. 550–65. Apse Mosaic. Sinai, Basilica of St.
Catherine’s Monastery
The account of the Transfiguration in the Gospel of Luke 9: 28–36 is

as follows (slightly abbreviated):
[Jesus] took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to
pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his
raiment was white as the light. And behold, there talked with him two
men, which were Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory, and spake of his
decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem. But Peter and they that
were with him were heavy with sleep; and when they were awake, they saw
his glory, and the two men that stood with him. [Then] there came a cloud,
and overshadowed them; and they feared as they entered the cloud. And
there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son; hear
him. And when the voice was past, Jesus was found alone.
In the mosaic, Christ stands at the centre, the luminous whiteness of

his robe rendered with tesserae of marble and gold leaf. The figure is
enclosed within an elliptical mandorla, perhaps evoking the overshadow-
ing cloud of the gospel account, which consists of four concentric bands
in tones of blue, deepening towards the centre. Across these bands eight
rays of light emanate from Christ himself. On either side of Christ stand
Elijah and Moses, both raising their right hands in gestures of speech,
while the astonished James and John are shown in awkwardly twisting
postures, as if disoriented and perhaps trying to direct their gaze towards
the vision without quite succeeding, and Peter in particular is shown in a
remarkably undignified pose, prone beneath Christ’s feet. As already
noted, the mountain itself on which the episode takes place is not depicted.
The mandorla and all five witnesses stand out starkly against a uniform
field of gold, uninterrupted by any indication of landscape setting, apart
from a narrow strip of green tesserae along its lower edge, which may be
intended to represent the summit (Elsner and Wolf 2011, 55).3
Above the triumphal arch are a pair of smaller mosaics depicting the
two Sinaitic theophanies already mentioned from the Book of Exodus: at
the upper left, Moses, called by God from the midst of the Burning Bush,
removes his sandals now that he realizes he stands on holy ground
(Fig. 6.3), while at the upper right Moses receives the divine Law from
the hand of God, in the form of a scroll rather than the ‘tablets of stone’
mentioned in the biblical account (Fig. 6.4).
116 A. Paterson
Fig. 6.3 Moses and the Burning Bush. c. 550–65. Mosaic. Sinai, Basilica of St.
How would these images have been read by pilgrims and desert monks
in the sixth century? And how might the unexpected absence of a depicted
mountain in the Transfiguration scene help us to understand how the
significance of the physical mountain (immediately outside the monastic
compound) has been transformed for these two categories of viewer?
Fig. 6.4 Moses receiving the Law. c. 550–65. Mosaic. Sinai, Basilica of St.
Firstly in relation to visiting pilgrims, the mosaics may have served a

primarily didactic purpose. The basilica was so constructed that the
sacred bush—just as significant an object of the pilgrims’ devotions as
the mountain’s summit—was located outside its east wall, as it still is
today. In other words, the relic itself was, to some extent, marginalized
118 A. Paterson
as a result of the restructuring of the site (Forsyth 1968, 15).4 Once the
basilica was built, it is likely that pilgrims would have been guided by
their monastic hosts through the basilica en route to the sacred bush, in
which case they would have seen the mosaics before arriving at the bush.5
No doubt the powerful visual impact of the mosaics would have height-
ened the pilgrims’ sense of awe on their arrival at the holy site, but their
imagery may also have served to reframe the relic cult focused on the
holy bush and mountain within a larger theological perspective. With
this in mind the monastic community most probably continued their
tradition of providing their guests with theological guidance by giving
some instruction in ‘reading’ the iconography of the mosaics, particu-
larly the way in which the Old Testament theophanies associated with
the site are visually subordinated to the revelation of Christ’s divinity at
the Transfiguration.6
One clue to the nature of this instruction is provided by another Greek
inscription, this one carved into the lintel beam above the entrance to the
narthex of the basilica, which may be translated as: ‘And the Lord spoke
to Moses in this place saying, I am the God of your fathers, the God of
Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. I am that I am.’ This
text conflates two divine self-declarations taken from the episode of
Moses and the Burning Bush in Exodus 3: 6 and 14; thus, the position-
ing of this text at the doorway to the basilica seems to equate access to the
‘holy ground’ of the Exodus theophany with the physical act of stepping
into the church (Elsner and Wolf 2011, 50). Since most lay pilgrims
would have been illiterate, the monks would have needed to read these
words to them, and the visual impact of the apse mosaics would have
amplified the same message—namely, that the fullness of God’s plan of
salvation, as articulated in the iconography of the mosaics, was to be
experienced primarily through the present dispensation of the church,
and particularly the Eucharist celebrated beneath them. Hence, the relic
of the Bush—and by implication Mount Sinai too—were not to be seen
as devotional ends in themselves but rather as incidental mementoes of
the complete plan of salvation as revealed in the New Testament (Elsner
and Wolf 2011, 14).
If the purely symbolic topography of the basilica with its inscriptions
and images thus served as a didactic corrective to the instinctive focus of
pilgrims on the physical mountain and its bush as devotional objects in

their own right, the mosaic scheme would have held further levels of
meaning for the resident monks, and can be interpreted as representing
for them a more radical interiorization of the mountain as a symbol of
spiritual quest. While the cultivation of loca sancta enabled pilgrims to
experience the holy with as much physical immediacy as possible, monks
had been trained to mistrust and reject such sensory experiences, being
engaged instead in an internal struggle for purity of heart which alone
made possible a genuine vision of God (Harmless 2004, 241).7 At the
same time, the Sinai monks would surely have recognized that the three
scenes of the Burning Bush, the Receiving of the Law, and the
Transfiguration collectively symbolized the essence and goal of their
vocation, which was precisely to see and know God. This vocation was
summarized by means of an extended metaphor of mountain ascent in
the allegorical Life of Moses composed by the theologian St. Gregory of
Nyssa (335–94), who wrote that ‘the knowledge of God is a mountain
steep indeed and difficult to climb – the majority of people scarcely reach
its base’ (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, 2. 158). It is also significant in
this connection that the monastery’s most famous abbot, St. John
Climacus (c.579–c.649)—who would have regularly celebrated the
Eucharist beneath the mosaics—composed an immensely influential
treatise on the monastic vocation entitled The Ladder of Divine Ascent, in
which the theme of spiritual ascent is equally central, but the mountain
metaphor is replaced by that of a ladder (Manginis 2016, 71).
The three scenes depicted in the mosaics can be read as a hierarchy of
theophanies (Elsner 1995, 111); they form a sequence that corresponds
to the stages of a mystical ascent, beginning with the image of Moses
before the Burning Bush. At the base of the mountain (in this case the
rock itself forming an integral part of the image), God attracts Moses’s
attention by means of a dramatic visual phenomenon—‘though the bush
was on fire it did not burn up’ (Exodus 3: 2)—and only once Moses
comes nearer to investigate this does God speak, ordering Moses to make
the ritual gesture of removing his sandals. However, a monastic viewer
may have understood this episode allegorically, as the call of God initiat-
ing a mystical ascent that led away from physical vision towards spiritual
vision (this idea is also developed in Emily Goetsch’s chapter in this
120 A. Paterson
v olume). According to Gregory of Nyssa, the vision of the Burning Bush

represented an experience of grace, which a faithful monk could hope to
receive in the present:
It is upon us who continue in this quiet and peaceful course of life that the
truth will shine, illuminating the eyes of the soul with its own rays. This
truth, which was then manifested by the ineffable and mysterious illumina-
tion which came to Moses, is God. (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, 2. 19)
Gregory then proceeds to expound the theological consequences of

such an experience, namely that ‘none of the things which are appre-
hended by sense perception and contemplated by the understanding
really subsist, but that the transcendent essence and cause of the universe,
on which everything depends, alone subsists’ (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of
Moses, 2, 24). It was this kind of theological argument, endorsed by much
of the ecclesiastical elite in the fourth century and owing a good deal to
neo-Platonist philosophy, which underpinned Gregory’s argument in one
of his surviving letters, that pilgrimages to loca sancta were pointless for
monks since they had committed themselves to an interior pilgrimage of
prayer, of which outward journeys at best served as a metaphor (Gregory
of Nyssa, Letters 2). Nevertheless, Gregory argues in the Life of Moses, the
‘vision of the senses’ is necessary for the preliminary ‘education of the
soul’ (Gregory of Nyssa, Letters 1, 20; 2, 20).
The second Moses panel, in which again the mountain itself is promi-
nently depicted, seems to represent the goal of the ascent that began with
the vision of the Burning Bush, since we now see Moses at the summit.
However, in fact at this point Moses receives only a partial vision of God.
He is depicted standing in a narrow cleft in the rock in reference to the
theophany described in Exodus 33: 22–23, in which God announces,
‘When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover
you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand
and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.’ In the mosaic
Moses’s gaze is directed, not upwards to the hand of God, but towards the
viewer, perhaps suggesting that the vision of God depicted here is ulti-
mately incomplete; only in the Transfiguration scene do we see Moses
gaining access to the ‘face to face’ vision of God in Christ.
The theological inference drawn from these Old Testament theoph-

anies is that they are merely preliminary to the third and final theophany
of the sequence, that of the Transfiguration of Christ in the apse conch.
Here, in keeping with the gospel accounts, Moses appears once again (on
the right of the scene), this time depicted as a considerably older man,
along with the prophet Elijah on the left, whose own experience of a
partial theophany on Horeb is recorded in the first Book of Kings: 8–13.
The two great prophets stand alongside Christ and converse with him,
their mystical ascent at last complete.
As for the three disciples taken up the mountain by Jesus, their very
body language in the mosaic indicates that their mystical ascent is still in
progress. They have been cast to the ground by the power of the divine
light but are beginning to get up again. Their postures can be taken to
symbolize a spiritual act of passage from a state of sleep to one of wakeful-
ness. While the disciples’ state of being ‘heavy with sleep’ is referred to in
Luke’s account, it carries metaphorical meaning, which would have reso-
nated with the mosaic’s monastic viewers. Various passages in the New
Testament dwell on the need to ‘watch’ (or ‘wake up’) in order to be
receptive to the advent of the presence of God.8
The variations in physical posture among the depicted witnesses seem
to serve as a visual metaphor for this process of ‘waking up’. For exam-
ple, a curious aspect of the figure of Peter in particular is that his alert
head, whose turning round to face towards Christ is emphasized by its
supporting hand, appears—at least in certain lights9—somewhat
detached from his body, which still faces downwards and away from
Christ; the tesserae used to form the shoulder and neck are so close in
colour to the gold of the background that this seems to have been an
intentional effect (Fig. 6.5). This detail may be interpreted as depicting
a partial, initial response to theophany, comparable to that experienced
by Moses at the Burning Bush—so far it is only Peter’s gaze, so to speak,
which is able to ascend towards the light, while the rest of his being is
still to follow.
The figures of John and James on either side of Peter are depicted
kneeling, again with their heads turned towards Christ and their bodies
facing away—a halfway stage, so to speak, between the prostration of
Peter and the uprightness of Moses and Elijah. Both John and James are
122 A. Paterson
Fig. 6.5 St. Peter. Detail of Fig. 6.2
shown with their legs tightly bent at the knee, in exactly the same way as
Peter’s right leg which seems to be flexed in order to begin the process of
rising up off the ground. In other words, the three disciples seem to be
drawn in such a way as to articulate stages in a process of ‘standing up’
which is completed in the figures of Moses and Elijah, who have become
like Christ in their posture and converse with him.10
The reward for completing this symbolic ascent is a vision of divine
light, a vision which transforms the one who beholds it. This theophanic
vision was associated theologically not just with the Transfiguration as an
historical event, but with the future appearing of Christ at his Second
Coming. A chant from the liturgy for the feast of the Transfiguration in
the Eastern Church states: ‘Thou wast transfigured upon Mount Tabor,
showing the exchange mortal men will make with Thy glory at Thy sec-
ond and fearful coming, O Saviour’ (cited in Hieromonk Justin of Sinai
2011, 8). In this connection, the luminous blue tones of Christ’s
mandorla evoke the eschatological vision of the heavenly firmament
described in Exodus 24: 10–11. On this occasion, Moses, Aaron, Nadab,
and Abihu, along with ‘seventy of the elders of Israel’, ascend Mount
Sinai:
And they saw the place where the God of Israel stood: and there was under
His feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone, and as it were the appear-
ance of the firmament of heaven in its clearness. And of the elect of Israel
not even one was lost; also they appeared in the dwelling place of God, and
did eat and drink.
A pilgrim-viewer might have looked forward to participating in such a

vision through the future grace of the Second Coming. However, for a
sixth-century Sinai monk the colour of sapphire might also have evoked
a striking passage from the works of the mystical theologian Evagrius of
Pontus (345–99), which concerns a spiritual ascent by means of intro-
spective contemplation: ‘When the mind has put off the old man and
clothed itself with grace, then during prayer it will see its own nature like
a sapphire or the colour of heaven. In Scripture this is called the dwelling
place of God that was seen by the Elders on Mount Sinai’ (Evagrius of
Pontus 1979, Vol. 1, 49). The ascetic is thus exhorted to reinterpret
eschatological vision as a mystical transformation attainable in contem-
plative prayer.
The mosaicist’s treatment of Christ’s mandorla and the eight rays of
light emanating from it ingeniously indicate the still unfolding nature of
this divine revelation and its transformative power. The transparency of
each ray is rendered by using a proportionally lighter tone of blue than
the band of the mandorla through which it passes, until it emerges from
the edge of mandorla as white, and then proceeds to alter in a similar way
the colours of the robes of the disciples it touches. As the disciples’ vision
of God becomes clearer, their human nature is transformed—as one of
the so-called Macarian Homilies (probably composed in Syria towards
the end of the fourth century) puts it: ‘the glory that was within Christ
was outspread upon His body and shone; and in like manner in the
saints, the power of Christ within them shall in that day be poured out-
wardly upon their bodies’ (Pseudo-Macarius 1921, 15. 38).
In sum, the basilica’s mosaics articulated for their monastic viewers a
complete spiritual ascent, from sleep to wakefulness, from the response to
the divine voice within the Burning Bush to the glimpse of the ‘back’ of
God, and culminating in the face-to-face vision of the Incarnate God.
The fundamental metaphor of ‘ascent’ as summarizing the whole of the
124 A. Paterson
monastic vocation no doubt alluded to the subjective experience—or at

least invoked the experience of biblical heroes like Moses—of climbing a
literal mountain. However, it was an ascent that had become thoroughly
interiorized—the grand architecture of the Justinianic basilica and the
fortress-like monastic enclosure as a whole seem to indicate that this new
physical locus of Sinaitic monks’ devotions marked something of a retreat
indoors from the bare mountain itself. The location of the mosaics also
indicates that the devotional ascent, albeit essentially mystical in nature,
was at the same time more specifically envisaged as being enacted within
a liturgical context. An optimal view of the Transfiguration mosaic could
only have been gained from a position at the east end of the nave, in other
words where worshippers went forward to receive Holy Communion at
the climax of the Eucharist. Indeed, the mosaic’s iconography was
designed to be understood in conjunction with the Eucharist celebrated
daily at the altar immediately beneath. If the Transfiguration, in Orthodox
teaching, implies the possibility for humanity to partake of the divine
nature, then the Eucharist is the sacramental means by which such union
may be achieved.
This finally brings the chapter back to the question of the undepicted
mountain in the Transfiguration mosaic, and the visual and spiritual
impact of this image on its original audience of pilgrims and monks. Just
as pilgrims at loca sancta were enabled to visualize the biblical events asso-
ciated with them with unprecedented immediacy, so artists in the sixth
century were beginning to depict such events (e.g., in Syrian miniatures
of that period such as those in the Codex Sinopensis and the Rossano
Gospels)11 with greater vividness too, visualizing them as if they were
presently taking place and including the depiction of onlookers reacting
to what they were witnessing. However, the locus sanctus of Mount Sinai
must have presented a particular challenge, pictorially speaking, in that
the subject here was not simply the interaction of human figures but a
theophanic vision of God. The achievement of the mosaicists in the Sinai
basilica can be appreciated by comparing their work to another apse
mosaic of the Transfiguration executed only a few years earlier, at the
church of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe near Ravenna, which, remarkably,
avoids the literal depiction of the biblical event altogether in favour of a
highly conceptualized representation.12
By contrast, the Sinai presentation of the Transfiguration must have

struck its original viewers with astonishing immediacy, an immediacy
enhanced all the more by the decision to omit any pictorial indication of
spatio-temporal location. This particular Transfiguration, one might say,
is not just a staged representation of a biblical vision; rather, the sight of
it is meant to function (in conjunction with the ritual of the Eucharist)
as a transforming experience in its own right. The depiction of Mount
Tabor was not required, simply because the image was itself located on
another holy mountain, Mount Sinai. Whoever was able to contemplate
this image, whether monk or pilgrim, had already made a difficult physi-
cal journey, and by implication had already embarked on a path of inward
transformation, in order to arrive at this vision, since the geographical
journey was seen as but an outward symbol of the spiritual quest on
which such sixth-century viewers were engaged. If the mountain had
been depicted, its ‘holy ground’ would effectively have been placed at a
slight remove from the viewer’s immediate visual environment; ‘there’ in
pictorial space rather than ‘here’ in the viewer’s own space. But the exclu-
sion of the mountain from the image has the effect of including the
mosaic’s viewer as present, as another direct witness of the theophany
itself (Elsner 1995, 113). The figures depicted—Moses and Elijah, and
also the three disciples—all function as exemplars of the mystical ascent,
as models for imitation, while the sixth-century viewers of the mosaic,
both monks and pilgrims, were effectively included in the sacred space
depicted, as present participants in a sacred history that was still unfold-
ing. This virtual ‘holy ground’, symbolized by the gold ground of the
mosaic uninterrupted by any literal pictorial reference to a mountain,
had become the true goal of the pilgrim’s journey and the monk’s spiritual
endeavour, rather than the physical mountain outside the basilica’s walls,
which had drawn them all to the site in the first place.
Notes
1. Few traces of the summit’s sixth-century basilica now remain; however,
recent archaeological excavations have ascertained that it was of a similar
design to the one in the monastic compound, and was roughly three times
larger than the chapel, built in the 1930s, which stands in its place today.
126 A. Paterson
2. Jerome. (1963). Epistolae. (trans: Mierow, C.C.). Ancient Christian

Writers no. 33. Westminster Md., London.
3. It should be noted that Elsner and Wolf propose an alternative interpre-
tation of the apparent non-depiction of the mountain, namely that ‘the
positioning of Peter’s body evokes the rock formation associated with the
translation of his name’. In other words, the revelation of Christ’s divin-
ity in this image is associated with the establishment of his Church on
the rock of St. Peter. This is an ingenious suggestion, but I am not aware
of any other example of Peter’s prone body carrying such iconographical
significance, and it may be doubted in any case whether the Byzantine
Church ascribed the same unique significance to St. Peter as the Roman
Church did at this period. My own interpretation of Peter’s posture (see
below) is more in keeping with the theme of spiritual ascent, which runs
through the mosaic scheme as a whole.
4. The decision to place the Bush outside the basilica is in marked contrast
to other churches built on loca sancta which were designed around a relic
at their centre, such as the fifth-century martyrium of St. Symeon Stylites
in Syria, which the architect of the Sinai basilica, Stephanos of Aila,
would surely have known as a potential model.
5. According to Forsyth’s hypothetical but plausible reconstruction (1968,
11–14), pilgrims would have been conducted along a passageway from
the gate in the fortified wall of the monastery to the west entrance of the
basilica, and via the narthex into the north aisle, then through a side
chapel and out into the courtyard where the sacred bush was located
(today enclosed within the Chapel of the Burning Bush). From there
they would return along the south aisle, thus completing a U-shaped
circuit of the church which did not intrude upon the central worship
area of nave and sanctuary.
6. This theme is also addressed in Christos Kakalis’s chapter on Mount
Athos.
7. Cf. Matthew 5: 8: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’
8. For example, 1 Cor. 15: 51–53: ‘Behold, I tell you a mystery: we shall
not all sleep, but we shall all be changed … for this corruptible must put
on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.’
9. It should be noted that the mosaicists placed the tesserae at subtly varied
angles to the curved surface of the apse conch, thus enabling the chang-
ing ambient light to alter the apparent tonal relationships between dif-
ferent areas of the design. Thus, photographs of the mosaic taken at
different times may record somewhat different visual effects.
10. ‘Standing up’ is a literal translation of ἀνάστασις, the Greek term for
resurrection.
11. For examples, see Weitzmann (ed.) 1979, 491–93, and Loerke 1984,
30–33.
12. For an illustration and discussion of the Ravenna mosaic, see Loerke
1984, 43–45.
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7
How Can One Be a ‘Montagnard’? Social
and Political Expressions of Modern
Imaginaries of Territoriality
Bernard Debarbieux
Three Authors in Search of Characters

In 1749, Buffon dedicated a volume of his Histoire naturelle générale et
particulière to the human species (Leclerc 1749). Some historians of the
human sciences see it as a foundational text of anthropology (Blanckaert
1993, 13–50), and even an important contribution to geographical
thought (Broc 1974). As with many of his contemporaries, Buffon pos-
tulated the fundamental unity of the human species; humanity’s ana-
tomic and cultural variations, understood through the prism of ‘race’ as
was the custom then, were explained through variation in ‘climates’.
In a volume of the Suppléments appearing in 1778, he reproduces a
long extract of a text by Nicolas Commerson on the ‘half-men’ who were
said to live in the high mountains of the interior of the island of
This paper is an almost complete translation of a paper published in Annales de Géographie,

2008, 660–661, 90–115, called “Construits identitaires et imaginaires de la territorialité:
variations autour de la figure du « montagnard »”
B. Debarbieux (*)
University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_7
130 B. Debarbieux
Madagascar, and to form a sizable ‘national body’ called the Quimos or

Kimos (Leclerc 1778, 510). The author said they were white skinned and
of small build. Buffon discussed the account, being surprised that so close
to the equator, and therefore in a hot climate, one would find such small
people. But by bringing together observations made on plants and ‘men
for whom climate had yielded similar races’ (Leclerc 1778, 463) in the
Andes, in Ethiopia, and in Lapland, he concluded that wherever a tem-
perature gradient permitted comparisons of individuals of the same spe-
cies, those that lived in relatively colder climates present forms of
dwarfism. To explain the white skin of the Quimos, Buffon suggested
that the descendants of the first representatives of the species, who were,
according to him, white and originated in the mountains of Central Asia,
conserved their original colour when they remained in relatively temper-
ate climates. Inversely, those who established themselves in hot climates
saw their skin darken from the sun’s rays. Furthermore, the ‘mores’ of
the populations he described would be diversified in virtue of the same
principle of acclimation to different environments, as well as in function
of the kinds of food that each allowed.
In a text published in 1936 on the occasion of the ninth Congress of
the Institut de Hautes Etudes Marocaines [Institute of Advanced Moroccan
Studies], Jean Célérier proposed a way, unusual for his time, of under-
standing population issues in the mountains (Célérier 1938). Of course,
he expressed some of the concerns of geography of his day, notably the
joining of natural and social phenomena and the effects of the natural
environment on the temperament of local populations. But he also devel-
oped a political analysis of the categorization of Moroccan society and
territory. Notably, he considered that the hypothesis of a retreat of the
Berber populations to the mountains following successive invasions—
which was widely adopted after the French occupation—was unwar-
ranted. According to Célérier, the Berbers of the Atlas merely constituted
the non-Arabized part of this people once distributed over the entire ter-
ritory, which later works largely confirmed. He also thought that the
Atlas as an entity made no sense for the majority of its inhabitants, who
were more concerned with delimiting the nearby areas they frequented.
He concluded that the identification of a mountain range designated by
a single term, the Atlas, arose from a naturalist reading progressively
7 How Can One Be a ‘Montagnard’? Social and Political... 131
adopted by the colonial powers for pointing at the natural environment

of the Berbers so as to better organize its management of Moroccan soci-
ety and control its territory.
In 1998, Elizabeth A. Byers, the head of The Mountain Institute, an
organization aiming to bring attention to the distinctiveness of mountain
regions around the world, published an article in the magazine of the
Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) pre-
senting the Mountain Forum (Byers 1998). She introduced her article as
follows: ‘Mountain peoples and mountain organizations have many com-
mon characteristics including isolation from one another and from much
of the rest of society’ (1998, 13). She explains that this forum, created in
1996, ‘is a network of networks’ in that it electronically brings together
systems of regional actors organized at the level of continents, for exam-
ple Europe, and the principal mountain ranges, such as the Andes (1998,
13). The forum is said to have three objectives: ‘to provide a forum for the
exchange of ideas, to be an advocate for mountain peoples and environ-
ments, and to foster mutual support among mountain people’ (1998,
13). On the digital platform there are databases, discussion spaces and
digital talks, an online library, case studies, and recommendations regard-
ing policies and initiatives. Furthermore, at the regional level the forum
organizes workshops and information exchanges.
roblematizing the Relations Between Culture,

P
Identity, and Space
The three texts referenced above share an interest in mountain popula-
tions; each points to the ethno- and social type on which this article
focuses. However, each text differs radically in terms of its underlying
paradigm, particularly with regard to how each understands the singular-
ity of its subjects, and how each articulates the relations between space,
culture, and identity—in short, the way they problematize the territorial-
ity of each group they invoke.
For Buffon, the uniqueness of the Quimos rested on a discrete notion
of space, a biophysical understanding of territoriality and a naturalistic
concept of culture and identity: the surface of the earth is composed of
132 B. Debarbieux
separate entities for which everything within is causally related; the ter-
ritoriality of this human group results from its adaptation to biophysical
phenomena; the culture of this group, understood as the totality of arti-
facts, empirical traits, and ‘customs’ which define it, is the product of the
natural entity within which it is constituted—the ‘high mountains’ of
Madagascar; the identity of this group and the zone over which it extends
is understood as the objective result, unique and lasting, of these
processes.
For Célérier, the Berbers of Morocco are not so determined by their
immediate surroundings, but more so by the designation of a natural
entity, the Atlas Mountains, to which alone an ensemble of tribes were
associated. At first glance, the spatial reasoning here is not different from
that which was identified in the first paradigm, except that it is guided by
political and strategic questions. As such, this forms an institutional reg-
ister of territoriality—an inventory by which social institutions name
social and geographic entities, and regulate practices of the environment
of corresponding groups. Therefore, this institutional register of territori-
ality contributes to the making of social identities. According to Célérier,
the construction of Berber social identity occurred through the identifi-
cation of a geographic entity to which it is linked, the Atlas, in the politi-
cal context of colonial segmentation of Morocco.
For Byers, the Mountain Forum connects social actors mobilized
around a global project arising from a shared engagement of individuals
living in mountain regions and their advocates. Mountain societies, even
though distant from one another, are deemed sufficiently related to jus-
tify such exchanges. The predominant identities here are most often
referred to as personal and collective identities. The second designates the
feeling and desire of multiple individuals to belong to the same group
and to act accordingly. Personal identity here refers less to the psycholo-
gizing sense (self awareness) but rather to Hannah Arendt’s (Arendt 1958)
and Charles Taylor’s conceptualizations in political philosophy:
My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which pro-

vide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to
case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse
or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of
taking a stand. (Taylor 1989, 27)
The Mountain Forum as described by Byers results from the gradual

creation of collective identity involving individuals situated far apart, yet
in relationship with one another, sharing representations, knowledge,
and experiences—and thereby a certain form of culture—related to a
specific kind of environment. In this case, we suggest speaking of a self-
referential register of territoriality, by which each individual inscribes her-
self or himself simultaneously in an affinity group and a system of
corresponding spatial practices.
In the chronological sequence of these three texts, it would be tempt-
ing to recognize signs of renewal in the notion of culture: from culture as
a fact of nature to culture as an institutional phenomenon, to culture as
an intersubjective construction. This renewal would proceed from the
invalidation of earlier problematics, be it because evidence showed them
to be misguided—the Quimos as Buffon describes them as having never
existed—or because they ignored factors and processes that later came to
be seen as decisive, for example the role of collective action and self-
representation in contemporary societies. Similarly, we might be tempted
to apply this modest sampling of texts to an evolutionist analysis of
modernity: modernity would have led local communities to emancipate
themselves from biophysical forms of territoriality by favoring the elabo-
ration of institutional forms of territoriality, sophisticated yet normative,
before yielding, in these times of weakening institutional control, to
forms of territoriality based on affinity.
The present article adopts a different position regarding the diversity of
problematics evident in the three narratives. Rather than assume that one
perspective on the relations between identity, culture, and territoriality
supplants the preceding one, it proposes considering these narratives as
illustrations of different imaginaries of territoriality, which can coexist
and be combined within logics of action tending to singularize corre-
sponding social and geographic entities.
In order to defend this thesis, this chapter will further look at how
scholars and social actors refer to the so-called montagnards in the
French-speaking world, ‘mountain peoples’ and ‘mountaineers’ in the
English-speaking world,1 studying contemporary forms of practices,
actions, and identifications related to ‘mountains’, since they have been
conceived as a class of natural objects, that is, since the time of Buffon.
134 B. Debarbieux
onstructing a Social Category with a Modern

C
Conception of Mountains
The categories ‘mountain peoples’ and ‘mountaineers’ owe much to the
naturalist and philosophical discourses of the eighteenth century (Broc
1991; Walter 2004). In fact, in the image of Buffon, many authors of the
Enlightenment and the following century endeavored to create a concep-
tion of the world that joined a representation of the diversity of natural
forms—mountains becoming then an essential category—to a represen-
tation of the diversity of peoples and nations. In the eighteenth century
one thus finds an increase in statements aiming to define the scope of the
categories ‘mountain’ or ‘mountain region’ on the one hand and ‘moun-
tain people’ or ‘mountaineer’ on the other, and to apprehend their rela-
tions in a causal way. The category ‘mountain’ was defined according to
criteria of size, slope, altitude, or the succession of climates and vegeta-
tion, and was thought, at different times, to be the earliest or latest traces
of the history of the earth (Broc 1991). The ‘mountaineer’ tends then to
become a human type whose attributes—physical, psychic, moral, and so
on—derive from a kind of environment said to be ‘mountainous’. Yet, for
a long time, the people designated by this term did not recognize them-
selves in it, largely preferring local and regional names.
Nonetheless, this identity became naturalized and widely diffused in
modern societies by way of popular and touristic literature, and works
directed to broad audiences, particularly school children (Fig. 7.1). For
this reason, the montagnard became one of a social types that European
societies adopted to think about their internal diversity and to construct
their popular mythologies.
But this tendency, because it was tied to moral and political values, also
gained a normative and prescriptive function, already evident in Célérier’s
work. The uniqueness of the groups and peoples described in these ways
was then subordinated to social roles and political projects by which
national societies understood themselves as such. But the terms of this
normative and descriptive function varied in relation to political context.
Applied to mountain populations where national mythology extolled its
virtues, for example in Switzerland (Walter 2004), Scotland (Trevor-
Fig. 7.1 Camille Guy and Marcel Dubois, 1896, Album géographique, Paris,
A. Colin
136 B. Debarbieux
Roper 1983), and since 1918 in Austria, the category montagnards has
often designated a model to follow and favored public interventions pro-
moting such cultural traits and ways of life. Applied to populations whose
traits are deemed outside the mainstream social model or whose behav-
iors are seen as maladapted to a modernity promoted in the West, the
term feeds a social critique and a questioning of the way of life of such
mountain dwellers (Debarbieux and Rudaz 2015). The construction of
these social identities, the pejorative representations used to justify them
in several countries, and the radical measures they engendered gave rise to
a repositioning, beginning in the 1960s, by part of the academic com-
munity, and interpretations in terms of class relations (Whisnant 1980)
and ‘colonization’ (Lewis et al. 1978).
Despite the diversity of texts, which have made use of the terms over
the last several centuries, ‘mountain people’ and ‘montagnards’ have
essentially served to designate populations apprehended from without.
These names have allowed the formation of one of the most popular fig-
ures of alterity by which we conceive human diversity, just as mountains
were seen as fundamentally different from the milieu where the majority
of the producers of these representations spoke.
From Social to Collective Mountain Identities

However, from the middle of the nineteenth century, the social use of
these categories became more complex for two reasons: the will of moun-
tain climbers to refer to themselves as ‘montagnards’ or, more specifically,
to adopt and keep for themselves the English-speaking word ‘mountain-
eers’, and the tendency of many social actors living in mountain environ-
ments to designate themselves in reference to ‘mountains’.
How Mountain Climbers Became ‘Mountaineers’
The words ‘montagnard’ or ‘mountaineer’ became a tool for self-

designation among alpinists in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Indeed, during the earliest days of alpinism, these words were reserved by
tourists for high-mountain guides and inhabitants of the high Alpine val-
leys. But the emergence of a more athletic alpinism, at times deemed
heroic, and the advent of Alpine clubs in the second half of the nine-
teenth century led a new generation of climbers to claim the title for
themselves (Clark 1953; Lejeune 1988). Then, the term montagnard
more often designated these alpinist tourists than resident populations, a
tendency for which there are several explanations. In practicing moun-
taineering, there was an evident concern with social distinction, so as not
to be confused with the contemplative tourist, who was beginning to be
mocked in popular literature. There was also, as in Edward Whymper
(Whymper 1900), a symbolic dismissal of local mountain populations,
who could not yet offer the technical skills needed by elite alpinists.
In this process of appropriating the name montagnard/mountaineer,
the influence of the close relations that alpinists and Alpine clubs main-
tained with scientific circles and governments should not be underesti-
mated. Sport climbing recruited its adepts from among the most leisured,
most educated, and most connected social groups at the time. The Alpine
clubs prided themselves as well on contributing to the advancement of
science, at times by initiating scientific studies, at times by divulging sci-
entific knowledge in their publications. As such, they saw themselves as
bearers as much of scholarly representations of mountains as of modern
mountain practices. Popular representations and traditional practices
were only rarely objects of comparable curiosity on their part, at least
until the middle of the twentieth century. This state of mind also allowed,
during this period, a genuine collaboration of Alpine clubs with forest
administrators, with whom they shared objectives on behalf of a natural-
ist and progressive conception of mountains. It also allowed the alpinists
to assume an important role in promoting the idea of protecting moun-
tain nature, which was taken up very early, with little consideration for
local populations and without taking into account their frequent hostility
vis-à-vis such emerging public policies.
This appropriation of the term montagnard/mountaineer by members
of Alpine clubs should be interpreted as forms of personal and collective
identity, rather than of social identity. They connect their personal and
collective image to a kind of environment—in this case the ‘high moun-
tains’—which they invest with their practices and initiatives. We discern
138 B. Debarbieux
here the manifestation of what was previously referenced as the subjective

and self-referential register of territoriality. But it would be reductive to
limit ourselves to this interpretation and this one register. Because of their
proximity to national administrators and their participation in state proj-
ects, their identification and actions cannot be apprehended independent
of the institutional register of territoriality. Finally, in contributing to the
setting of the first public policies specific to mountain regions, especially
forestry and conservation policies, they conceived of themselves as deci-
sive interpreters of the biophysical reality of the high mountains, particu-
larly in the Alps. Largely reforested, alleviated of grazing pressure and
managed in terms of new tourist practices, the European high mountains
were said to be brought into new equilibria. The three registers of territo-
riality distinguished here therefore proved eminently complementary in
the construction of the Alpine clubs, in that none could be considered
decisive alone.
merging Modes of Self-Identification in Local

E
Populations
The taking up of the name ‘mountain people’ by local populations came

both later and more slowly, but again this was largely subordinate to
issues of political recognition in national, yet heterogeneous contexts. In
fact, even though we lack specific studies on this point, it seems that these
populations didn’t begin to claim the appellation until the end of the
nineteenth century, and even then only in the sole touristic regions where
they protested the indifference shown to them by some tourists (Tissot
2004). This process occurred earlier or later depending on whether the
national imaginaries tended to celebrate, or on the contrary denigrate,
the so-called mountain people. The rather distinct cases of Switzerland,
France, and the European Union are instructive.
Mountains became objects of public policies in Switzerland beginning
in the 1920s. The depopulation of corresponding regions, observed since
the middle of the nineteenth century, had become cause for concern, giv-
ing rise to legislative proposals aiming to mitigate the causes and effects.
Switzerland then, on behalf of a certain concept of the positive qualities
of its mountains and the virtues of its mountain inhabitants, adopted the
first public measures aiming to keep these populations in place (Rudaz
and Debarbieux 2013). Soon afterward, several lobbies were set up as
privileged interlocutors of the Federal Parliament and administration for
questions relating to the management of the Alps and Jura. Notable
among these, from 1943, was the Schweizerische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für
die Bergbauern [Swiss Organization of Mountain Farmers], which pre-
sented itself as the official emanation of Swiss mountain populations. The
organization of a representative body for mountain populations thus
came following the adoption of the first public policies aiming to assist
the corresponding regions. Both were justified by a concern to correct the
social and territorial imbalances brought about by the economic develop-
ment of the industrial period.
A comparable configuration also occurred in France, but close to half
a century later. Some 20 years following the adoption of measures favor-
ing mountain agriculture, France gave itself a Loi Montagne [Mountain
Law] (1985) which sought to address a wide range of social and eco-
nomic problems. A National Association of Elected Representatives of
the Mountains (Association Nationale des Elus de la Montagne, ANEM)
was established right afterward, presenting itself as representing moun-
tain populations and establishing itself as an interlocutor with public
powers at the national level. Born in the aftermath of virulent polemics
over the cogency and modes of tourist development and protection of the
French mountains, following as well the decentralization laws of
1982–1983, which recognized the competencies of local elected officials
in matters of urban planning, but the application of which was limited in
mountain jurisdictions by other texts, ANEM adopted a discourse aim-
ing to restore the legitimacy of elected officials from the mountains: ‘We
are a “territorial lobby”, over a very complex territory that is the moun-
tains. It engenders an ensemble of issues arising out of montagnards soci-
ety [société des montagnards]. Our objective is to be the expression of
this mountain population’ (Remy 2001). In the years following its cre-
ation, ANEM demonstrated its activism and efficacy in forcing the
national legislature to take into consideration the claimed distinctiveness
of mountain regions.
140 B. Debarbieux
The progressive transfer of competencies in policy matters to the level

of the European Union led to a rescaling of lobbies and pressure groups
(Debarbieux and Rudaz 2015). Two groups have been set up for promot-
ing collective discussion on mountains at the EU scale: Euromontana, in
1974, mainly devoted to agriculture and rural development; and the
European Association of Elected Representatives from Mountain Regions
(AEM), in 1993, mainly initiated by ANEM and its Italian counterpart,
the UNCEM, in order to encourage the European Commission and
Parliament established a European Association of Elected Representatives
from Mountain Regions (AEM). The European Commission, encour-
aged in this by the existing associations, for a time also reflected on the
opportunity and possibility of specifying to adopt specific measures for
mountain regions in the EU policies. Under the pressure of this active
lobbying, reference to mountains appeared for the first time in a European
Treaty, the one of Lisbon (2007) and the Commission, the AEM, and
Euromontana have got used to work in concert to create organizational
structures at the level of mountain ranges (mainly the Alps, the
Carpathians, and the Pyrenees).
The ensemble of these initiatives formed part of two processes long
recognized in the social sciences: (1) a social process of identity conver-
sion from a denigrated social identity to an affirmed collective identity,
with the self-definition of identity of the groups concerned transforming
the motives for stigmatization into sources of collective pride; and (2) a
political process of institutionalization, particularly in the form of advo-
cacy groups, aiming to influence democratic and deliberative processes in
the name of a legitimacy acquired through widely shared social identities.
In these conditions, both subjective and institutional registers of territo-
riality are strongly mobilized, but the attention here to sociopolitical pro-
cesses shouldn’t obscure the importance of the biophysical register;
indeed, the initiatives mentioned here specifically aimed to defend or
promote kinds of uses of mountains likely to alter their character. Thus,
when the associations of elected representatives demanded more auton-
omy in managing the administrative territories of their members, they
especially sought to reduce the weight of environmental constraints; con-
versely, the Alpine Convention and many of its advocates have sought to
generalize a mode of sustainable development and environmental protec-
tion to the level of ranges, a proposition motivated by a certain concep-

tion of alpine environments, and inclined to favor ecological components
and forms of management.
he Reformulation of Social and Collective

T
Identities in the Context of the Globalization
of Mountain Issues
Since the beginning of the 1990s, a process similar to that seen in Europe
throughout the twentieth century is expanding at the global level, giving
rise to the requalification of ‘mountain peoples’ and new manners of self-
identification. In 1992, in what was a first for such a gathering, the
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro, described mountains as a planetary
issue. In Agenda 21, the action plan of the conference, an entire chapter,
chapter 13, was dedicated to mountains. There mountains are offered as
a model environment for the implementation of the sustainable develop-
ment goals promoted at the gathering. This attention to mountains cul-
minated in 2002 with the organization of the International Year of
Mountains, again at the instigation of United Nations. That same year, in
the context of the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in
Johannesburg, the Mountain Partnership was created, bringing together
diverse bodies (states, international organizations, nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs), associations of elected representatives, scientific
teams, etc.) eager to coordinate their initiatives directed toward moun-
tain regions.
UNCED placed at the forefront international organizations—particu-
larly the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which was entrusted
with implementing and monitoring chapter 13, and later assumed lead-
ership of the Mountain Partnership—and the states which were most
involved in the negotiations (Debarbieux and Price 2008). Switzerland,
which was at the time preparing to enter the UN, played a decisive role
in the discussion, leading a group of mountainous countries mostly from
the Global South (Ethiopia, Bolivia, Nepal, etc.). These countries,
142 B. Debarbieux
brought together with the support of several NGOs, formed a lobby

which was particularly active during the annual sessions of the UN
Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD). But further—and this
is the principal interest of this series of events to the thesis of this arti-
cle—these institutional actors strove to engage the active participation of,
on the one hand, scientific experts and, on the other, local populations.
The analysis which follows concerns principally this new configuration of
protagonists, the modalities of naming and characterizing ‘mountain
populations’ which resulted, and the registers of territoriality which this
implies.
he Status Given to the Scientific Community and Its

T
Initiatives
UNCED and the administrations of the most-engaged countries played

a decisive role in the shaping of a scientific community specialized on
mountain issues so as to have at their disposal appropriate expertise, and
to be able to put it to use. During the period covering the preparatory
steps of the conference, the conference itself, the following events espe-
cially in 2002 and the working period of the institutions set up in the
following steps, a close relationship between a group of scientists, UN
agencies, and national administrations of development gave way to the
rise and stabilization of a common vision for a global governance of
mountain regions.
At the same time, the scientific community organized itself at the
global level with the twin goals of creating a body of knowledge appropri-
ate to the issues and facilitating the implementation of local and regional
campaigns and networks which would follow. The work of synthesizing
available knowledge at the beginning of the 1990s took form in a series
of scientific publications (Stone 1992; Messerli and Ives 1997; Price et al.
2004a), lavish pamphlets which year after year has supported the CSD
on a series of issues (water, tourism, etc.) concerning mountain regions.
Alongside this effort toward synthesis, scientists organized themselves in
regional associations (the Andes, Africa, etc.), seeking to build regional
communities intended to become the preferred interlocutors of states
and NGOs working at these levels. In fact, the organization of this scien-
tific community has not been exempt from identity concerns, some of its
members calling for the definition of a specific field of knowledge called
‘montology’.
he Status Attributed to the So-Called Mountain

T
Populations
During the same period, this scientific community and the interna-
tional organizations or UN agencies involved in this mountain agenda
elaborated a specific discourse about local populations which they
sought to bring into the process. In fact, the various international con-
ferences on sustainable development organized during these years had
already highlighted the value of the knowledge and know-how of local
populations, and the importance of their involvement. Moreover, inter-
national organizations insisted on the importance of concerned states
recognizing the distinctiveness of these regions and granting a certain
autonomy to the peoples living in them, as a guarantee of good man-
agement. The globalization of mountain issues thus was led by the com-
bined ideas that the ecological and cultural uniqueness at the global
level should be recognized, and that its preservation could be optimized
through the promotion of local autonomy of ‘mountain sustainable
communities’.
But once again, the identity of the so-called mountain populations was
constructed from an external perspective, in the frame of a skillful argu-
ment seeking to delimit mountains, characterize their main ecological
features, and promote sustainable development policies. It was still there-
fore a social identity, independent of the ones these populations assumed
themselves. Given this situation, some social scientists have criticized this
naturalist prism as a corruption of the cultures of these populations, and
as the expression of a political will to subordinate their identities and
practices to the goals of environmental conservation.2 The definitions
and characterizations of mountains and mountain populations, scientific
and political in its principles and justifications, quickly became the sub-
ject of political and scientific controversy.
144 B. Debarbieux
he Modes of Adjustment of Local Populations

T
to the Globalization of Mountain Issues
How did the concerned populations position themselves when invited to

think of themselves as mountain ones and to contribute under that title to
sustainable development policies at the global level? In fact, they adopted
several, very different attitudes.
A first attitude consisted of taking advantage of this new context to
carry out local initiatives in partnership with intergovernmental
organizations, NGOs, or cooperation offices. In this way, the Swiss SDC
has accompanied many local development projects throughout the world,
projects presented then in official government reports as contributing
much to this international cause.
A second attitude consisted of these populations involving themselves
in long-distance partnerships and organizing themselves in regional and
transnational networks set up by some of the initiators of this process of
globalizing mountain issues. Exchange programs between the inhabitants
of different mountain chains (HimalAndes and SANREM, among oth-
ers) were organized by scientists with the financial support from the
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Information-
sharing networks, on the model of the Mountain Forum mentioned at the
very beginning of this chapter, were set up by NGOs eager to optimize
communication between populations seen as facing similar problems.
Finally, resource centers were set up at the regional level, for example the
International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICMOD) for
the greater Himalayan region and the Consortium for the Sustainable
Development of the Andean Region (CONDESAN) for the Andes, con-
cerned with engaging the corresponding populations of these regions in
their agenda. Similar initiatives were taken in European mountain regions
following the Alpine Convention. In 2007, at the initiative of the
Convention’s secretariat and International Commission for the Protection of
the Alps (CIPRA, a transnational association very active in the promotion
of sustainable development at the level of the massif ), a 240-member-
strong association of municipalities, Alliance in the Alps, took on the goal
of promoting sustainable development at this level. Similar associations
have emerged recently in the Carpathians and Central Asia. Additionally,

a great many mountain municipalities and regions in Europe have
increased the number of sister relationships and other forms of cultural
exchanges with other mountain municipalities or regions in the world,
often with the aid of national agencies eager to facilitate this kind of ini-
tiative (Debarbieux and Rudaz 2008).
A third response has been for some actors to organize in reaction to
global initiatives seen as imposed from above. The World Mountain
People Association (WMPA) is one example: at its origin, this associa-
tion, which was created in 2001 at the initiative of individuals otherwise
involved in associations of elected representatives of mountain regions in
Europe (ANEM, UNCEM, AEM), clearly aimed to position itself as the
preferred interlocutor of international organizations so as to favor local
autonomy and to guarantee a voice for the populations concerned. The
founding partners made explicit their interest in reproducing at the
global level that which they had achieved at the level of France, Italy, and
Europe at the height of their community discussions and elaboration of
national policies regarding mountain regions. Perceived at first as a force
aiming to jeopardize the global initiatives regarding the world’s moun-
tains, the WMPA in the end was recognized in its representative role,
joining the Mountain Partnership. Having won this recognition, its
objectives have broadened to promoting mountain agricultural and arti-
sanal products, creating protective labels and establishing dedicated mar-
keting circuits, as well as conserving and promoting mountain cultures
and identities.
eturn to Forms of Identity and Registers

R
of Territoriality at the Time of Globalization
of Mountain Issues
Throughout this fairly complex process, animated by many heteroge-

neous actors, how can we specify the role of the various forms of identity
and registers of territoriality identified so far? During the last 15 years,
considerable energy and means have been devoted to identifying and
describing the mountain regions and environments of the world. This
146 B. Debarbieux
mobilization has explicitly aimed to promote sustainable development

and the conservation of the biological and cultural diversity of these
regions. It thus concerned cultivating the distinctiveness of mountain
regions, especially in their biophysical dimensions.
The principal initiators of this process—scientists, diplomats, as well as
NGOs and IGOs—share a common engagement with the cause of
mountains, to the point at times of being defined by it, as reflected in
those who call themselves ‘montologists’. In their actions, they point to
an ensemble of ‘mountain populations’ for whom they wish to speak and
who are presented as the legitimate beneficiaries of the policies that they
pursue. We recognize here a kind of repeat at the global level of what
happened in Western and Southern Europe from the end of the nine-
teenth century: the making of a mountain social identity subordinate to
the objectives of managing mountains as such. But this time, the objec-
tive of sustainable development has taken precedence over reforestation.
The ways affected populations have positioned themselves has varied
greatly vis-à-vis the categories used to refer to them, notably ‘mountain
populations’ and ‘mountain people’. Some have shown themselves indif-
ferent, while others have assumed the labels on their own account—to
shape collective identities, rethink their uniqueness and place in the world,
or to gain means, active networks, or coordinate demands. This observa-
tion supports in part that which analysts of the indigenous movement in
the Americas have concluded: the display of a common identity entails
varied cultural and political strategies, consisting often of combining het-
erogeneous referents of identity, mobilized according to circumstance.
But this selective way of making reference to mountains in the con-
struction of new collective identities, clearly linked to the globalization of
mountain issues, shouldn’t lead us to think that the institutional and
nation-state registers of mountain territoriality have become obsolete.
The analysis above and some supplementary elements lead us to the
opposite conclusion. In fact, we have observed that certain countries for
which reference to mountains constitutes an important part of their very
identity, or a decisive internal issue in terms of development—notably
Switzerland—have played a decisive role in this process of globalization.
Next, the process itself, because it is based on intergovernmental orga-
nizations, rests first and foremost on the engagement of member states of
these organizations. In this way, the International Year of Mountains

(IYM) took the form of an ensemble of events many of which had
national aims. France illustrates this fact well: the French state hoped the
IYM would all at once help promote Agenda 21 and sustainable develop-
ment in mountain regions, update its own ‘mountain’ policies, advance
mountain policy at the level of Europe, and sustain numerous initiatives
by local actors. The mobilization of local and institutional actors was
impressive—382 proposals were submitted and 188 were approved—as
was the diversity of the projects (cultural, economic, environmental,
educational, etc.) and the spatial frames (local, interregional, transna-
tional, long-distance partnerships, etc.).
Therefore, considering the role played by some states, such as France
and Switzerland, and intergovernmental organizations in this worldwide
reshaping of modes of identification of, and with, mountains, we cannot
overlook the importance of institutional registers of territoriality. Even
further, several promoters of these initiatives, foremost some intergovern-
mental organizations, have actively sought to win recognition for moun-
tain peoples and environments by states otherwise resistant to doing
do—be it to retain a free hand in exploiting natural resources or to avoid
recognizing cultural minorities. Thus, far from being the initiative of a
few activists, the globalization of mountain issues attests to the ability of
very heterogeneous protagonists—individuals, cultural and professional
groups, intergovernmental organizations, and states—to construct a
complementarity of identifications (geographic, social, collective), moti-
vations, and actions capable of redrawing the field of discourses and legit-
imate action regarding mountains.
The degree to which the biophysical register of territoriality partici-
pates in the whole of this process remains to be determined. It has often
been invoked by the protagonists of this process to demonstrate the dis-
tinctiveness of mountain environments or the ways of life and subsistence
of their inhabitants. It has also been used, though less frequently, to sup-
port the hopes and claims of certain communities, and here we could see
reemerge the image of the free and proud Bergbaeur or Highlander, like
the one made common in the literature of the enlightenment. But besides
constituting one of several figures of the territorial imaginary, the bio-
physical register of territoriality is operative in the whole of actions and
148 B. Debarbieux
concrete changes arising from the practical initiatives ensuing from this
imaginary. The data banks of the resource centers mentioned above and
many field studies attest to these practical initiatives which, because they
are built on a discourse of mountain specificity, also participate in con-
structing the distinctiveness, including the biophysical distinctiveness, of
the corresponding regions and sites.
To illustrate this, we can point to the specific example of mountain mas-
sifs that tend to be depicted as so many ‘bioregions’ or ‘ecoregions’, so as to
better conceive and implement interventions and regulations at that scale.
This approach was adopted first by environmental organizations, such as
World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and CIPRA, and then by interested
states, as seen in the Alpine Convention. It tends to be the case for groups
of inhabitants who defend the idea that new social collectives should
emerge and be organized at the level of the mountain ranges to which they
belong; this is the idea that underlies the activities of Alliance in the Alps.
The same is evident among adherents of the bioregional movement in
North America (Sale 1985): followers promote natural entities (essentially
watersheds and mountain ranges), no longer merely as areas for manage-
ment, but also, and above all, as administrative and political entities and as
a frameworks for reconfiguring collective identities. The advocates and
conceptualizers of this movement speak of a process of territorial reshap-
ing, referring ‘both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness—
to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place’
(Berg and Dasmann 1978, 218), to ‘ecocentric identities’ (Bretherton
2001) or even to an ‘ecology of shared identities’ (McGinnis 1999).
Conclusions
The main objective of this chapter was to analyze the ways mountain
identities have been defined according to various conceptions of culture
and territoriality. Let’s summarize the argument, following the two per-
spectives adopted all along the chapter: first, the invention and social
diffusion of the categories montagnards, ‘mountain people’, and ‘moun-
tain population’; second, the various imagined territorialities on which
these categories have been based through time.
The modern meanings of the categories montagnards, ‘mountain peo-

ple’, and ‘mountain population’ were born in the eighteenth century,
when scholars and philosophers became eager to organize knowledge of
human diversity according to geographic and natural categories. This
manner of thinking, external to the people being designated, was quickly
adopted by tourists and administrations. In the twentieth century, the
designated populations gradually did the same, mostly in order to take
advantage of this mode of designation for defending their own interests
at national, continental, and, then, global levels. This diffusion of the
modes of categorization illustrates social processes quite familiar to the
social sciences: the spread of scientific models of knowledge within the
societies they analyze and the social reflexivity which derives from this
process; the conversion of social identities into collective identities; and
the politicization of collective identities, especially within minorities
eager for recognition and a voice in debates concerning their daily life.
The mountain identities identified above are of different types and cor-
respond to different registers of territoriality. A first one is based on the
idea, ground in the dominant scientific culture of the eighteenth and
twentieth centuries but still active today, that populations living in moun-
tain environments, as defined by natural scientists, present specific char-
acters or features due to their close relation to these environments. The
corresponding imagined territoriality insists on the nature-society rela-
tionships developed at a local or regional scale. A second register of ter-
ritoriality, called institutional here, is based on the idea that ‘mountain
people’, still seen from above and externally, are a component of national
societies or humanity as a whole and should be thought of according to
their contribution to the collective bodies they are embedded in. The cor-
responding imagined territoriality is more horizontal, focusing on the
articulation of diverse areas and social groupings. A third type of moun-
tain identity relates to the modes of self-designation of individuals and
collectives willing to refer to mountains for conceiving and representing
themselves. The corresponding territoriality is highly reflexive and often
political when issues of recognition and rights are at stake, highlighting
in a symbolic manner the relations of the people with their environment.
These various forms of identity and imagined territoriality have offered,
in academia, strong alternatives for conceiving the social world, belong-
150 B. Debarbieux
ing to competing schools of thought. But the same may not be true out-
side of that sphere. In fact, the illustration developed here shows that
these various forms cohabitate and are even superimposed in the dis-
courses and modes of action of key actors engaged in mountain topics
and issues.
Notes
1. In French, montagnards has been the main word used for designating indi-
viduals living in mountain regions for centuries, both among scientists
and in ordinary language. The same word has been common for pointing
at mountain climbers since the mid-nineteenth century. It is only from
the mid-twentieth century that it has become common to talk about pop-
ulations de montagne. In English, ‘mountaineer’ was equivalent to ‘mon-
tagnards’ until the mid-nineteenth century; then, the word became
reserved for climbers and sportsmen, individuals living in the so-called
mountain regions being mostly named ‘mountain populations’ or ‘moun-
tain people’. Some regional appellations have been adopted such as hill-
billy in the Appalachian mountains and highlander in Scotland, both
loaded with many connotations which will be commented later in this
chapter.
2. See for example David Barkin and Michèle Dominy, 2001, ‘Mountain
lands: regions of refuge or ecosystems for humanity?’ in B. Debarbieux
and F. Gillet, op. cit., pp. 71–77.
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8
A Difficult Line: The Aesthetics
of Mountain Climbing 1871–Present
Anja-Karina Nydal
Introduction
In 1920, Geoffrey Winthrop Young (1876–1958) published a large man-
ual of mountaineering techniques titled Mountain Craft. An accom-
plished British mountaineer and educator, he was best known for his
many first ascents in the Alps and also for the legacy this comprehensive
manual has left. In the introduction, Young writes that mountaineering
‘is a genuine craft’, ‘a science for whose mastery the study of all our active
years is barely sufficient. Of its rewards in […] aesthetic pleasure […] it is
not the place to speak in a book of practical counsel’ (Young 1920, ix).
However, despite Young’s unmistakable indication that he will not dis-
cuss the aesthetic experiences of climbing mountains, there is nevertheless
plenty of material in his book that shows climbers’ aesthetic appreciation
of the mountain and the ways in which their perspective differs from that
A.-K. Nydal, PhD (*)

Independent Scholar, Kent, UK

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_8
156 A.-K. Nydal
of ordinary observers. Young simply cannot resist the temptation of writ-

ing about the subject throughout his technical manual.
This chapter has therefore drawn upon Young’s continual references to
the aesthetic experiences of climbers, discussing the idea that climbing, as
a challenging and difficult pursuit, gives a certain aesthetic value to the
mountain that is irresistible to climbers. To do so, it investigates, in the
first instance, texts by writers who were the first of their time and disci-
pline to write instructional manuals for their craft and who, consequently,
grappled specifically with the difficulties involved in mastering such a
craft and thus also indirectly with the concept of ‘aesthetics’.
Fortunately, there are a large number of writers whose work will be
analysed in order to demonstrate these points. Apart from Young’s work,
other texts that predate his manual, such as those by Leslie Stephen
(1832–1904), Clinton Thomas Dent (1850–1912) and Owen Glynne
Jones (1867–1899) will also be examined in this chapter. Young’s manual
was written during the early part of the twentieth century as a result of a
proposition by the publisher that the earlier Badminton volume on
Mountaineering (1892) by Clinton Thomas Dent was out of date (Lunn
1961, 111). As Peter Hansen, historian of British mountaineering,
pointed out: ‘some might identify Young’s book as the first technical
manual’ on mountaineering, but Clinton Dent’s book Mountaineering
was ‘an earlier example of the same kind’ (Hansen 2009).
Texts by contemporary climbers will also be examined to contribute to
an understanding of the aesthetic experiences climbers have and the ways
in which they value the mountain as a result. These accounts assist in
evaluating the historical tapestry that this concept is capable of weaving.
Kurt Diemberger (b.1932), Martin Moran (b.1953), John Middendorf
(b.1959), Steve McClure (b. 1970), Ben Heason (b.1975) and Dave
MacLeod (b.1978)—to name a few—provide fascinating insights into
climbers’ aesthetic experiences from a range of different perspectives:
from those scaling Himalayan mountains, to mountain guides and to
those attempting some of the world’s most difficult rock-climbing routes.
These mountaineers, mountain guides and rock climbers all have some-
thing in common: the search for the ‘difficult’ line and their quest to
master it. This shared objective means they all have something important
to contribute to this discussion.
8 A Difficult Line: The Aesthetics of Mountain Climbing... 157
The Pursuit of Difficult Lines

Climbing has, at its core, a never-ending quest to solve spatial problems;
it is the activity that preoccupies anyone attempting to scale a rock, wall
or a mountain for the majority of their time during this pursuit. At the
centre of these ‘problems’, and that which is ‘difficult’, lies the object of
the discipline’s interest and the source from which all the climber’s activ-
ities ignite—the concept of lines. Throughout the literature it is appar-
ent that the idea of lines permeate every page; there are ‘historic lines’,
‘good lines’, ‘fine lines’, ‘pure lines’, ‘great natural lines’, ‘elegant lines’,
‘wrong lines’, ‘weak lines’, ‘freakish lines’, ‘fancy lines’, ‘great classical
lines’ and so on. The ‘direttissima’ is also a well-known line. Chris
Bonington wrote for example that: ‘It’s got to be a good line—not just
hard—but one that catches my imagination’ (Bonington 1966, 119).
‘Lines’, then, are the topic of largely all dialogues on climbing and thus
also hold the clues to what it is about a difficult line that climbers value
so highly.
What climbers refer to as a ‘line’ is simultaneously that space within
which the activity of climbing takes place, as well as that space which
climbers represent graphically through drawings and photographs. Such
lines are often referred to in the literature as a ‘design’. Young, for exam-
ple, uses this term in several places in his book where he writes that ‘a
good leader must be able to design and direct an ascent’ (Young 1920,
3–4), and furthermore that he hopes to ‘design a route which by reason
of its angle […] should be safe’ (Young 1920, 386). Equally, author and
mountaineer Clinton Dent wrote about the conquest of Mont Blanc as a
‘design’ (Dent 1892, 25). But what did this line, or design, mean for
Stephen, Dent, Jones and Young as well as the contemporary climbers? At
what point does a difficult line become an object that has aesthetic value?
Contemporary big wall climber John Middendorf said that ‘sometimes
climbers fall in love with the line, or the idea of a line’ (Middendorf in
Nydal 2013, 255) but what is it about a challenging or difficult line that
makes a climber ‘fall in love’ with it?
In climbing, the design of a line is inevitably related to safety. When
decisions are made on which line of ascent to take, safety is indeed the
158 A.-K. Nydal
main priority, and yet there is a real dilemma throughout the climbing
literature: the desire for safety on the one hand, yet conversely the chal-
lenge of solving a difficult and, therefore, potentially dangerous problem.
The Welsh rock climber and mountaineer Jones illustrated well this per-
sistent aesthetic attitude towards difficulty:
The joy that might have attended our remaining efforts in working up to
the head of the chimney was marred by the reflection that we had not con-
quered the chief difficulty, we had only avoided it. […] Our doubts grew as
we advanced, as at last I proposed to descend again and settle them finally.
This suggestion was met with a very prompt approval, and ten minutes
later found me at the foot of the vertical wall again. (Jones 1897, 10,
author’s emphasis)
The aesthetic value that Jones alludes to, then, implies that the climb-
ing line has a problem that needs solving. The pleasure—or ‘joy’—that
Jones has observed is significant because it is aroused directly by pursuing
something without any other obvious aesthetic qualities, other than that
it has a problem that needs solving. It therefore seems plausible to suggest
that climbing lines have aesthetic value because they provide valuable
experiences, rather than because it, as an object, simply contains qualities
with aesthetic value. Jones later describes an instance where some climb-
ers, after having ‘practically solved the main problem’, saw little reason to
continue on the climb and, as he writes; ‘were contented to work out of
the gully by steep ‘mantelshelf ’ climbing up to the left’ (Jones 1897, 44),
something which would have been off-route. It may of course be that the
climb Jones describes was a particularly easy route, but the aesthetic value
of a line still remains the same: the ‘problem’—and the pursuit to solve it.
Again, this suggests that the value, thus, must be in the experience rather
than the object itself.
However, several contemporary climbers have opposed the idea that
difficulty is the starting point from which climbing can be a valuable
aesthetic experience. One climber argues, for instance, that the ‘aesthetics
of the line are the primary motivation, the difficulty of the climbing is
secondary’ (Heason in Nydal 2013, 258). Another agrees that there are
‘always some aesthetic choices in route selection, [and that] it is definitely
not just to do with difficulty […]’ (McClure in Nydal 2013, 260). Herein
lies a problem that needs resolving before we continue further. By refer-

ring to ‘aesthetics’ and ‘difficulty’ as if they are two separate values, and as
if one of them refers to an aesthetic value and the other not, it draws our
attention to a commonly held view on what an aesthetic experience is:
that it primarily involves sensory experiences like sight, sound and smell.
However, what is less well understood outside the fields of philosophy is
that an aesthetic experience involves perception in all its complexity.
Much of aesthetic experience, Collinson writes, ‘has its beginnings in
sense experience’, but as she continues, ‘it does not end with them’
(Collinson in Hanfling, 112–113). The ‘aesthetics’ that climbers often
refer to are the sensuous experiences they have of climbing, but to have a
valuable aesthetic experience of something that is ‘difficult’ it is clear that
it cannot simply engage the senses by themselves—it must in some way
engage our cognitive faculties in a way that is experienced as enjoyable.
Thus, climbing routes, or lines, are repeatedly referred to as ‘difficult’
and as a ‘problem’, but with distinctly positive undertones. We often find
in contemporary climbing guidebooks descriptions of routes that are
described as: ‘yet another “last great problem” [on the Matterhorn]’
(Griffin 1998, 424)—and always directly referring to the ‘problem’ as
being its main attraction. Whenever this phrase is used in the climbing
literature, the word ‘great’ almost always appears to mean more than just
the scale or difficulty of the problem but also of how good it is. If the
problem of a climb, then, is ‘great’, it must somehow be as much sought
after as it is avoided. There is a sense of pride in having overcome the
most difficult of problems. Why else would there be such a sense of pride
in having climbed K2 instead of Everest? ‘Everest is indeed the taller of
the two, but K2’, as Kurt Diemberger argues, ‘is the more beautiful, more
fascinating and quite the more difficult of the two’ (Diemberger 1999,
347). Climbing to the top of Everest long ago became much less of an
achievement than other, more difficult, mountains.
The Gaze
Throughout Mountain Craft, Young recommends a number of skills that
he believes climbers need to learn and add to their repertoire in order to
become expert, rather than amateur, climbers. In order to solve many of
160 A.-K. Nydal
the challenges associated with climbing he emphasizes, in particular, the

necessity to ‘train their eyes’ in order to understand the mountains better
and, as a consequence, improve their climbing skills. A more detailed
account of what this training entailed is found in his chapter on recon-
noitring. Young argues that, unfortunately, in more familiar mountain
regions the existence of maps and guidebooks have relieved ‘the moun-
taineer of almost all occasion to apply his powers of observation’ and that
consequently the majority of climbers travelling to such regions simply
do not get the necessary training that he values so highly (Young 1920,
370). He notes that:
The loss is considerable, not only because a developed faculty of observing,

and of reasoning from the observations, is in itself a valuable permanent
possession, but because the neglect involves the failure to see much that is
beautiful. (Young 1920, 370)
In effect, what Young proposes is that the climber’s aesthetic experi-

ence is dependent upon critical judgement. In the aesthetics of art, for
example, critical judgement plays a significant part in the appreciation of
the object. In order to make critical judgements there has to be a level of
intellectual activity that takes place. The aesthetic appreciation that Young
observes in climbers is thus closely connected to training their observa-
tional skills that in turn allowed them to make reasoned judgements.
Interestingly, Young appears to be more concerned about how this lack of
experience affected their aesthetic judgement rather than how it affected
their climbing skills.
Furthermore, what Young makes particularly clear is that the knowl-
edge acquired from training their observational skills and their ability to
reason facilitated making better aesthetic judgements:
If we are accustomed to wait until beauty imposes itself upon the eye, as in
the end it will, and almost flauntingly, in large mountain scenery, we shall
have already missed the discovery of the relations of line and colour and
mass to which the beautiful effect is due, and we are fated to overlook
much that is lovely and much that is interesting […]. (Young 1920, 370)
In Young’s account there are two types of aesthetic judgements a

climber can make, first, a judgement that does not lay any claim to prior
knowledge and can therefore, literally, impose itself upon him. This
imposed type of beauty has been defined as ‘the immediacy thesis’ and
this means ‘that judgments of beauty are not (or at least not primarily)
mediated by inferences from principles or applications of concepts, but
rather have all the immediacy of straightforwardly sensory judgment’
(Shelley 2015). Second, what Young proposes is a judgement based upon
having the necessary training required in order to interpret these sensory
impressions and thus be able to see connections that others would not. As
such, an experienced climber will perceive, as Young states, qualities of
the mountain that are not only ‘lovely’ but ‘interesting’. ‘Mountains […]
are visible to everybody’, he says, ‘but not equally intelligible to every-
body’ (Young 1920, 372). By distinguishing an imposed type of aesthetic,
which everyone can see, he is therefore able to differentiate it from the
more important reasoned version that must be learnt.
Fifty years earlier, Leslie Stephen addressed a similar concern to Young
when he examined the difference between what he calls the inexperienced
and the ‘experienced eye’. In his book The Playground of Europe, he
described, for example, the way in which an untrained observer would
commonly perceive a buttress to be a perpendicular rock structure and
consequently judge it as a route only available to highly skilled climbers.
However, Stephen argues that, ‘the long slopes of debris by which it is
faced prove the fallacy of this idea to an experienced eye, and it is, in fact,
easy to ascend […]’ (Stephen 1871, 116).
The inexperienced eye, then, hovers over what it sees, but does not
know how to interpret what it sees. It could be argued that the shift in
terminology during these 50 years, from the ‘experienced eye’ in Stephen’s
text to ‘trained eye’ in Young’s text, represented the changes that occurred
in the climbing literature during the development of a more systematized
training of climbers. Whether or not this shift also represented a change
in their aesthetic judgement is not clear but it seems appropriate to, at the
very least, suggest that climbers over the course of this 50-year period
were, at the outset, aware of an aesthetic experience that was immediate
but which later, through training, developed into one that was reasoned.
162 A.-K. Nydal
Consequently, evidence of different types of aesthetic judgements began

to appear in the climbers’ texts.
This approach to training the climbers is something Young writes
about more systematically than any other writer before him. In his ana-
lytical appraisal of climbing, it follows that, ‘he has learned to see […],
and with the power of sight he has opened a new world of pleasure’
(Young 1920, 396). What Young describes is a situation where the moun-
tain is interpreted and appreciated in a similar way to a work of art. The
aesthetic appreciation of a work of art arises when an observer recognizes
the intention and purposeful arrangement made by the artist (Sheppard
1987, 4–17). Climbers look at a mountain with a very specific objective
in mind, to climb it, and the route to the top is arranged with purpose
and intent. Climbers are thus in a position both as the artist and as the
observer, and their appreciation of the mountain relies upon the capacity
of their imagination to project such purpose and intent onto the
mountain.
According to Young, ‘climbing is a joyous method of getting up attrac-
tive mountains by attractive ways’ (Young 1920, 138)—a sentiment that
is also evident in the thoughts of contemporary climbers. What, then, are
the features of a mountain that climbers find ‘attractive’, that inspire
them to attempt the climbing of a route, and that has aesthetic value?
Steve McClure, for example, states that he is, ‘inspired by obvious natural
features […] like corners, grooves, cracks etc, any series of features that
lead from bottom to top, ideally one feature that goes the whole way’
(McClure in Nydal 2013, 260).
McClure’s use of the word ‘obvious’ is important because, as a highly
trained climber with many years’ experience in practising his observa-
tional skills, he would have had the means to easily distinguish sophisti-
cated climbing lines otherwise imperceptible to the untrained eye.
Natural features such as ‘corners, grooves’ and ‘cracks’ are characteristics
of the geology of the mountain that his trained eye is very familiar with.
It is unlikely that an untrained eye would recognize them, let alone
assemble them into a ‘series of features that lead from bottom to top’ to
make one continuous, and undoubtedly good, climbing route up a
mountain. The ability to identify and assemble these features would give
McClure, in the words of Young, an ‘expert eye’ (Young 1920, 892).
Ben Heason also affirms that the lines that attract his desire to climb
them tend ‘to be the most striking lines, such as […] arêtes and corners,
which are continuous lines from bottom to top. They are the purest lines’
(Heason in Nydal 2013, 258). The ability to distinguish these geological
features and assemble them into one continuous line indicates therefore
an attraction and a desire to climb that line. As Heason maintains, ‘it [the
line] just stands out and asks to be climbed. They simply catch the eye
more strongly therefore giving you a stronger urge to climb them’ (Heason
in Nydal 2013, 258). In this context, Moran’s use of the words ‘natural
aesthetic line’ effectively captures the type of line that climbers identify as
having good climbing potential. Moran explains, ‘Occasionally, the natu-
ral aesthetic line is also the most practical. Such routes give the best
mountaineering experiences imaginable. If the mountain is beautiful
then the details of the route line are less important. Just to reach the top
is satisfaction enough’ (Moran in Nydal 2013, 255).
Why do climbers feel this desire to climb the ‘natural aesthetic line’, or
a line that stands out distinctly against a background? It has been argued
that ‘our perception would not comprise either outlines, figures, back-
grounds or objects, and would consequently not be perception of any-
thing, or indeed exist at all, if the subject of perception were not this gaze
which takes a grip upon things’ (Merleau-Ponty 1992, 295). A trained
climber’s gaze sees lines that are only visible because experience separates
complex linkages of features from the background and assembles them
into a line. In any visual field, something will move into the foreground
because the climber strives towards organizing what they observe. The
‘segregation of planes and outlines is’, according to Merleau-Ponty, ‘irre-
sistible’ (Merleau-Ponty 1992, 307). With the intention and purpose of
a climber to assemble these features into their work of art, as it were, they
become features that have an ‘irresistible’ aesthetic value.
The Puzzle
We have seen that experienced climbers frequently refer to their desire to
climb a route from ‘bottom to top’ and to do so in one continual, and
pleasing, route. In order to achieve this, climbers go to great lengths to
164 A.-K. Nydal
identify suitable geological features that can be assembled into a single,

attractive line. Kurt Diemberger, who was confronted by the challenge of
a broken line, describes the moment when he saw the missing link that
would resolve the impasse of his climb:
The corner, the ‘groove’, might be the key; but after a few steps I could see
that our dream of the summit-prize was over. […] And then, all of a sud-
den, I spotted it … surely, there, just above the snow-crawl, one small
weakness in the ice-armour, and the only one! […] Yes—just at the most
improbable spot—there was a way up […] that last link. (Diemberger
1999, 94–95)
In large mountain landscapes, such as the one Diemberger illustrates,

there is more likelihood that chance encounters can provide links that
solve the problem of a climb than on shorter, and arguably more techni-
cal, rock-climbing routes where each feature of a route is often carefully
planned, and linked together, in advance. However, we must remember
that Diemberger’s link, which appears to be a visual problem and simply
a matter of such chance encounters while climbing, are the words of an
experienced climber. Although he writes about it in such a matter of fact
way, what he actually demonstrates is an intricate series of linked
manoeuvres, which the climber has to perform, in order to join up the
route.
From this emerges something that is at the core of this discussion.
Climbers have a sustained aesthetic interest in identifying complex link-
ages of features that they find beautiful: ‘I am attracted to beautiful
lines—obvious geological weaknesses or complex linkages of features’
(Moran in Nydal 2013, 255) and have valuable aesthetic experiences
from the linking together of these features: ‘I enjoyed the puzzle aspect of
piecing together discontinuous features in order to climb with the least
permanent impact’ (Middendorf in Nydal 2013, 254). In order to under-
stand more fully the nature of this enjoyment, we must try to understand
how they went about linking together routes and what solving the puzzle
meant to them. A puzzle is first and foremost an intellectual challenge,
one that climbers clearly enjoy, because although climbing is at its heart
a physical activity that has practical and material challenges at the centre
of their discourse, a puzzle demands of the person attempting to solve it

a desire for something difficult to understand and to test one’s ingenuity
in solving the problem. The spatial problem of piecing together these
discontinuous features thus satisfies this desire. It could, then, be argued
that to have a spatial problem, or puzzle, which needed solving, is a crite-
rion for having a valuable aesthetic experience of climbing.
Throughout the climbing literature it is evident that there is a persis-
tent search for new challenges by identifying and negotiating complex
linkages. However, because they cannot be found simply through remote
observation, using telescopes, binoculars and photographs, it is impor-
tant to understand that their discovery is not always a result of ‘reasoning
from the observation’, as Young puts it, but often the result of an imagi-
native projection. Young illustrates this occurrence at length:
It is for our reconnoitering craft, first, to reject those alternatives which are
interrupted by the angle of the impossible; secondly, to condemn the lines
where it detects surface conditions or direct menaces which will introduce
too large an element of danger; thirdly, to except the routes where it decides
that harsh angle and poor condition in unrelenting succession combine to
form too great a volume of difficulty to be humanly vincible in a single
expedition; and lastly, if no agreeable or interesting remainder be left over,
to use its utmost skill to determine whether some unseen aspect may not
reveal sufficient of its character to encourage a hope that it will offer a more
helpful line of attack. (Young 1920, 373)
When Young’s climber ascertains, through visual observation, that a

climb is too dangerous or difficult, they will nevertheless attempt to
establish, through using their ‘utmost skill’, whether there is another line
of approach. His ‘unseen aspect’ implies not only something out of view,
but also something that the climber must be able to see and solve in the
mind. As such, it could be argued that the greatest skill Young identified
of a climber was an ability to treat the problem of complex linkages like
a three-dimensional puzzle in the mind’s eye, as it were. It would there-
fore be appropriate to argue here that a mountain is valued by the climb-
ers ‘because of the imaginative effort’ it demanded of them in order to see
the line (Sheppard 1987, 15).
166 A.-K. Nydal
What, more precisely, is this imaginative effort required of them, and

how was it used to resolve some of the difficulties met with on a climbing
line? Clinton Dent describes, for example, a common situation where a
climber has become stuck in the midst of solving a problem. He writes,
‘When a man has become hopelessly entangled on rock, he can often set
himself straight by simply taking hold with his left hand in the same
place that he had anchored himself with his right […]’ (Dent 1892, 224).
The term ‘entanglement’ is ordinarily associated with a state of mind,
a mental confusion or a complicated situation, but the word also brings
to mind lines, and we often think of something entangled as objects with
distinct linear qualities. These could be thin cords, hair, twine, fibres or
wire, to mention a few, that can easily be entangled and twisted together.
Dent’s entanglement on the rock appears to suggest the climber’s inability
to visualize the climbing line in the mind; consequently he finds himself
‘anchored’ with the wrong hand.
In order to solve this spatial problem, or puzzle, the climber must first
be able to visualize the sequence of moves but if, as Dent writes, the
climber can ‘set himself straight’ by swapping the left hand for the right
hand, it could be argued that the climber must also be able to manipulate
and rotate this three-dimensional configuration of lines in the mind. An
example from one of the world’s leading contemporary rock climbers,
Dave MacLeod, who says that he ‘just remember[s] the moves in [his]
head’, will help us understand this more fully:
I can play it [the sequence of moves] back either ‘inside’ myself as if I was
climbing it, or from ‘outside’ as if I was watching myself. I also find I can
improve my sequence by doing this i.e. I can discover a way to climb a
sequence more efficiently by playing back the different options the hand and
footholds offer without being on the route to try it. Quite often when I go
back to the route and try it out, it works. (MacLeod in Nydal 2013, 257)
It is important to note that the climbing route MacLeod is referring to

is not only extremely advanced technically and therefore outside the
perimeter of existing climbing grades, as we will see further on, but that
it is also on a scale which demands an ability to remember and visualize
more than 300 hand and foot moves in their correct sequence (MacLeod
in Nydal 2013, 250). That is without also having to remember the loca-
tion of all the equipment. The ability to visualize three-dimensional con-
figurations of lines, then, is not static, but indeed a dynamic, or moving
‘image’ that can be rotated at will.
Furthermore, MacLeod states: ‘I play moves back in my head so often
I don’t even realize I’m doing it’ (MacLeod in Nydal 2013, 257). It could
be argued that MacLeod’s ability to visualize, and rotate, a three-
dimensional, dynamic configuration of lines in the mind—with a lot of
practice—has become instinctual. At the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, Young had also indicated that the ability to visualize the sequences
of moves could be trained to become instinctual. He explained, ‘He has
only to train his eye to select holds ahead which will allow of a sequence
of harmonic positions; to train his instinct to imagine beforehand what
these positions will be; and to train his body to move from each one of
these positions to the next’ (Young 1920, 145).
The process of learning to climb, then, was threefold: first to train the
eye, second to train the minds-eye, and third to train his body to perform
accordingly. As Young stated, this was the ‘ladder of modern technique’
(Young 1920, 145). MacLeod’s ability to ‘play’ the position of his body
back to himself in his head, both from an internal and an external per-
spective sounds extraordinary, and it is unlikely that Young would have
been able to envisage that an ‘instinct to imagine’ the position of climb-
ers’ hand and footholds would entail anything like the complex spatial
rotation that MacLeod performs in his mind. The rock-climbing abilities
were, during Young’s time, far below the technical standards that exist
today.
Interestingly, Young uses the term ‘position’ three times in the same
sentence, implying a sense of spatial location: a physical as well as a cog-
nitive location. Climbing, then, is a complex puzzle that negotiates spa-
tial positions and is solved through a carefully orchestrated series of
manoeuvres that are both of the eyes, mind and the body simultaneously.
The fact that the space occupied by these locations are described as ‘har-
monic’ suggests that Young must have had a strong awareness that each
of them involved a choreography that had aesthetic value.
Throughout the history of climbing there has been a quest to reach
the limit of human capacity: ‘[t]ime perhaps will show’, Clinton Dent
168 A.-K. Nydal
observes, ‘that the upward limit has assuredly not yet been reached’
(Dent 1892, 89). Just as Dent predicted, increasingly more difficult
climbs began to appear, and the ‘upward limit’ is still as sought after
today as it was then. Diemberger also wrote about this pursuit of climb-
ing more and more difficult routes: ‘once the day dawned when to
climb a peak by the normal route […] failed to satisfy, I had become a
rock-climber […]. Rock—with all the difficulties of extreme climb-
ing—that was the thing: cliffs, ridges, arêtes of rock’ (Diemberger
1999, 62). Climbers are continually searching for new links that allow
them to assemble, what to them, is a route that has aesthetic value. This
quest, together with the whimsical nature of rock, creates an unlimited
number of new lines and the puzzles are ever more difficult and
complex.
Once each spatial problem has been solved they become easier to
understand and other more difficult climbs become more within physical
as well as cognitive reach. Unlike ordinary puzzles where the activity
reaches a natural conclusion once a problem is solved, climbing will
always have more complex problems. Once you have tackled a grade 5a
climb, you tackle a 5b, then a 5c and so on and so forth. MacLeod reached
the limit of documented climbing grades1 with his climb at Dumbarton
Rocks, Scotland, called Rhapsody and graded E11 7a. MacLeod com-
ments: ‘Notes on the grade: E11 7a. Obviously this is a remarkable grade.
It arises mainly from the physical and technical difficulty of the climb. It’s
the hardest link I’ve ever done. […] But it’s also very technical climbing, a
very devious sequence’ (MacLeod 2016a).
If successful, each time MacLeod attempts a harder climb he places a
new grade on the climbing scale. What follows from each new attempt is
increasingly more challenging and therefore also more dangerous climbs.
It could be argued that one of the main attractions of climbing is a sus-
tained aesthetic interest in solving spatial problems both visually,
cognitively as well as physically—and that this is what draws climbers to
attempt increasingly more challenging climbs. These aspects of the puzzle
become increasingly more difficult and thus less likely to be solved.
MacLeod describes this very clearly: ‘my worst fear was realised and the
rope wrapped itself around my leg as I fell, flipping me upside down,
crushing and burning my leg and slamming my back off the wall. I just
managed to pull my head out [of ] the way, if I hadn’t I would be dead’
(MacLeod 2016b).
Conclusion
At its heart, climbing is a physical pursuit with many challenges and we
have seen that it is hard to dissociate it from the pursuit of aesthetic plea-
sure. Principally, everyone has an inherent appreciation of the mountain
as an object that has aesthetic qualities belonging to the mountain itself.
Experienced climbers are additionally able to identify complex linkages
of features on the mountain that are otherwise indistinguishable to the
casual observer and are therefore also able to use this ability to solve the
problems encountered whilst attempting to climb difficult lines. As such
climbers have an aesthetic appreciation of the mountain, and of the activ-
ity of climbing, that is intrinsically linked to the acquisition of knowledge
and experience as well as to the imaginative effort it requires of them.
These combined experiences give the mountain an irresistible aesthetic
value to climbers.
Climbers, then, negotiate difficult lines in physical as well as cognitive
locations simultaneously and it is through mastering them that their aes-
thetic experiences become so highly valued. Their quest to reach the limit
of human capacity, as well as a desire to repeat their experiences, leads
them to constantly look for links that would allow them to create new,
more challenging routes. This results in infinite possibilities of climbing
and spiralling levels of difficulty. The conquest of such difficult lines gives
the climber a sense of achievement and immense satisfaction. In this
short pursuit of the aesthetic value of mountains as seen from a climber’s
perspective, we have seen that the climbing of difficult lines enriches their
understanding about the mountain, and this is an experience that has a
deep cognitive significance that captures and sustains climbers’ aesthetic
interests in the mountain.
This is a significant reason why climbers climb.
170 A.-K. Nydal
Note
1. ‘Limit’ refers here to climbing grades from 2006.
Bibliography
Bonington, C. (1966). I chose to climb. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Dent, C. T. (1892). Mountaineering. London/Bombay: Longmans, Green &
Co.
Diemberger, K. (1999). Omnibus: Summits and secrets: The endless knot, spirits of
the air. London: Bâton Wicks Publications.
Griffin, L. (1998). Valais Alps west. Selected climb. London: Alpine Club.
Hansen, P. (2009). Personal correspondence.
Hill, L. Interview with Kathleen Gasperini. Mountain Zone. http://classic.moun-
tainzone.com/climbing/hill. Accessed 21 Mar 2009.
Jones, O. G. (1897). Rock climbing in the English Lake District. London:
Longmans & Co.
Lunn, A. (1961). Geoffrey Winthrop Young. Alpine Journal, 66(302 and 303),
100–117.
MacLeod, D. (2016a). http://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/page.php?id=198.
Accessed 07 August 2016.
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Accessed 16 Sept 2016.
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Nydal, A-K. (2013). Repertoires of architects and mountaineers. A study of two
professions. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Kent.
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clopedia of philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.
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Stephen, L. (1871). The playground of Europe. London: Longmans, Green & Co.
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9
Untimely Mountains | Entangled Matter
Kim W. Wilson
Introduction
I grew up in one of the many ex-oil-shale mining villages of West Lothian.
The landscape was and still is populated by the remnants of that industry
in the form of several oil-shale waste spoil heaps locally referred to as
bings. As children we were aware that these were not mountains in the
proper definition of the word. However, their vast burnt redness, com-
pletely at odds with the rest of our landscape, secured their place in our
imaginations. Our occasional childhood adventures on the bings were
always tinged with a sense of uneasiness that may have been rooted in
their otherworldly character. Also, the bings resisted us. Each step taken
towards the top would be carried away by the loose shale lamina. It was
surely a task better suited to the quadrupeds we were not. Atop and insu-
lated by its shaley craterous lip the rest of the world fell away, as we
remained bing-held.
K.W. Wilson (*)

Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_9
172 K.W. Wilson
This personal history was the catalyst that drew me back to the bings,
but it was also their particular material qualities and histories that held
my interest as an artist. There were practical reasons for my focus on
Niddry bing. The other waste heaps were now protected, leaving Niddry
as the only possible source of spent oil-shale that I could access. However,
following my first site visit, I quickly realised that there were several qual-
ities that made this bing of particular interest. Niddry bing is constantly
in a state of becoming-as-it-becomes-undone. Almost daily, tonnes of
spent shale are removed. Each visit I make is to a bing re-made. Yet it
retains its atmosphere of ambiguity regarding location in time and place,
continually shifting between the imagined territories of prehistories and
science fiction futures. It is a material source but it is also a
thing-in-itself.
Since 2013 my work as an artist has focused on the oil-shale waste that
is Niddry bing. More recently I have adopted a new materialist method
of enquiry of the bing through sculpture. It is this new materialist
approach that I shall discuss in this chapter, beginning with an outline of
the shale-oil industry and how the bings were formed. I will then give a
brief overview of the areas of New Materialism that are relevant to my
artistic practice. Following on from this I will discuss the relationship
between my work and this new materialist method of enquiry.
he Shale-Oil Industry and the Oil-Shale Waste

T
Bings
The oil-shale of West Lothian is lacustrine in origin, laid down around
360 million years ago and is a sedimentary rock that contains kerogen, a
solid organic matter that when heated releases oil and gases (Ellis 2009,
5; Allix et al. 2011, 4–6; Monaghan 2014, 1). The shale-oil industry was
founded in 1851 near Bathgate, West Lothian, by the Glasgow-born
chemist James Young, in what is considered by some to be the world’s
first commercial-scale oil refinery (Almond Valley Heritage Trust 2010).
It was Young who pioneered a method of extracting mineral oil through
a process of retortion (heating) (Almond Valley Heritage Trust 2010).
9 Untimely Mountains | Entangled Matter 173
The oil-shale was mined, transported to the surface and refinery where
it was crushed and fed into the retorts where it was super-heated. The
released oil vapours were collected in condensers, separated and refined
to obtain the different grades of lighting, motor and lubricating oils and
wax (Knox 2010a, b). The spent oil-shale was then transported to the
bing, adding to the accumulating ‘mountain’ of waste that would eventu-
ally form bings reaching heights of between 9 and 9.5 metres above the
surrounding landscape (Harvie 2005, 6). Gradually oxidising from burnt
blue-grey to a terracotta hue, the bings became steep-sided and flat-
topped, distinctive artificial mountains within the level green arable land
of Scotland’s Central Belt (Harvie 2005, 8).
Initially considered to be of no commercial interest, the spent shale
was eventually used to manufacture bricks and as hardcore for road and
building foundations, which included the access road for the new Forth
bridge crossing (Scottish Oils, Limited 1948, 28 and European
Academies Science Advisory Council 2007, 16). Certainly from the
mid-nineteenth century onwards the bings have been frequented by
walkers, underage drinkers, air-rifle enthusiasts and fly-tippers. Their
steep sides have posed a challenge for bing-baggers, motorbike scram-
blers and those who raced for gala day prizes in the 1940s. Over the
years several bings have become the habitat of local and nationally rare
species of fauna and flora (Harvie 2005, 20–21). Of course Niddry
bing could hardly be classified as a mountain. However, rising as it
does, terracotta-coloured and mesa-like, it continues to loom moun-
tainously over the relatively flat-green countryside of that region. As the
only bing currently being extracted, it is a ‘mountain’ in the process of
unbecoming.
It is to this mountain that I returned as an artist whose practice is
driven by an interest in materials and processes. As Niddry bing slowly
began to edge its way back into my consciousness, I had become increas-
ingly aware of the possibilities of new materialist theory as a method of
artistic enquiry. It seemed appropriate therefore to embark upon a new
body of work that would also allow me to analyse the usefulness of New
Materialism within the context of my own art production.
174 K.W. Wilson
New Materialism
As noted by Bolt, there remains in contemporary art a widespread
approach to making work wherein matter is perceived to be passive and
inert, a means to a conceptual end (2006, 1). In the introduction to her
book Materiality, Petra Lange-Berndt sets out the current state of affairs
concerning the place of matter, materials and materiality in contempo-
rary art,
to address processes of making is still associated with formalism, while

materials are thought of in terms of concrete, direct and inert physicality,
carrying imprinted messages. … For some, to engage with materials still
seems the antithesis of intellectuality, a playground for those not interested
in theory. … Materiality is one of the most contested concepts in contem-
porary art and is often side-lined in critical academic writing. (2015, 12)
New Materialism offers a way of challenging these commonly held

beliefs and assumptions as well as providing a context for my own prac-
tice, the core of which is formed by my interest in materials and pro-
cesses. A new materialist practice of contemporary art challenges the
hylomorphic model of making wherein matter is passive and inert, await-
ing the imposition of preconceived form by humans. In this section I will
give an outline of a selection of the common ideas that unite the various
theorists and practitioners of New Materialism in which I have a particu-
lar interest. While this overview should not be taken as an exhaustive
exploration of what New Materialism is, as addressing the expanse of the
theory this lies beyond the scope of this chapter, it offers insight into the
theoretical foundations of my work and my approach to the mountain-
like forms of the bings.
In terms of approach, New Materialists challenge the persistent view of
matter as that which belongs to the denigrated half of a world that is for-
ever subjected to Cartesian dualism: ideal versus real; culture versus nature;
human versus non-human; and matter versus form. Their aim is not to
reverse the fortunes of these binaries but to seek an understanding of the
world as one that is not bifurcated and, by implication, hierarchical.
Instead New Materialism claims a mutually constitutive and c onstituting
world of materials and (im)material forces that are constantly generating

and productive of the physical-virtual world.
With regards to theoretical foundations, New Materialism is part of
the ‘material turn’, a reorientation towards what we know rather than how
we know about the world (McNeil 2010, 429). Seeking a multiplicity of
ways of thinking about and through matter, it challenges the premise that
meaning and knowledge are created via culture (humans) by way of
impressing itself upon nature or matter (Ingold 2010, 92). Rather, New
Materialism seeks to address the unacknowledged constitutive nature of
matter and redress the situation that has now arisen in which, as noted by
Karen Barad, ‘Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters
[and that] the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter’
(2003, 801).
New Materialism asserts that matter—human; non-human; organic;
inorganic; animate; inanimate; cultural and non-cultural—is a force in
itself rather than a passive substrate for life.
At the core of New Materialism is agential matter. Philosopher and
feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti on the impact of New Materialism
states that, ‘a radically immanent conceptualization of matter necessarily
affirms its ongoing metamorphosis … as it shows an interest in intensive
material processes and the actual forms they can produce’ (Dolphijn and
van der Tuin. 2012, 107).
Consequently, a New Materialist approach is an inherently relational
one. Matter is at once embedded in and generative of a world through
processes that are described by New Materialist practitioners as an entan-
glement, assemblage, a flux and flow of forces and matter from which
things emerge and re-emerge, become and unbecome become (Barad
2003; Bennett 2010; Grosz 2011; Ingold 2010). Matter does not need a
cultural force for it to have agency. New Materialism, therefore, refutes
human exceptionalism that allocates agency, knowledge, meaning, mak-
ing and value solely within the realm of the human.
Matter that is an entanglement of transformations and meanings is
matter that is storied, in the sense that it enfolds and embeds all processes
that it has provoked and been subjected to, be they virtual or physical,
human or non-human. New Materialists Iovino and Oppermann state
that:
176 K.W. Wilson
the stories of matter are everywhere: in the air we breathe, the food we eat,
in the things and beings of this world, within and beyond the human
realm. All matter, in other words, is a ‘storied matter’. It is a material ‘mesh’
of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and nonhuman
players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying
forces. (2014, 1–2)
What are the stories of the oil-shale waste and Niddry bing itself?
Certainly these stories do not begin or end with the spent shale of the
bing. Rather they spiral out, through, under and above. The oil-shale
waste is the residue product of super-heated oil-shale. It is the kerogen
that formed over millions of years of heat and compression. It is the
Carboniferous plants that fell to and rotted on lacustrine beds. It is the oil
retorted to light homes and streets and lubricate engines. It is the bright
clean light that gave safe passage to ships. It is the burnt shale pumped
out at material source, spreading arterial-like as roads and motorways,
re-emerging through the brick-work of towns and villages. It is the thick
plates of oil-shale shearing heads from the bodies of miners. It is the sharp
fragments displaced by foot, wind, rain, wheel, spade, hand, claw, paw,
beak and root. It is the greasy residue dug from finger nails. It is the stains
left on hands. It is material bought and sold. The bing is an industrial
spoil heap. It is the derelict land once designated by civil servants. It is a
1940s gala day race and penny prize (Miller 1942). It is adventures and
trysts. It is dumping ground, drinking ground, eyesore and anomaly. It is
a view to the Forth Road Bridges. It is work and leisure place. It is a new
habitat sought out by fauna and flora. It is art. It is the sign for home.
Storied matter is untimely matter. New Materialist feminist philoso-
pher Elizabeth Grosz1 states that,
Something is untimely, out of its own time, either through its being anach-
ronistic, which is another way of saying that it is not yet used up in its
past-ness, it still has something to offer that remains untapped, its virtual-
ity remains alluring and filled with potential for the present and future.
(2010, 48)
The untimely characterises a New Materialist approach to time, one

that resists its assumed linearity and teleology, that time is always measur-
able, divisible and constantly moving forward. New Materialists consider

this an abstract and structural characterisation of time that is essentially
a human (Western) one (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 66). What
they propose instead is a concept of time that does not encourage the
myth of linearity and inevitable progress, but which ‘shifts the focus on
[to] an open-ended future … to include the affective power of the past
and the present’ (Walker 2014, 53). The untimely is dynamic, unfolding
and generative. It has no linear causal relationships, no predictable move-
ment from past to future and no end point or final state that the past or
present is directed towards. As a non-anthropocentric model of time the
untimely provokes us to consider perspectives that are non-(Western)
human, when humans are yet to be or are no longer. Untimely matter
acknowledges matter’s active participation in the constitution of the pres-
ent and future, that the matter of the past is not in any way deadened by
its past-ness. It enfolds matter that is human, non-human, animate and
inanimate, that which is of human and non-human time (Gil Harris
2009, 16, 17).
The spent shale is untimely. It has been retorted of its oil but it is ʻnot
yet used up in its past-nessʼ, for its used-up-ness does not leave it redun-
dant and stranded in the past (Grosz 2010, 49). It is an accumulation of
material transformations, human and non-human and while it accumu-
lates it also provokes. In its oil-bearing state, it provided heat and fuel and
prompted the birth of the oil-shale mining industry. Villages expanded as
workers flocked to take advantage of the boom. Miners’ rows were illumi-
nated by the refined shale oil as were streets, businesses and homes
throughout the country. The sharp-edged shale tore at miners’ hands, but
still the business of mining shale was cleaner and safer than coal. The first
spurt of wealth funded some of Livingstone’s expeditions in Africa.
Extracting oil from shale eventually became more expensive than the oil
struck in the USA leading to the closure of mines and refineries (Almond
Valley Heritage Trust 2010). Collapsed mine shafts left crater-like dips in
the landscape that were filled with fictions of German bombers and scrap
material for gang-huts. What lay beneath now lay above. Burnt, rising
and oxidising, they seem to blush at their own anomalous looming. Who
needs a sign post when these shaley gatherings signal home.
178 K.W. Wilson
The untimely is that which exists in myriad concurrent states that are
constantly in a state of becoming and unbecoming, each state opening up
other potentialities, a ‘leap into the future … a movement of becoming-
more and becoming other, which involves the orientation to the creation
of the new, to an unknown future, what is no longer recognisable in
terms of the present’ (Grosz 2010, 49).
It is the oil-shale unbecoming to become something other, something
that differs and keeps on differing, becoming as it is unbecoming, so that
it is liquid, solid and gas. It is motorway, architecture, bing and art. It is
fact, fiction, geology and history. It is personal and public.
Putting New Materialism to Work

The relational approach of New Materialism that postulates a world that
is an entanglement, a flux and flow of forces and materials from which
things emerge and re-emerge, become and unbecome, is one that I have
adopted in attempting to put New Materialism to work through my own
practice as an artist. I am interested in materials that bring their own
geologies and (pre)histories. Their own social, biological and industrial
histories of processes and transformation and what, in turn, they have
transformed. Reductive processes such as extraction, drying, compression
and incineration are fundamental to my choices of materials. Making
work becomes a self-entanglement with the materials. The aim is not to
silence these materials and forces but rather for them to be manifest
through and generative of work.
New Materialists Van der Tuin and Dolphijn state that, ‘New
Materialism is something to be put to work’. It is ‘generative’ rather than
‘generated’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 101, 103). They state that
there is a danger of (mis) treating New Materialism as if it were fully
formed and fixed, a body of knowledge to be applied in different contexts
and disciplines. This they believe is tantamount to treating it as if it were
the form-giver to formless inert matter, thus reinforcing the dualisms that
it seeks to challenge. Whatever New Materialism intersects with or cuts
across its aim is not one of negation. Rather, ‘putting New Materialism to
work’ aims at generating something new, something related to but differ-

ent (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 101).
My approach to the oil-shale waste and bing-related research is one
that attempts to put New Materialism to work through the production of
sculpture. It is centred on Niddry bing and is bound up in the bing’s
constant state of becoming-while-it-is-unbecoming, of the site as a whole
but also of the shale waste in particular, its oxidisation, its potential for
crushing, flaking, compressing and mixing. My intervention as an artist
should not be regarded as a means by which the oil-shale waste or Niddry
bing becomes suddenly activated or meaningful. The New Materialist
method of enquiry that I adopt works with and through the oil-shale
waste as that which is already storied and untimely. As a consequence the
art works I produce are generated by and embedded in this untimely and
storied matter.
Working Mew Materialism, sculpture and works on paper through one
another involves the co-constitutive forces of materials and non-materials
research. I give as an example, ablation (Wilson 2015) (see Fig. 9.1).
Fig. 9.1 Wilson, K. W. (2015) ablation (sculpture) Generator Projects, Dundee
180 K.W. Wilson
Ablation was made from oil-shale waste, wool grease, raw silk, petro-
leum jelly and bone oil.
It is not only the sculpture made from these materials exhibited in the
gallery. It is also simultaneously an entanglement of all the processes and
relations, including myself, that it has accumulated along the way. The
millions of years of compression and heat of organic matter. The waxy
kerogen of oil-shale discovered and sought out. The blasting and digging
of miners. The super-heating of retorts. The dry sound of shale waste slid-
ing underfoot as I climb the bing to mine the waste back out of its steep
slopes. Partially retorted shale, creamy with oil and staining my fingers.
The fine laminae of red shale like the friable pages of an old book, graze
hands and press through jeans. The weight of my shale loaded back slow-
ing my pace as the pressure comes to bare on my knees.
The materials are brought to the gallery and the work is made on-site
incorporating all the unknowns of material performances, including my
own. Unfolding and becoming in the space with its own temperature and
light, ablation is enmeshed in and an enmeshment of the human and
non-human, organic and inorganic materials and material forces from a
time before and during human existence. The mixture of silk, wool grease
and petroleum jelly hardens in tubs as the temperature drops. Getting it
out becomes a drawn-out process, the entanglement of temperature and
materials resists extraction and my wrists ache. There is a process of
improvisation, in which the materials and I navigate the work together.
Building from beneath my feet, responding and adjusting as the material
collapses, slides, spreads and shears away.
As part of the bing and spent shale body of work I produced a series of
works on paper. The work choler (see Figs. 9.2 and 9.3) contains almost
all of the same materials as ablation: wool grease; oil-shale waste and bone
oil on isometric paper. As with the sculptural work, choler is an assem-
blage of materials and materials forces virtual and physical: oil-shale;
heat; compression; scouring; smashing; staining; mixing; mining; melt-
ing; sliding; silk; sheep; shearing; bruising; bricks; bodies; weighing;
worms; wool grease; dumping; death; climbing; chaffing; chopping.
Since its production in 2013, choler has kept, ‘working on paper’. The oil
and grease halo has continued to advance across the paper saturating to
transparency, exposing and incorporating the fixings into the visual plane.
Fig. 9.2 Wilson, K. W. (2013) choler (work on paper) Edinburgh Sculpture
Workshop, Edinburgh
182 K.W. Wilson
Fig. 9.3 Wilson, K. W. (2013) choler (work on paper, detail and outline of subse-
quent bleed) Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Edinburgh
The materials in choler exert themselves, entangling the work in other

iterations of itself.
Ablation and choler enfold storied matter. Matter whose stories are geo-
logical, biological, industrial, economic and cultural. They are human
and non-human narratives to which I add to when I am mining, bagging,
crushing, mixing and naming during the process of extracting, processing
and making the works. However, my involvement does not equate with
the insertion of a full stop, nor is it an attempt to silence the ‘voices’ of
the materials but rather to be one voice among many. Even after my
direct involvement ceases the materials themselves continue to story the
work. Their odour conjuring up other times, places and experiences for
those encountering it. The terracotta-hued shale waste continues to dry
and pale. A greasy halo continues to advance.
Conclusion
Niddry bing is an artificial ‘mountain’. It is a mountain that is already in
the process of unbecoming and becoming other: bricks, roads, architec-
ture and art. My New Materialist approach to Niddry bing and the oil-
shale of which it is comprised recognises that matter exerts itself. It is not
activated or made meaningful solely by humans. Rather the bing in its
evolving state is made up of storied and untimely matter whose protago-
nists are geological, animal, botanical, meteorological, chemical and
human. Through the work that I have made I have attempted to extend
this New Materialist approach to my own art practice through sculpture.
By doing so I challenge widely held assumptions and attitudes held by
practitioners and educators within the field of contemporary art, wherein
matter or materials are regarded as the inert stuff awaiting the imposition
of form and meaning by the artist. This raises questions not only with
regard to how art is made and taught but also how it is received and
perceived.
However, the practice of New Materialism has potential far beyond the
scope of contemporary art. A turn towards the material is a turn towards
the ethical for it is only when the matter of matter is addressed that the
boundaries between entities—human and non-human animals, the
184 K.W. Wilson
organic and inorganic, boundaries that are manipulated for the construc-
tion of, or used as a by word for hierarchies—can be dissolved and
dualistic modes of thinking broken down. It is only when we attempt to
imaginatively empathise with the Other, uncovering similarities and dif-
ferences, that we can begin to understand these differences as being non-
hierarchical in nature.
Notes
1. Elizabeth Grosz is Women’s Studies Professor in Trinity College of Arts
and Sciences, Duke University.
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Part 3
Mobility
10
Mountains as a Way of Seeing:
From Mount of Temptation to Mont
Blanc
Veronica della Dora
Climb mountains to see lowlands (Chinese proverb)
Mountains move as we shift our gaze. Yet, mountain encounters have

also shaped and reflected shifting ways of seeing, experiencing, and
representing the world. Not only are mountains the most visible land-
marks in the landscape, they are also privileged vantage points.
Ancient Greeks and Byzantines referred to mountain heights as skopiai
and Romans as speculae, which is ‘look-out places’1 (Tozer 1897, 327).
The Argonauts climbed Mount Dindymon to gain a prospective
understanding of the region through which they were about to travel
(Thalmann 2011, 6–7). Philip the Macedon ascended the highest
This chapter is a revised and adapted version of ‘Mountains and Sight’, in V. della Dora,
Mountain: Nature and Culture (London, 2016).
V.d. Dora (*)

Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_10
190 V.d. Dora
peak of the Haemus range in order to see the lie of the land as he
planned his war against Rome—it was widely believed that this sum-
mit commanded a view over the Danube and the Alps, and both the
Adriatic and the Black seas (Tozer 1897, 313–314). Likewise, Hadrian
ascended Aetna in Sicily and Mount Casius in Syria to observe the
sunrise and obtain a view over a wide swath of country, whereas Atlas,
the legendary ruler of Mauretania, who was also a philosopher, astron-
omer, and mathematician, was said to have climbed up to the highest
summit in his kingdom to gain a prospect of the entire world (Tolias
2011). The view from the mountaintop was an approximation of
divine knowledge, a sort of compromise between the totalizing ‘god’s
eye’ view and the view from the ground of mortals.
The synoptic experience of space is a quintessentially visual experience:
it requires distancing. From antiquity to our days, gazing from a moun-
taintop has been traditionally interpreted as an empowering act—as a
supreme expression of political authority and knowledge. As a metaphor
of omniscience, it is at once divine and demonic; it allows rational mas-
tering and at the same time it causes dangerous vertigo. This tension is
best encapsulated in Matthew’s Gospel, as the devil takes Christ on a lofty
peak and tempts him with a simultaneous view of ‘all the kingdoms of
the Earth and the glory of them’ (Matthew 4:8).
The biblical scene had an enormous and enduring resonance in the
Western imagination. Through the centuries, it has been the subject of
poems, commentaries, and visual representations of sorts. On a painting
by Duccio di Buoninsegna from Siena dating 1308–1311 (Fig. 10.1), for
example, the lofty peak nearly disappears under Christ’s mighty presence.
Eternity, suggested by the gold leaf on the higher part of the composition,
contrasts with the fabulous yet ephemeral-walled cities on the lower part.
Christ is firmly standing on a boulder-like mountain, the rock of faith;
Satan stumbles over his illusory cities. Five-hundred years later, the same
scene assumes very different contours. On an engraving by William
Richard Smith (Fig. 10.2), scenery takes over allegory. Here, Christ and
the devil nearly disappear in the landscape. What is alluring is not the
beauty and richness of the cities but the overpowering cartographic view
from above—and the infinite horizon.
10 Mountains as a Way of Seeing: From Mount of Temptation... 191
Fig. 10.1 Duccio da Buoninsegna, The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain,

1308–1311, Frick Collection
What has happened in between the creation of these two images? This
chapter explores some iconic mountaintop encounters at different times
in Western visual history and how these encounters have changed, or
reflected, shifting ways of perceiving landscape and the world: from the
fourth-century Spanish pilgrim Egeria on Mount Nebo to Horace-
Bénédict de Saussure on Mont Blanc, and beyond. These encounters allow
us to explore three ways of perceiving space and looking at landscape:
topographically, as a sum of features and memory places; geometrically,
through linear perspective; and finally, panoramically, at 360 degrees.
192 V.d. Dora
Fig. 10.2 William Richard Smith, Mount of Temptation, 1829. © Victoria and
Albert Museum, London
Topographies of Memory
Duccio’s painting (Fig. 10.1) is ruled by memory and symbols. The sizes,
locations, and colours of the figures are proportionate to their signifi-
cance in the Bible and to the need to commit them to memory. They do
not respond to the geometrical principles of linear perspective but to the
power of memory. The viewer’s attention is immediately captured by
Christ at the centre of the composition. It subsequently moves to other
individual features: the devil, the angels, the cities, and the boulder-like
mount. This technique, sometimes called ‘psychological perspective’, was
common in Egyptian and Byzantine art but it also, more broadly, reflects
a typically pre-modern topographic way of seeing and experiencing space
and landscape.
Early examples of this way of seeing are found in the pilgrimage

account of Egeria, a Spanish nun who, in AD 384, undertook a pilgrim-
age to the Holy Land. As she moves through the landscape, Egeria is
constantly after elevated vantage points: craggy hills, high cliffs, and
mountain tops. Mountain churches and chapels encourage the use of
biblical summits as panoramic platforms. For example, on the top of
Nebo, the ‘lofty peak’ Moses ascended at the end of his life to behold the
Promised Land (Deut. 32:49–50), local clergymen invite Egeria to walk
around the church and view ‘the places which are described in the Books
of Moses’. From the church door she sees:
‘where the Jordan runs into the Dead Sea, and the place was down below
where we were standing. Then, facing us, we saw Livias on our side of the
Jordan, and Jericho on the far side. … From there you can see most of
Palestine, the Promised Land and everything in the area of Jordan as far as
the eye can see. To our left was the whole country of the Sodomites, includ-
ing Zoar, the only one of the five cities which remain today. … We were
also shown the place where Lot’s wife had her memorial, as you read in the
Bible’ (Wilkinson 2006, 121).
Egeria does not ascend mountains for pure aesthetic pleasure, but to
better grasp Scripture. What matters are the places she has already
encountered in the Bible. From the height of her panoramic platform she
sees a giant topographic map of biblical places unfold under her eyes.
Each location evokes a story, a scriptural passage. Landscape operates as a
memory theatre in which the eye wanders from locus to locus.
Egeria’s descriptions are addressed to her sisters who remained home in
Spain. As she explains, the mental visualization of those places shall enable
them to better memorize Scripture. This way of seeing rules most pre-
modern cartography (Mangani 2006). For example, the Madaba map, a
sixth-century index-mosaic on the floor of the Basilica of Saint George in
Jordan, presented the faithful with a bird’s-eye view of the Holy Land in the
form of pictorial vignettes with historical explanations (Fig. 10.3). As with
Egeria, Madaba parishioners would associate biblical events to each of the
coloured loci memoriae portrayed at their feet: a bird’s-eye view of Jerusalem
with its Constantinian holy landmarks; the Dead Sea traversed by two large
194 V.d. Dora
Fig. 10.3 The Madaba map, Jordan, sixth century, Alamy
boats; ‘the desert of Sinai, where the manna came’; ‘Ephron where the Lord
went’; and so on (Gold 1958, 50–71; see also Dilke 1987, 261–262).
A similar structure ruled Western medieval mappae mundi. While
operating at a different scale, these Christianised images of the earth, like-
wise, worked through topological and mnemonic principles, rather than
through the mathematical principles of modern cartography (Woodward
1987, 359–368). They were not about the actual appearance of the land
or about distances between places. Rather, they were tools for memoriz-
ing biblical events through spatial visualization. Standard features ranged,
for example, from the Red Sea painted in red and crossed by the Israelites
to the Garden of Eden with the four rivers and Adam and Eve.
As with the world of the Madaba map and mappae mundi, pre-modern
landscape was a container of loci, or memorable features. It was also a
container of symbols and allegories—Satan’s illusory cities and ‘the rock
of faith’ in Duccio’s painting, for example. One of the most evocative
‘symbolic’ mountaintop views nonetheless comes from the Byzantine
world, from the Life of Saint Basil the Younger, a holy man who lived in
Constantinople in the first half of the tenth century. Amidst his many
miracles, Basil enabled his disciple and biographer Gregory to access the
realm of afterlife and explore its complex topographies in nocturnal

visions. In one of them, Gregory is guided to the top of a lofty mountain
on which is a watchtower. From this privileged observatory, Gregory is
given to witness nothing less than the Second Coming.
Everything underneath flees. Scenes of salvation and damnation parade
one after the other under his feet, as in a tableaux vivant. Landscape con-
tinually transforms. The drama culminates in the creation of a new earth,
an earth upon which ‘there were no mountains rising up nor descending
chasms nor level plains, but that entire earth appeared in a uniform state
and condition from one end to the other, and there was no concealed
place in it, so one might liken it to a threshing floor in summer’ (Sullivan
et al. 2014, 455–457). The surface of this new earth is like the blank
surface of a map awaiting to be inscribed by the cartographer. From his
elevated position, Gregory is given the privilege to watch this process of
inscription. From its smooth, translucent surface wondrous plants spring
out one after the other, disclosing their sweetest aromas and beautiful
features. Quickly, this renewed earth becomes a giant Garden of Eden:
Its surface was white like milk or snow just fallen from the clouds and a
golden gleaming mist emanated from it and rose up to the air of heaven,
filling it with ineffable sweet aroma; and it was all glorified. And still the
Lord gazed upon all the surface of the earth, and immediately there sprang
upon it grass white as snow. Behold, there were upon it plants beautiful
and gorgeous in form providing leafy shade and fine fruit, some plants
growing fiery red, some gleaming like snow, some blooming with flowers
of many colours. … I was totally astonished and astounded at the beauty
of the vegetation, I became dizzy and trembled. (Sullivan et al. 2014,
455–457)
Unlike Egeria who focuses on the biblical past, Gregory’s visionary

gaze is directed to the future. As with Egeria’s account, however, Gregory’s
account presents a complex topography of salvation. In both instances,
the goal is the spiritual edification of readers, and, in both instances, this
is achieved through vivid icons, through memorable place-events sur-
veyed from above, from a mountaintop.
If faith and topographies of memory underpin these accounts, curios-
ity and aesthetic gratification motivate the most famous mountain climb
196 V.d. Dora
in Western intellectual history—Petrarch’s ascent of Mont Ventoux,

which, at 1912 metres, is the highest peak in Provence. On April 26,
1336, the Italian poet decided to climb this mountain, which had been
haunting his imagination for many years. He wrote to Dionigi di Borgo
San Sepolcro, an Augustinian monk at the University of Paris:
I have lived in this region from infancy. Consequently the mountain,

which is visible from a great distance, was ever before my eyes, and I con-
ceived the plan of some time doing what I have at last accomplished to-day.
The idea took hold upon me with especial force when, in re-reading Livy’s
History of Rome, yesterday, I happened upon the place where Philip of
Macedon, the same who waged war against the Romans, ascended Mount
Haemus in Thessaly, from whose summit he was able, it is said, to see two
seas, the Adriatic and the Euxine. (Petrarch 1970, 308)
As Petrarch confesses to the monk, his only motivation was ‘the wish
to see what so great an elevation had to offer’(1970, 308). The climb
nevertheless soon turns into an allegory of his life journey, as the young-
ster repeatedly tries to find an easier way to the top, but each time it
reveals lengthier and more straining paths than the direct path chosen by
his brother. Disgusted by the intricacy of his detours, Petrarch summons
himself that ‘thou must perforce either climb the steeper path [of life],
under the burden of tasks foolishly deferred, to its blessed culmination,
or lie down in the valley of thy sins, and (I shudder to think of it!), if the
shadow of death overtake thee, spend an eternal night amid constant tor-
ments’ (Petrarch 1970, 311–313).
His slow progress to the top, dependent ‘upon a failing body weighed
down by heavy members’, makes the poet long for traversing ‘that other
road’ in spirit, the road to eternity (Petrarch 1970, 313–314). His brother,
a priest, is (spiritually) lighter and makes it to the top more quickly.
Petrarch eventually rejoins him and reaches the highest part of the moun-
tain, ‘one peak, the highest of all, the country people call Sonny, why, I
do not know’(Petrarch 1970, 313–314). The ‘great sweep of view’ unfold-
ing before him, as combined with the ‘unaccustomed quality of the air’,
initially causes a sense of vertigo. ‘I stood like one dazed. I beheld the
clouds under our feet, and what I had read of Athos and Olympus seemed
less incredible as I myself witnessed the same things from a mountain of

less fame’ (Petrarch 1970, 313–314).
However, as his gaze turns south-east, to Italy, the poet, once again,
moves from external to inner contemplation and recalls the years he has
left behind his boyhood studies. The mountain top offers him a bird’s-eye
view not only of the surrounding area but also of his life itself.
The Alps, rugged and snow-capped, seemed to rise close by, although they
were really at a great distance; … I sighed, I must confess, for the skies of
Italy, which I beheld rather with my mind than with my eyes. An inex-
pressible longing came over me to see once more my friend and my coun-
try. … Thus I turned over the last ten years in my mind, and then, fixing
my anxious gaze on the future … I rejoiced in my progress, mourned my
weaknesses, and commiserated the universal instability of human conduct.
(Petrarch 1970, 314–316)
As if awakened from sleep, Petrarch suddenly recalls the initial purpose

of his ascent. Having cast homesickness and lovesickness aside, he thus
turns his gaze to the west and launches into a detailed exploration of the
panorama. As passions and anxieties dissipate and his organism adjusts to
the high altitude, the landscape acquires crisper contours. He is able to
identify the bay of Marseilles and the mountains of the region about Lyons
(though these remain generic mountains, rather than named peaks).
His reconnaissance completed, Petrarch pulls out the pocket a copy of
Saint Augustine’s Confessions and decides to read at random. His eye falls
on the following passage: ‘And men go about to wonder at the heights of
the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of
rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but
themselves they consider not’(Petrarch 1970, 317). At this point, bodily
vision is once again superseded by spiritual insight. Ashamed, the young
man turns back to the valley. ‘I had seen enough of the mountain. I
turned my inward eye upon myself ’ (Petrarch 1970, 317).
Petrarch’s ascent has been taken as emblematic of a novel sensibility.
Some commentators identified the Italian poet as the ‘the first modern
man’ insofar that his original motivation was to ‘look at nature itself ’
(Clark 1949). His gaze surveying the landscape has thus been tradition-
198 V.d. Dora
ally interpreted as a grantor of truth and accuracy. Other commentators

have taken the episode as a threshold between two eras and attitudes, that
is, modern empirical knowledge and Renaissance humanism on the one
hand, and medieval devout introspection and humility on the other
(Schama 1995, 421).
Either way, Petrarch’s ascent is an allegorical as much as physical feat.
While Egeria climbed Nebo and other biblical peaks after Moses and
used sight to validate biblical truths and better memorize them, Petrarch
is caught between Philip the Macedon’s thirst for terrestrial omniscience
and Saint Augustine’s acknowledgement of the limit, or rather deceitful-
ness, of terrestrial things. Ultimately, Petrarch’s venture remains a t ypically
Christian inner struggle followed by epiphany and redemption (the
reading of Saint Augustine’s passage). On the mountaintop the poet over-
comes homesickness, lovesickness, and melancholy in the same way
Christ resisted Satan’s allures. The mountaintop enables Petrarch to put
his life ‘into perspective’ (just as Gregory did in his vision). Yet, Mount
Temptation unconsciously casts its long shadow on Mt Ventoux. Like
Duccio’s painting, Petrarch’s account is still dominated by topoi. It is still
lingering between medieval and modern sensibilities.
Landscape and Linear Perspective

As opposed to Duccio’s painting, on Smith’s engraving (Fig. 10.2) land-
scape is no longer an ensemble of topoi, but a scenery mastered by a
mono-focal gaze from a fixed point of view. The eye is guided through the
vertiginous rocky platform to Christ and the devil, where visual axes con-
verge. At the same time the eye is also pushed to the horizon. Landscape
is articulated through such tension—between proximity and infinity.
According to the Italian geographer Franco Farinelli, the modern idea
of landscape was born only when mountains were measured and the
maximum horizon defined—that is, shortly before Smith’s engraving was
printed (Farinelli 2003, 41). This way of perceiving and representing
landscape, however, has much deeper roots. Comprehensive bird’s-eye
views, as if witnessed from a mountain or a hilltop, are common features
in Renaissance painting. Leonardo da Vinci has been especially credited
for advancing aerial imagination. Leonardo took advantage of the hilly

topography of central Italy and conducted observations on and from
mountains (Cosgrove and Fox 2010, 16–18). Landscapes witnessed from
above form the background of several of his paintings, including the
Mona Lisa (Fig. 10.4). Other times, high-oblique views of hazy peaks
loom on distant horizons through windows, porches, or natural open-
ings, as in the Virgin of the Rocks. These enframed views remind the
beholder of the wider world, of the harmony and totality of creation.
Fig. 10.4 Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503–1514, Louvre

200 V.d. Dora
In the sixteenth century, aerial views became artistic subjects ‘per se’.
The so-called cosmographic paintings set the observer in an elevated
position (usually on a highest mountaintop or cliff); they offered a vast
panorama of impossibly distant places—like Christ on Mount
Temptation. Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, for exam-
ple, brings both Crete and Cyprus within visual reach. In Albrecht
Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander at Issus (Fig. 10.5) landscape assumes an
even vaster extent. The whole Eastern Mediterranean becomes the stage
for the global drama of the defeat of the Persian army in 334 BC. Dazzling
numbers of armed soldiers pour out of walled cities and encampments
framed by distant lands and seas: the Levantine coast, Cyprus, the Isthmus
of Suez, the Nile Delta, and the Red Sea stretching to the horizon.
Terrestrial drama extends into the sky, as the shape of a lonely peak reflects
in the cosmic swirl of clouds (Schama 1995, 426). The eye is raised to a
position where ‘the site of battle, the curving earth and the planetary bod-
ies are all brought within its scope’ (Cosgrove and Fox 2010, 128).
As vantage points, mountains operate as liminal spaces, spaces setting
the observer between elemental and celestial spheres. Foreshadowing the
Copernican challenge to geo-centrism, they offer to every observer the
command over space that was once reserved to gods and kings; at the
same time, they also cause exhilaration and dizziness. The apotheosis of
such cosmographic vision is marked by Milton’s literary representation of
Christ’s temptation on the Mount, probably the most famous and evoca-
tive of all renditions of the biblical passage. The reader of Paradise Regained
(1671) is taken with Jesus up to the top of the lofty peak. Here the reader
is offered a dazzling view of the plain below and of the entire cosmos akin
to Altdorfer’s epic panorama. Past and present glories converge in a single
moment. Landscapes impossible for the mortal eye to see are brought
together in a single bird’s-eye view. From the mountaintop the reader
beholds with Christ:
Assyria, and her empire’s ancient bounds,

Araxes and the Caspian lake; thence on
As far as Indus east, Euphrates west,
And oft beyond;
to south the Persian bay,
And, inaccessible, the Arabian drouth. (Milton 1894, 270–274)
Fig. 10.5 Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander at Issus, 1529, Alte
Pinakothek, Munich Royal
202 V.d. Dora
A succession of famous cities parade under the gaze of Christ and the
reader: Nineveh, Babylon, Persepolis, Bactra, Hecatompylos, Susa,
Seleucia, Nisibis, Artaxata, Teredon, Ctesiphon—and the list continues.
Armies and soldiers come next, outpouring from city gates in the same
‘numberless numbers’ as in Altdorfer’s painting.
Marjorie-Hope Nicolson linked Milton’s cosmic perspective to the
development of a modern ‘aesthetics of the infinite’, of a new sensibility
dictated by the ‘opening’ of the closed Aristotelian cosmos and the
discovery of new worlds and new spaces through the lens of Galileo’s
telescope. Here, however, Milton uses Galileo’s glasses for terrestrial
rather than outer space observation; he transfers vastness from God and
interstellar space to terrestrial mountains (Nicolson 1997, 273–274).
Modernity and the Panoramic View

In the seventeenth century, views from above remained for the most, epic
flights of the human imagination. Throughout the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, European mountains were generally despised as unproduc-
tive and peripheral places of danger to be carefully avoided. (In this sense
Petrarch’s ascent was a notable exception.) German mountains were
infested by witches and demons. Until the eighteenth century, the Swiss
Alps were deemed to be inhabited by dragons. Johann Jakob Scheuchzer,
a Zurich professor of physics, compiled a catalogue of Alpine specimens.
The best ones, he wrote, were to be found in the cantons of the Grisons:
‘that land’, he wrote, ‘is so mountainous and so well provided with caves
that it would be odd not to find dragons there’ (Bernbaum 1997, 123).
It was only in the nineteenth century that the Alps started to be system-
atically climbed and measured.
At this point, the view from the mountaintop undergoes a further
transformation; it becomes a view constructed around and for a sovereign
subject standing alone and ‘first’ on the summit (Hansen 2013). Horace-
Bénédict de Saussure, a professor of natural philosophy from Geneva, is
usually credited for this new perception of the Alps. In 1787 he success-
fully ascended Mont Blanc, the highest Alpine peak. The summit had
already been gained by two locals the previous year. Saussure, however,
was the first to undertake the climb for the specific purpose of scientific
observation. From cursed wilderness, he transformed the peak into an
object of science.
Unlike Egeria’s eye wandering through biblical memory places, or
Petrarch’s, satisfied with a basic reconnaissance, Saussure’s eye was after
order in nature. His was a holistic, totalizing view. On the top of Mont
Blanc, he could enjoy the grand spectacle which lay under his eyes:
What I saw and saw with the greatest clearness, was the whole collection,
the whole group of these high peaks of which I had so long desired to know
the organization. I could not believe my eyes; it seemed to me that it must
be a dream when I beheld beneath my feet those majestic peaks. … I seized
on their bearing one to another, their connection, their structure; and one
glance removed all those doubts which years of labour had not been able to
clear up. (de Saussure 1876, 17)
Ultimately, it was the naturalist’s omniscient view from the mountain-

top that enabled the aesthetic appreciation of Western Europe’s high
places. This way of seeing nonetheless soon ended up embracing other
peaks on other continents—and most notably thanks to Alexander von
Humboldt.
Between 1799 and 1804 the Prussian naturalist travelled extensively in
South America carrying with him more than three dozen scientific instru-
ments. In the Andes he envisaged a vast observatory enclosing the totality
of the cosmos. Like Saussure on Mont Blanc, on Chimborazo Humboldt
found, ‘all the phenomena that the surface of our planet and the sur-
rounding atmosphere present to the observer’; it was on Mont Blanc that
he physically saw ‘the general results of five years in the tropics’ (Dettelbach
1996, 268). The majestic mountain, which was then believed to be the
highest in the world, condensed huge expanses of territory into a single
vertical ascent. In a perpendicular rise of 4800 metres, the various cli-
mates succeed one another, layered one on top of the next like strata,
stage by stage, like the vegetable zones, whose succession they limit, and
there the observer may readily trace the laws that regulate the diminution
of heat, as they stand indelibly inscribed on the rocky walls and abrupt
declivities of the Cordilleras (Humboldt 1997, 33).
204 V.d. Dora
Humboldt laboured under the Goethean notion of the harmony of

nature. He was after unity in diversity. He was not interested in individ-
ual plant species, but in their distribution and in the invisible principles
behind it. The sensual interfusion with the mountain and its elements
helped the scientist achieve an intimate, spiritual contact with the cosmos
and its hidden energies:
When the human mind first attempts to subject to its control the world of
physical phenomena, and strives by meditative contemplation to penetrate
the rich luxuriance of living nature and the mingled web of free and
restricted natural forces, man feels himself raised to a height from whence,
as he embraces the vast horizon, individual things blend together in varied
groups, and appear as if shrouded in a vapory veil. (Humboldt 1997, 79)
Humboldt’s views from mountain tops are always characterized by a

haze on the horizon, by a progressive loss of clearness and transparency as
the distance increases. Landscape is a threshold. It is a space of possibility.
It is the meeting point between the present and what has yet to come.
Landscape allows Humboldt to mediate between the local scale and the
cosmos, to grasp the hidden forces that animate the earth.
His view from above is the view the devil presented to Goethe’s Faust
as he promised him the power to command the energies of the cosmos. It
is also the view Faust eventually enjoys from the top of his artificial hill
created by human labour. From this height Faust, the prophet of modern
science and development, controls his new world in its entirety, a world
he has eventually brought into being through mega projects of land rec-
lamation, through vast irrigation networks, through canals, dams, and
urban planning (Berman 1988, 61). Hazy distant horizons stir his
unbound appetite for power and suggest the possibility for further
development. For Faust, Humboldt, and Saussure, the world has become
a vast spectacle constructed for and around the scientist:
My gaze revealing, under the sun,

A view of everything I’ve done,
Overseeing, as the eye falls on it,
A masterpiece of the human spirit,
Forging with intelligence,

A wider human residence. (Faust, vv)
This way of seeing is best represented by the fisheye view. Eight years
before his legendary ascent, during his geological explorations, Saussure
sketched the panorama he had enjoyed on the summit of Mont Bouët
(3096 metres) and commissioned Marc-Théodore Bourrit to produce
one such view of the surrounding mountains (Fig. 10.6). The fisheye
view conveys a sense of unity and panoptic control; it sets the observer
at the very centre. ‘All the objects’, Saussure writes, ‘are drawn in per-
spective from this centre, as they would present themselves to an eye
situ
ated at the same centre which successfully made a tour of the
Fig. 10.6 Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Marc-Théodore Bourrit, Circular View

of the Mountains from the Summit of the Bouët, 1779. Beinecke Library, Yale
206 V.d. Dora
horizon’ (Hansen 2013, 58). In the nineteenth century fisheye views

transcended science; they became part of a new popular visual culture.
For example, fisheye views were used as maps for orientation in the pan-
oramic rotundas of the great European capitals.
Rotundas were windowless circular structures in which the viewer
could admire a vast 360-degree-panoramic painting from a platform set at
the centre of the building (Fig. 10.7). The visitor’s field of vision was cut
by a coverage above the platform and by the platform itself. This produced
the illusion of total immersion in an actual landscape, to the extent that
visits to panoramas were sold as surrogates of travel. Visitors could freely
wander on the platform and take advantage of ‘guides’ who would point
at the various features in the landscape (Comment 1999). Von Humboldt
himself encouraged the construction of public rotundas ‘containing alter-
nating pictures of landscapes of different geographical latitudes and from
different zones of elevation’, which he believed would help the growth of
a popular knowledge of ‘the works of creation, and an appreciation of
their exalted grandeur’ (Humboldt 1997, 98). Like Humboldt and Faust’s
Fig. 10.7 Fulton, Description explicative du Panorama ou Tableau circulaire et

sans borne ou manière de dessiner, peindre et exhiber un tableau circulaire,
Brevet April 16, 1799. Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle, Paris
global visions and Saussure’s mountaintop views, panoramas portrayed

the world as an ordered totality centred on the individual.
Ironically, the Alps became familiar to the public mainly thanks to
these new visual technologies. Lay citizens could comfortably explore the
inaccessible high places of Europe in urban rotundas. They could also
enjoy alpine fisheye views on fine porcelain dishes and other visual
mementoes (Anderson 2012, 155–183). More specifically, from 1852 to
1858 Londoners could experience the ascent of Mont Blanc through
Albert Smith’s popular show in Piccadilly, as we have seen in Jonathan
Pitches’ chapter. The British satirist had himself climbed the peak in 1851
with a retinue of guides comparable to Saussure’s expedition; according
to the article ‘Mont Blanc’ in the March 18, 1852, issue of the Hannibal
Journal, however, instead of scientific equipment they carried extraordi-
nary provisions of alcohol: 66 bottles of vin ordinaire, 6 bottles of
Bordeaux, 10 bottles of Saint George, 15 of Saint Jean, 10 of cognac, and
2 of champagne. The show, an ‘extravaganza of Alpine kitsch’ (Schama
1995, 88), featured dioramas of the mountain rolling across the back of
the stage and commented by Smith. By 1858 Smith’s audience outnum-
bered the hundreds of thousands.
So mountains moved. And as they moved, increasing numbers of peo-
ple moved to the mountains. Between 1853 and 1858 Mont Blanc was
ascended 88 times. At some point, the editors of the Punch sarcastically
reported that the route to its top was to be carpeted (Colley 2010, 2). Not
only did visual technologies made mountains available to the European
urban bourgeoisie, but the view from the mountaintop transformed the
world into an exhibition; an exhibition centred on a spectator paradoxi-
cally immersed and at the same time detached from it as in the pan-
orama—the ultimate paradox of modernity.
Conclusions: Other Ways of Seeing

There are different ways to look at a mountain: from ground level, from
its slopes, from above its top, and from its very top. Likewise, there are
different reasons for gazing at the lie of the land from a mountaintop:
military reconnaissance, pious contemplation, scientific observation,
208 V.d. Dora
planning, mastering, or simply mere curiosity. There are, however, also

different ways of looking at the landscape. The perspectival view from the
mountaintop has been taken as a metaphor of modernity and its many
contradictions. It is the one way of seeing we have come to take for
granted. However, we often forget it is just one way of looking at land-
scape—and at the world.
According to the Scottish novelist and poet Nan Shepherd, writing
on the Cairngorms in the 1940s, mountains allow us to see things in
new ways. Yet, one has to train and discipline the senses, including the
eye. As she takes her readers along dark ridges and crystal lochs,
Shepherd challenges them to pry through surfaces, to venture into hid-
den crevasses, to pause over details, to fully immerse in the landscape
and all its elements. Her poetic journeys are a perpetual act of discov-
ery. Rather than pursuing the modern dream of omniscience, or pas-
sively surrendering to the impossibility of mastering the sublime,
Shepherd takes the mountain experience as a creative act, an infinite act
of learning, an enriching but always unfolding process. ‘Knowing [the
mountain] is endless. The thing to be known grows with the knowing’
(Shepherd 2011, 59).
The view from above entrances Shepherd. From the height of the
mountaintop, the world seems ‘to fall away all round, as though I have
come to its edge and were about to walk over. And far off, on a low hori-
zon, the high mountains’ (Shepherd 2011, 46). Unlike Saussure, how-
ever, it is not lucidity of image and open horizons that excite her most,
but the snowflake’s geometrical shapes, the quartz crystal, the patterns of
stamen and petal, the crack in the rock, the deep recess, the ascent of the
inside of a cloud, the haze hiding and revealing new shapes, a walk in the
dark, ‘oddly enough, reveal[ing] new knowledge about a familiar place’,
or the illusions of the eye caused by elevation—in other words, the hid-
den sides of landscape (Shepherd 2011, 16).
The end of a climb meant for me always the opening of a spacious view
over the world: that was the moment of glory. But to toil upward, feel the
gradient slacken and the top approach, as one does at the end of the
Etchachan ascent, and then find no spaciousness of reward, but an inte-
rior—that astounded me. And what an interior! The boulder-strewn plain,
the silent shining loch, the black overhang of its precipice, the drop to
Loch Avon ad the soaring barricade of Cain Gorm beyond, and on every
side … towering mountain walls. (Shepherd 2011, 16)
The poet’s gaze looks into and through the mountain. As Robert
MacFarlane recently noted, Shepherd provides a powerful corrective to
our contemporary sensorial disengagement from nature. ‘More and
more of us come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the
bodily experience of being in the world—its spaces, textures, sounds,
smells and habits—as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies
we absorb. We are literally losing touch, becoming disembodied’
(MacFarlane 2011, xxxi). By reactivating this link and navigating us
through her ‘living mountains’, Shepherd reminds us of the creative
potential of the eye, rather than of its ordering powers. ‘The eye brings
infinity into my vision. … It is the eye that discovers the mystery of
light, … the endless changes the earth itself undergoes under changing
lights’ (Shepherd 2011, 98).
Shepherd’s mobile engagement with mountains is reminiscent of
Chinese landscape painting. While Western perspectival painting and
mechanized photography require a fixed viewer gazing from an elevated
vantage point, traditional Chinese landscape painters emphasize the
necessity of moving through the mountains. In learning to paint, wrote
eleventh-century artist Kuo Hsi, ‘you must go in person to the country-
side to discover it. The significant aspects of the landscape will then be
apparent’ (Casey 2002, 106–109). Wandering allows the artist to absorb
the essence of the landscape. And in turn, it makes the viewer’s eye wan-
der through the verticalities of the painted mountains.
Yet, today the perspectival view from the mountaintop seems to domi-
nate the world. Scenic spots and pathways, panoramic restaurants and
webcams punctuate European peaks. Nowadays the top of Mount of
Temptation is accessible from Jericho by cable car. The view from the
mountaintop is no longer a demonic temptation, nor is it the privilege of
divinities, monarchs, and scientists. It is a commodity for mass consump-
tion; it is a view to be framed by the lens of the camera and taken home,
SMSed to friends, posted on Facebook, or circulated on blogs. Because
mountains move. And today they move faster than ever.
210 V.d. Dora
Note
1. The Greek poet Simonides (556–468 BC), for instance, speaks of the
summits of Cithaeron as ‘lonely watch-towers’, whereas Strabo
(64 BC–24 AD) provides descriptions of an actual belvedere built on one
of the summits of Mount Tmolus in Lydia (Western Anatolia).
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11
Representing the Landscape
of the Sierra Nevada (Granada):
A ‘Translated’ Mountain of Reception
of the Nineteenth-Century Alpine
Geographical Imaginations
Carlos Cornejo-Nieto
Introduction
The Sierra Nevada is a Mediterranean high mountain massif forming part
of the Betic-Rif arc and located close to the city of Granada, in Andalusia.
It contains the highest summits of the Iberian Peninsula, reaching a maxi-
mum height of 3482 metres above sea level at the Mulhacen peak, fol-
lowed by the Veleta peak (3392 metres) and the Alcazaba (3371 metres).
It is thus the southernmost high mountain range in Europe, and the sec-
ond highest after the Alps (Platt et al. 2013; Muñoz Jiménez and Sanz
Herráiz 1995). Some of the most remarkable features of this mountain
massif are its unusual elevation between the surrounding valleys and culti-
vated plains, its alpine landscapes over 3000 metres height, its snow cover
despite being only 35 kilometres far from the Mediterranean Sea, and its
C. Cornejo-Nieto (*)
Independent Researcher, Madrid, Spain

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_11
214 C. Cornejo-Nieto
great biodiversity (Jiménez Olivencia 1991). All of these characteristics,

along with its unusual morphology as a European high mountain massif,
provoke an astonishing visual contrast with respect to its entire natural
environment (Fig. 11.1).
The Sierra Nevada has had important historical relations between its
geographical features and human cultural activities, as well as other
European mountain chains such as the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Caucasus,
and the Greek summits (Joutard 1986; Walter 1989; Broc 1991; Briffaud
1994; Debarbieux 1995; Schama 1996; Reichler 2002; Beattie 2006;
Frolova 2006; Della Dora 2011). Historical ways of engaging with the
Betic mountain have generated a wide range of iconographic, narrative,
and rhetorical materials, which have, in turn, conveyed the topographical
knowledge, the popular interpretation, the scientific research, the roman-
tic imagination, and the mountaineering activity of Sierra Nevada
throughout modern history (Cornejo Nieto 2015a, b). All of these modes
Fig. 11.1 Bird’s eye view of Granada, the irrigated land of the Vega, and the
snow-capped Sierra Nevada in the background. Source: Google
11 Representing the Landscape of the Sierra Nevada (Granada)... 215
of approaching the massif have emerged as a result of the materiality of

the mountain itself, and of its visual relation with the entire landscape of
the city of Granada and its large cultivated plain, called the Vega.
Stirred by the powerful visions of Orientalism, nineteenth-century
British travellers transformed the ancient Islamic city of Granada into
one of the main destinations of the journey to the Iberian Peninsula.
But the images shaped by orientalist tastes were not the only ones that
represented the travel to Granada. The proximity of the Sierra Nevada
to the city also made the massif an important natural site of attraction
for foreign visitors. Owing to the outstanding influx of Romantic
travellers, the Sierra soon emerged as a geographical repository of cul-
tural forms. Travellers’ geographical imaginations came to materialize
in a huge array of renderings and narrations, conveyed by cultural
devices such as travel accounts, print albums, and engraving collec-
tions. However, the metaphors and contents which shaped these
imaginaries and the global contexts from which they emerged have
not been discussed yet from a global perspective within recent debates
in Cultural Geography.
This chapter focuses on one of these geographical imaginations of the
Sierra Nevada through the study of several images and narratives created
by the British travellers during the nineteenth century. The aim is to
place them within the context of cultural knowledge of Western European
high mountains, and, thus, to set out a comparative dialogue between
the meanings of the Sierra’s representations and those images shaped by
the way of envisioning the Alpine landscapes within British culture. The
chapter will show how the aesthetic models and the conventional meta-
phors of mountain scenery, previously employed in the making of the
symbolic acquaintance of the Alps, circulated in time and space through
diverse cultural artefacts, being thereby reappropriated in the visions of
the local landscape formed by Granada, the Sierra, and the Vega. The
aesthetic criteria of the sublime, the romantic Gothic revival, and a
mythical narrative of mountains—elements which had defined the canon
image of the Alpine world—were reinterpreted onto and facing the sum-
mits of Sierra Nevada, forming an Alpine collective imagination in
southern Europe.
eographical Imaginations and Geographies

G
of Reception
The concept of geographical imaginations—also named ‘imaginative’ or
‘imagined geographies’, and ‘spatial consciousness’—has been defined by
David Harvey as a series of practices and processes which ‘enable the
individual to recognize the role of space and place in his own biography,
[and] to relate to the spaces he sees around him’, thus allowing him to
identify ‘the relationship which exists between him and his […] terri-
tory’, as well as ‘to use space creatively and to appreciate the meaning of
the spatial forms created by others’ (Harvey 2005, 212). Geographical
imaginations function, as the cultural geographer Stephen Daniels has
put it, as symbolic tools which make it possible to ‘bring material and
mental worlds into closer conjunction’ by merging ‘the mythical and the
mundane’ (Daniels 2011, 182).
Academic attention to geographical imaginations has generally led to
an essential ‘ocularcentrism’ in the study of landscape within Cultural
Geography (Driver 1995, 2003; Rose 2003). Thus, landscape has been
conceptualized as a symbolic formation which is produced by the speci-
ficities of a particular visual regime and the power of a social group, both
exerted over nature (Cosgrove 1984, 1985; Daniels and Cosgrove 1988).
This visual approach to landscape has nonetheless been challenged from
different perspectives within different disciplines. Kenneth Olwig (1996,
2002) has called into question the idea of landscape in terms of represen-
tation, claiming instead the construction of a social space where a strong
political sense of community (the ‘body politic’) might be developed in a
territory. Likewise, landscapes have been considered ‘as arenas of practice’
(Cresswell 2003, 270), which must be explored through the perspective
of ‘human embodiment’ so as to find its meaning in ‘practical activity
[…] rooted in an essential engagement with the material environment’
(Ingold 1993, 157; see also Bender 2002). Recent studies, including
Christos Kakalis’ chapter in this volume, have unified such perspectives
with performativities occurring in the ‘more-than-human, more-than-
textual, multisensual worlds’ (Lorimer 2005, 83) focusing on the ‘proces-
sual sensibilities’ mediated by ‘the relations between “selves” and
“landscapes”’; within ‘practices of voyaging and dwelling’ (Wylie 2002,

251). In any case, either through images and metaphors or through prac-
tices and performatives, imaginative geographies permit us to ‘apprehend
and create nature as meaningful’ (Cosgrove 1990, 354).
Spatial consciousness of territory moves spatially and chronologically
through cultural devices and ‘forms of media and instrumentation’
(Daniels 2011, 185). The models of representation concerning the
European high mountain also circulate in time and space over collective
imaginations. This transmission of ideas, visions, and cultures provides a
good opportunity to place the study of the Sierra Nevada within the
framework of circulation of knowledge, drawing on Edward Said’s essay
‘Traveling landscapes’. Said considered the role of journey as the main
communication channel of theories and knowledge, both scientific and
symbolic. He stated that ‘ideas and theories’, ‘cultural and intellectual
life’, ‘travel from situation to situation, from one period to another’, tak-
ing ‘the form of acknowledge or unconscious influence, creative borrow-
ing, or wholesale appropriation’ (Said 1991, 226). After Said, several
studies have examined the consequences of transmission of discourses
through cultural printed forms and translations, discussing how ideas are
transformed as they travel around (Jardine et al. 1995; Beer 1996; Rupke
2000). Circulation of knowledge means, according to James Secord
(2004, 661), ‘thinking always about every text, image, action, and object
as the trace of an act of communication, represented by conventions of
transmission’.
Within Geography, David Livingstone (1995, 2005) has re-thought
this theory in spatial terms, focusing on what he calls ‘geographies of
reception’ or ‘geographies of reading’. He has explored how knowledge is
situated by highlighting ‘the significance of location in hermeneutic
encounters’ of texts, images, and theories with readers and viewers
(Livingstone 2005, 395, 392). As Livingstone has put it, the meanings of
ideas, discourses and narratives, once turned into printed forms, ‘varies
from place to place’, ‘tak[ing] shape in response to spatial forces at every
scale’ (2003, 4). Thus, the making of ideas is geographically constituted
and spatially conditioned. In their mobility, they are continuously shared,
‘disarticulated’, transformed, and re-shaped, for ‘spaces both enable and
constrain discourse’ (Livingstone 2003, 7). Other geographers have also
discussed the transmission of ideas and narratives through cultural devices

and moving practices. Derek Gregory and James Duncan have pointed
out how the action of travel writing becomes an ‘act of translation’. In
narrating and representing the ‘other natures’ of unknown landscapes,
travellers adopt an established compendium of spatial norms, as those
referring to high mountain spaces, thus ‘“translat[ing]” one place into
another’ and producing a ‘tense “space in-between”’ (Duncan and
Gregory 2010, 4; see also Gilroy 2000; Wylie 2007), an idea that is devel-
oped in Emily Goetsch’s chapter in this volume. Finally, Veronica della
Dora has investigated the mobility of popular landscape images by
remarking their ‘materiality, performance and circulation as a medium of
exchange between places’, and, consequently, between societies’ spatial
consciousness (Della Dora 2007, 288).
Against this theoretical background, this chapter will analyze the cir-
culation of the aesthetic and symbolic knowledge of mountain landscapes
in nineteenth-century Europe through the case study of the Sierra
Nevada, illustrating how the massif became a focus of geographical recep-
tion and reinterpretation of the Alpine imaginative geographies. First, the
chapter will briefly review the main keys of the aesthetic discourses and
recurrent metaphors that shaped the canonical image of the Alpine world
by presenting the contents which contributed to defining the concept of
the sublime, the Gothic revival, and the idea of Arcadia. The discussion
will then turn to address how such narratives and aesthetic models were
combined to shape the conventional representations of the entire land-
scape of Granada, formed by the main medieval landmark of the city (the
Alhambra), the snow-capped summits of the Sierra Nevada, and the large
meadow of the Vega.
haotic, Gothic, and Arcadian Visions

C
of the Alps
The historical genealogies of the metaphors which shaped the Alpine geo-
graphical imaginations in British culture were complex. On the one hand,
the new geological theories appeared at the dawn of the Enlightenment,
and the English aesthetic theory conceived in the pre-Romantic period.

Both were unified by the sense of the sublime, which prompted the mak-
ing of new symbolic ways of relating to wild nature. On the other hand,
Romantic sensibilities were found in the classical idea of Arcadia, an
Edenic connotation of nature which carved out an idealized image of
Alpine mountain landscapes.
The sense of the sublime was one of the main rhetorics that moulded
the collective imaginations of mountains. However, it was not an exclusive
issue of the aesthetical rhetoric. Marjorie Hope Nicolson has shown that,
before being established by the eighteenth-century liberal arts, the ele-
ments and metaphors which fashioned the ‘rhetorical Sublime’ had previ-
ously been formulated by diverse scientific disciplines through the idea of
the ‘natural Sublime’ (Nicolson 1963, 30, n. 39). Theology, Astronomy,
Geology, and Philosophy set up the terms, the languages, and the images
which would characterize the category of the sublime in the height of
modernity. Discoveries in Astronomy and Earth Sciences, reflected in
Literature, changed the attitude towards mountains. The fantastic scenes
of Johannes Kepler’s Somnium sive Astronomia lunaris, published in 1634,
presented a ‘forbidding spectacle of vast towering [lunar] mountains, pro-
found chasms and abysses’ (cited in Nicolson 1963, 132). Likewise, the
geological treatise Geographia Generalis by Bernhardus Varenius, first pub-
lished in England in 1650, became a literary model among pre-Romantic
English poets, such as John Milton and James Thomson, who echoed the
explanations of the rising of mountains of the Moon, and the infinite
panoramas of the unknown mountains of the Earth.
Kepler’s and Milton’s imaginaries became examples for the writers of
the Romantic generation. Attracted, on the one hand, by those sublime
scenes, and, on the other hand, by the writings of expeditions to the
peaks and glaciers of the Alps—especially those by Horace-Benedict de
Saussure, Marc-Théodore Bourrit, William Coxe, and William
Windham—a whole generation of British poets set out on the journey to
Chamonix to see, in situ, Mont Blanc. Their descriptions contained the
same metaphors which had formed the fantastic and chaotic landscapes
from Milton’s Paradise Lost and Kepler’s Astronomia lunaris. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, for example, extolled the ‘icy caverns’ and ‘jagged rocks’
of the chaotic massif of Mont Blanc (Coleridge 1969, 377–379), while
Percy Bysshe Shelley emphasized the powerful force radiating from the
‘unearthly forms’ and ‘unfathomable deeps’ of the highest summit in the
Alps (Shelley 2002, 98).
In the Earth Sciences of the second half of the seventeenth century,
mountains played an essential role in the scientific theories on the forma-
tion of landforms and oceans. Transformations of the Earth surface and
the origin of mountain ranges were explained by means of several meta-
phors, using the recurrent images of chaos and ruins. In this regard,
Thomas Burnet’s book Telluris Theoria Sacra, first published in English in
1684, was fundamental. According to Burnet, mountains rose by the col-
lapse of the original ‘smooth’ surface of the Earth (Burnet 1697, 47). This
orogeny then provoked the ‘Chaos’, whose consequences resulted in the
creation of oceans and mountain chains. Mountains were thus seen as
‘vast bodies thrown together in confusion’, ‘heaps of Stones and Rubbish’,
the ‘ruins of a broken world’ (Burnet 1697, 95, 96, 100; see also Nicolson
1963, 200). Burnet’s ideas were very influential in the making of the aes-
thetic theory of the ‘rhetorical Sublime’, as well as in descriptions of the
Alps’ wild nature (Ogden 1947; Schama 1996). From the starting point
of those imaginaries, conveyed by poetry and science, the eighteenth-
century philosophers Joseph Addison and Edmund Burke formulated for
the first time the theoretical and aesthetic considerations of the sense of
the sublime. In ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’, written by Addison in
1712, and A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful, published by Burke in 1759, they highlighted the
agreeable horror that vast, dark, and wild natural spaces should provoke
in the viewer or the traveller.
Concurrently to the categorization of the sublime, the Gothic Revival
also echoed the haunting atmospheres of ruins and rugged landscapes,
and the terror stirred by the wild nature of the high mountain. These
environments were presented in Gothic novels and travel accounts as
wild landscapes which made the readers move virtually to remote histori-
cal times. Thereby, sublime landscapes of irregular peaks and chasms were
completed by medieval architectures (Fig. 11.2). According to Maggie
Kilgour, the taste for the Gothic, exemplified by architectural features
and ruins such as cathedrals, castles, towers, and abbeys, was ‘symptomatic
of a nostalgia for the past which idealises the medieval world as one of
Fig. 11.2 Landscape of Bellinzona. Lithography. Source: William Beattie, La Suisse

pittoresque: ornée de vues dessinées spécialement pour cet ouvrage. London,
1836. Courtesy of Viatimages/Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire – Lausanne
organic wholeness’(Kilgour 1995, 11). Besides, these medieval remains

were connected to the fascination of the violent formation and the wild
structure of mountains, that is, the ‘ruins of a broken world’ (Kilgour
1995; Natta-Soleri 1998).
The imagined geographies of the Alps also recovered a mythical vision
of nature. Alpine valleys embodied the new Eden of bourgeois societies
in industrialized Europe. As Claude Reichler has pointed out (2002,
10–12), mountain geographies occupied an increasingly important place
in European culture to the extent that its canon image, epitomized by
chasms and peaks, came to represent a contrast to that of the verdant
valleys. Hence the metaphor of the locus amoenus was recalled in opposi-
tion to the concept of topos horribilis. The Arcadian connotations of the
Alpine locus amoenus responded to the ‘dream about the state of Nature,
about the preserved happiness of a primeval life’ which was projected

onto wild nature by modern societies (Reichler 2002, 10). In classical
times, the term locus amoenus denoted an idealized space of Edenic remi-
niscences. It was conceptualized as a secluded location (in geographical
and metaphorical terms) in which time did not seem to run, and in
which the realization of the Golden Age, represented by the archetype of
Arcadia, might be possible (Schama 1996, 531–538; see also Samson
2012). In eighteenth-century England, this landscape archetype was
envisioned as ‘a means of escaping imaginatively from the pressures of
urban or courtly life into a simpler world’ (Andrews 1989, 5). That idyl-
lic place symbolized Arcadia, a ‘mythical time set in an eternal spring
when man lived in harmony within his society and with the natural
environment’ (Andrews 1989, 5).
The poem Die Alpen by Albrecht von Haller, first published in 1729,
and well known in all Europe after its French edition in 1732, was the
foundational work which set the Edenic sense of the Alpine mountain in
the collective imaginations. Its success ensured the circulation of an
Alpine locus amoenus over the continent. Such a mythical interpretation
of mountains presented an archetypal image of Alpine scenery formed by
the ‘opposed’ elements of climate and vegetation ‘gathered in one site’
(Joutard 1986, 84). Alpine valleys were thus conceptualized by European
elite as the new natural spaces which harboured the Classical Arcadia,
nourishing the mountain myth of the legendary Golden Age (Raffestin
2001, 17).
ublime Summits, Gothic Ruins, and Arcadian

S
Landscapes in the Visions of the Sierra Nevada
During the nineteenth century, British travellers discovered other geogra-
phies apart from the traditional routes of the Grand Tour, other places
which evoked the chasms, the peaks, and the valleys of the Alps. The
Iberian Peninsula came to be one of the most visited lands among these
new destinations. It emerged as an exceptional place in which travellers
could put into practice the pleasures of the imagination moulded by
the sublime, the Gothic, and the mythical. The Alpine geographical
imaginations thus circulated in time and space, being culturally transmit-

ted to the Peninsula, and particularly reactivated in those mountainous
regions with great landscape diversity.
The ancient Kingdom of Granada appeared as one of the richest areas
from a geographical perspective. It represented the quintessence of the
British aesthetic categories. Due to the spectacular geographical location
of the city (in a setting formed by the contrast between the plain of the
Vega and the Sierra Nevada), and to the imposing presence of the
Alhambra (erected just on the Sierra’s wooded foothills), Granada, the
plain and the Sierra had the material elements which had configured the
sublime and the Edenic, while the architectural remains of the city
enhanced the potential of such categories through the recovering of the
medieval revival. The geographical and visual structure of this landscape
enabled the English travellers to envision the Granada’s mountains and
its environment through the already familiar Alpine metaphors.
The way of envisioning the Sierra Nevada through the metaphors of
the chaos and the sublime became evident in the summits’ climbing. In
their expeditions to the Betic high mountain, travellers shaped an Alpine
conceptualization of the massif. One of the first travellers who narrated
his ascent of the Sierra (namely to the Veleta Peak) was Robert Semple in
A Second Journey in Spain, in the Spring of 1809. Its climbing was
described by the sequence of conventional images which had previously
marked out the accounts of expeditions to the Alps. According to the
traveller, ‘by degrees the Sierra assumed a grander form, the ridges
became loftier, sharper, and more distinct; the precipices darker and
more profound’ (Semple 1809, 183). As he was reaching more altitude,
he recalled the geographical elements which generally took part of the
Alpine landscapes. Once passed the plain, he found himself ‘in the
bosom of the Sierra, among wild mountains, chasms, torrents, preci-
pices, and rocks’ (Semple 1809, 184). The Alpine verticality was thus
lived in Sierra Nevada through the relocation of foreign imaginative
geographies.
The Alpine imaginations continued to circulate through the most
famous travel account of the time, Richard Ford’s A Hand-Book for
Travellers in Spain and Readers at Home, published in 1845. ‘The Alpine
range of the Alpujarras is grand beyond conception, and is the
Switzerland of Spain’, he wrote, as he likewise claimed that ‘the lover of

Alpine scenery should by all means ascend the Sierra Nevada’ (Ford 1845,
359, 395). During his ascent, Ford employed the chaos analogy by stress-
ing the confused appearance of several spots of the expedition, such as the
Dornajo, described as an ‘Alpine jumble of rocks’ (Ford 1845, 395). As a
good connoisseur of the English literature, and perhaps due to his previ-
ous journey to the Alps, his narration of the ascent of the Veleta Peak
used many terms referred to the Alpine world, offering an image of the
Sierra close to the agreeable terror:
The Picacho is a small platform over a yawning precipice. Now we are

raised above the earth, which, with all its glories, lies like an opened map at
our feet. Now the eye travels over the infinite space. […] The cold sublim-
ity of these silent eternal snows is fully felt on the very pinnacle of the Alps,
which stands out in friendless state, isolated like a despot, and too elevated
to have anything in common with aught below. (Ford 1845, 396)
William George Clark visited Granada in 1849. Before setting off on

his journey to Spain, he had already indicated his intention of getting
into the Sierra when he ‘first unrolled the map of Spain at home’: ‘there
was one portion of [my future tour] which, above all, attracted my imagi-
nation—the district lying between the Sierra Nevada and the
Mediterranean’ (Clark 1850, 139). Further, he deliberately expressed his
‘great passion for hill-climbing’ (Clark 1850, 154). Just as Ford, he knew
well the English poetry and travel literature of the time. He had read the
oeuvre by those authors who set out on the journey to Chamonix in
search of the Mont Blanc. In his account, he actually confessed that ‘this
passion has since been fostered by Wordsworth’ (Clark 1850, 154). The
sublime and chaotic visions of the mountain also appeared in Clark’s nar-
ration, determined by the Alpine sceneries with which he had become
acquainted through literature. As he was ascending the Sierra, ‘the cold
grew more and more intense’, and the mountain ‘presented to the eye a
vast black mass’ (Clark 1850, 158). The summits landscape emerged with
a marked chaotic appearance, ‘where Nature seemed to have carted her
rubbish’ (Clark 1850, 158).
The transmission of the Alpine sublime to the Sierra Nevada was not
only made possible through the ascent of its summits. The visual relation
between the massif and the ruins of the Islamic fortress of the Alhambra
also brought about the reactivation of the sublime in the landscape of
Granada. The Hispanist traveller Henry David Inglis emphasized this
connection in his book Spain in 1830. Inglis stressed the visual harmony
of the Islamic building and the Sierra in the background, describing the
scenery in medieval terms, and even identifying the architectural ele-
ments with the summit line of the massif. Far from being ‘a few isolated
ruins’, the architectures consisted of ‘ranges of palaces, and castles, and
towers, […] rising above and stretching beyond one another, […] and
almost vying in grandeur with the gigantic range of the snowy Sierra that
towers above them’ (Inglis 1831, II, 218). This visual dialogue was well
exemplified by the engraving The Sierra Nevada from the Alhambra
(Fig. 11.3). Published in the album Alhambra 1827 by T. H. S. Bucknall
Estcourt, the plate underscored the Alpine appearance of the Sierra,
Fig. 11.3 T. H. S. Bucknall Estcourt. The Sierra Nevada from the Alhambra, 1833.
W. Westall, engraver. Lithography. Source: T. H. S. Bucknall Estcourt, Alhambra/
T.H.S.E. London, 1832–1833. Courtesy of Archivo del Patronato de la Alhambra y
Generalife, Granada
whose imaginary summits were shown behind an evocative medieval site

which was represented by the ruins of the Alhambra’s towers and gates
(Bucknall Estcourt 1832). The English traveller seemed to place the
Alpine imaginations in Granada through its archetypal elements: the
medieval ruins and the craggy mountains.
The Alhambra was considered a Gothic building by the British theo-
rists of the time. Christopher Wren introduced in 1750 a new theory on
the origin of the Gothic style. He claimed that the late medieval architec-
ture was connected to Islamic art by means of the Saracen origin of pointed
arch, introduced in Europe by the Crusaders, and later perfected by
Christians through the Gothic style (Raquejo 1990, 41–42). In addition,
the bad state of preservation of the Alhambra’s rooms, walls, and, in gen-
eral, of the whole area of the building, allowed the evocation of the world
of ruins which had been so attractive for British culture (see also Raquejo
1986; Hoffmeister 1990; Saglia 2010). In renderings, the distortion of the
fortress’s external parts was the clearest evidence of the transmission of the
sublime Gothic to Granada. This was the case of David Roberts’ drawings,
engraved on steel plates for the popular Robert Jennings’ Landscape
Annuals. The plates paradigmatically illustrated the sublime interpretation
of the landscape of Granada, the Alhambra, and the Sierra. Images like
The Alhambra from the Albaycin did not only present a distortion of the
outer relief of the building, but also a distorted view of the entire natural
environment, in which the Sierra Nevada was depicted as a mountain of
exaggerated height and verticality (Fig. 11.4). The ‘Gothic’ fortress
appeared perfectly intertwined in a geographical frame of Alpine connota-
tions, and was even identified with the mountain itself:
On emerging from the hills, […] the old Moorish capital is seen in the
distance, and more conspicuously the ruddy light of its Vermilion Towers,
high overhung by the range of the snow-clad Sierra. The sight of the famed
Alhambra […] impresses the soul with deep and mournful feelings […]. A
fortress of palaces, its walls bristling with castellated forts, embrace the
entire crest of the hill which commands the city, forming part of the grand
Sierra Nevada, a chain of mountains perpetually covered with snow. […]
Granada, the beloved city of this vast mountain-fortress, lay at its feet.
(Roscoe and Roberts 1835, 3, n. †)
Fig. 11.4 David Roberts, The Alhambra from the Albaycin. 1834. E. Goodman,
etcher. Steel engraving. Source: T. Roscoe and D. Roberts, Jennings’ Landscape
Annual for 1835, or, Tourist in Spain Commencing with Granada. London, 1835.
Courtesy of Archivo del Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife, Granada
In the Landscape Annual’s plates, the landscape formed by the Alhambra

and the Sierra Nevada was offered to the reader as a magnificent scenery
governed by several aesthetic rules which were widely assimilated by
British popular visual culture. Roberts endowed the visions of the ‘other’
with familiarity, transcribing the elements of the Alpine geographical
imaginations to the new travel destination. With the readaptation of
these imaginaries to Granada, the landscape of the Sierra Nevada was
given an outstanding spectacularization of Alpine type, complemented
with the Gothic appearance of the Alhambra, and legitimized by the
medieval reminiscences of the ancient Islamic kingdom.
The Alpine conceptualization of the landscape of Granada and the
Sierra Nevada also included the vast plain of the Vega. In this sense, the
idea of the modern Arcadia, which had nourished the Alpine geographi-
cal imaginations, also travelled to the Iberia Peninsula. Granada’s Vega
has traditionally been a field of exceptional fertility for irrigated land due
to the proximity of the Sierra. In this sense, the massif has always func-
tioned, as Ford stated, as ‘a perpetual Alembic of fertilizing water’ for the
fields of the meadow (1845, 359). Its irrigated landscape provoked a
strong impression on all the British travellers. In their travel accounts,
they often pointed out the geographical connection between the Sierra
and the Vega. The traveller William Jacob noticed that the ‘melted snow
on the Sierra Nevada forms continual streams, which are most copious in
the summer, when they are particularly necessary to refresh the parched
land; and it is to this circumstance that the productive powers of the soil
of the Vega may be chiefly traced’ (Jacob 1811, 299), while John Leycester
Adolphus conceived the massif as ‘the parent of all the waters which
refresh the gardens and the plain’ (Adolphus 1858, 181–182).
The lush appearance of the Vega’s farming landscape at that time
acquired a mythical meaning in the travellers’ imaginations. Their
descriptions usually compared the plain with a garden, an orchard, and
even paradise as the result of the good irrigation system managed by the
Arabs during the Islamic times. It thus became a spatial repository of the
Edenic perception of the close mountain scenery. Through the evocation
of the Vega as a vast garden of Islamic reminiscences, the meadow turned
into an anachronistic locus amoenus, and the Sierra Nevada, conceived as
the natural creator of that space, was part of it. The Edenic connotations
of the locus amoenus stemmed from the idea of paradise. This term came
from the ancient Persian, whose word pairidaēza referred to an enclosed
circular piece of land of Royal property, so that the term was generally
applied to the royal gardens (Samson 2012, 7). If the classical locus amoe-
nus was enclosed by walls or gates, the ‘garden’ of Granada also appeared,
in British travellers’ eyes, fenced within natural walls, which were repre-
sented by the surrounding mountains, especially by the Sierra Nevada as
the highest of all of them.
The traveller Sir John Carr envisioned the landscape of Granada in that
way in his Descriptive Travels in the Southern and Eastern Parts of Spain
and the Balearic Isles, in the Year 1809. When entering ‘the vast and mag-
nificent plain, […] variegated with farms, meadow-fields, rivers, forests,
woods, and country-houses’, he soon noticed that it was ‘bounded by
chains of mountains covered with vineyards, orange, citron, olive, mul-
berry, and fig-trees’ (Carr 1811, 163–164). In the background, he wrote,
the Sierra Nevada rose, ‘whose summits, covered with eternal snows, pre-
sented a brilliant contrast to the prodigal display of all tints of verdure
which nature had assumed below’. The entire landscape presented,
according to the traveller, ‘an expanded scene of luxuriance and opulence,
rarely to be beheld’ (Carr 1811, 163–164). Likewise, Inglis echoed the
Arcadian interpretation of the Vega. According to his vision, the meadow,
‘bounded on the south-east, the east, and north-east, by a semi-circular
range of high mountains called the Sierra Nevada’, was ‘covered with
perpetual verdure, with grain of every description, with gardens, with
olive plantations, and with orange groves’ (Inglis 1831, II, 220).
The metaphor of Arcadia was specially conveyed in the Spanish Papers
by Washington Irving. In his conceptualization of Granada from the
Alhambra’s towers, he eloquently merged the search for an anachronistic
paradise and his interest in history. His visions were defined by the
appropriation of the previous geographical imaginations and their relo-
cation in the context of Granada Islamic history. In entering the ‘vast and
beautiful plain, interspersed with villages, adorned with groves and gar-
dens, watered by winding rivers, and surrounded by lofty mountains’,
the writer reflected on its beauty in the past (Irving 1881, I, 112). The
Vega, he wrote, was ‘destined to be for ages the favorite abode of the
Moslems’: ‘When the arab conquerors beheld this delicious vega’—Irving
stated—, ‘they were lost in admiration; for it seemed as if the Prophet
had given them a paradise on earth, as reward for their services in his
case’ (1881, I, 112).
onclusions: The Sierra Nevada as a Translated

C
Mountain of Reception
As ideas and theories travel, aesthetic models and cultural myths also
circulate in time and space over societies’ imagined geographies, thus
constituting a moving symbolic knowledge. Collective imaginations
which shape the meanings of geographical space are also transmitted,
generating what Della Dora calls a ‘geography of landscape reception’, a
continuous mobility of the symbolic formation of landscape (2007,
288–290). In light of Livingstone’s ‘geographies of reading’ (2005), this
chapter has shown how the landscape formed by Granada, Sierra Nevada
and the Vega emerged as an appropriate space for the reinterpretation of
the nineteenth-century patterns of representation of European mountain
landscape. From the Central Alps to the Mediterranean massif of Sierra
Nevada, the Alpine geographical imaginations travelled through different
cultural devices, establishing a foreign way of seeing the Sierra and its
entire environment, and turning the massif into a mountain of reception
of the cultural archetype of the Alpine landscape. Sublime, chaotic,
Gothic, and Arcadian visions and narratives of the Alps found in Sierra
Nevada an ideal ‘other’ space where to be relocated and reinterpreted.
What consequences may be drawn from the circulation of this imagi-
nary? In addition to certain ideals of European landscape—shaped by
‘genres of aesthetics such as the picturesque, the pastoral and the sub-
lime’—being used to ‘characterise, appropriate and judge non-European
scenes’, the mountain landscape canon formed by the gaze of the ‘centre’
of the continent (in this case, in the Alps by British culture) was also used
in the ‘periphery’ (the Iberian Peninsula) as a means of ‘understanding,
evaluating, inhabiting and making knowable’ other types of alien geogra-
phies (Wylie 2007, 124, original emphasis). In this way, visions of the
Sierra Nevada responded to an ‘act of translation’ of ‘one place into
another’, ideas which also emerge in Emily Goetsch’s chapter. This trans-
lation aimed to present the unfamiliar landscape of the Sierra as a ‘legible
space whose cultural inscriptions [and also geographical features] could
be deciphered by the educated reader’ (Duncan and Gregory 2010, 4,
115). Romantic travel to Granada and the Sierra Nevada was configured
as a sophisticated ‘hermeneutic project’ waiting for the reader’s (and vir-
tual traveller’s) interpretation to operate in the field of culture (Duncan
and Gregory 2010, 115).
Travellers’ ways of seeing, subjected to the previous Alpine geographical
imaginations, transformed the landscape of the Sierra Nevada into an
astonishing sight. British travellers then represented Granada’s mountain as
an object of desire intended to be visually consumed. The cultural transla-
tion of the Sierra’s landscape by travel accounts entailed a ‘“staging” of par-
ticular places’ and views which were categorized according to a certain
‘hierarchy of cultural significance’ (Duncan and Gregory 2010, 116). In the
case of Granada, such a hierarchy was given by the meaning of its most vis-
ible Orientalist landmarks. Hence, the landscape of the Sierra Nevada was
appreciated by British visual culture as an attractive natural scenery comple-
menting the medievalist vision of the Islamic fortress of the Alhambra.
This translation of the ‘other’ triggered a de-contextualization of the
specificities of the Sierra Nevada. The foreign cultural appropriation of
the ancient Kingdom of Granada established an evocative image of the
entire landscape formed by the city, the Sierra and the Vega, which was
offered to the viewer and the reader as a palimpsest of what the traveller
Henry David Inglis described as ‘thousands of associations, half reality,
half adventure’ (Inglis 1831, II, 218–219). At the same time, the foreign
imaginative geographies, ‘translated’ by British travellers, contributed to
their disregarding of the historical particularities and geographical fea-
tures of the local territory. Their way of approaching the ‘other’ nature of
Granada entailed a cultural covering, both narrative and iconographic.
Accordingly, this ‘act of translation’ produced a ‘space in-between’ in
which local geographies turned into a distorted object to be visually con-
sumed depending on the British elite’s ‘landscape tastes’ (Duncan and
Gregory 2010, 2, 4; Wylie 2007, 133–134).
The landscape of Granada, with the Alhambra and the snow-capped
Sierra Nevada in the background, remains an icon today. Its image still
circulates in different ways by means of illustrated tourism magazines,
postcards, websites and photographs, nourishing current travellers’ imag-
inations for the search of Alpine summits close to the sunny city, plenty
of ancient Islamic features and souvenirs.
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12
‘I Lift Up My Eyes to the Hills …’
George Pattison
Introduction
The main purpose of this chapter is to initiate a comparison between John
Ruskin and Martin Heidegger. They are, in many respects, seemingly
too dissimilar to merit any comparison since each plausibly instantiates
precisely the features that make dialogue between British and Germanic
thought so often a dialogue of the deaf. Ruskin, whilst no crude empiri-
cist, builds up his arguments by observation and comparison, Heidegger
develops a vast meta-narrative that reaches back into the remote origins
of Western philosophy and presents itself as a ‘History of Being’. In terms
of their concrete interests, Ruskin wrote as a student of art and of the
history of art, whilst Heidegger’s main (though, as we shall see, not sole)
focus was on the foundational texts of the philosophical tradition. At
the same time, Ruskin’s political thought led him to a practical com-
mitment to ameliorating the lives of the new industrial working-classes
G. Pattison (*)
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_12
238 G. Pattison
whilst Heidegger’s eulogizing of the peasant life of the Black Forest seems
linked to his (albeit temporary) embrace of National Socialism.
Nevertheless, for all their differences (and these few comments are
merely indicative) there are also good reasons to look at them together.
In their respective contexts, they are amongst the principal inheritors of
European Romanticism. Wordsworth is amongst the most quoted
sources in Ruskin’s Modern Painters and, although the connection is
ignored by Ruskin, not only Coleridge but also Wordsworth has been
shown to have had significant affinities with the philosophy of German
Romanticism (see Hirsch 1960) that is the background of a major ele-
ment in Heidegger’s thought. At the same time (and like Romanticism
itself ) they are both marked by a deeply conflicted relation to Christianity
and to the Biblical sources of Christian thought. Furthermore, although
Ruskin pursued a constructive response to the effects of industrializa-
tion and urbanization, he, no less than Heidegger, was alarmed by the
ways in which these processes were degrading the human experience of
the natural environment and traditional ways of relating to it. When
Ruskin writes in the Preface to The Queen of the Air of the degradation
of the Alpine scenery that he had, by 1869, known for 35 years, lament-
ing the deterioration of the light, the air, and the waters of Lake Geneva
(Ruskin 1904, viii–x), he is not just cataloguing the material impact of
industrialization but alerting his readers to an epochal change in the
whole relation of human beings to their world. In such passages he is
not far from the kind of view developed by Heidegger in meditating
upon the deeper differences at play in the relationship between a wooden
bridge over a river and the installation of a modern hydro-electric tur-
bine on that same river (Heidegger 1977, 15–16).1 Both are intending
to push us towards a deeper questioning of the losses brought about by
these changes and both privilege both art and a certain recovery of the
early Greek spirit as a means of making good what has been lost or dam-
aged. In Ruskin’s case that is further embedded, for much of his career,
in the explicit invocation of Christian and biblical categories. In such
passages, both are exceptional examples of what might be called anti-
modern modernism, and both merit consideration as foundational
thinkers—in their respective contexts—of contemporary ecological
thinking.
12 ‘I Lift Up My Eyes to the Hills …’ 239
There are many points at which such a comparative study might begin.
In choosing to focus on their respective uses of mountain-imagery, I am
taking a theme that is expressly developed by Ruskin and indirectly by
Heidegger since, in his case, it is the rivers, primarily the Rhine and
Danube, that flow down from their Alpine sources that are the main
point of concentration. However, since for both of them the ‘meaning’ of
mountains is intertwined with and becomes manifest in their function as
a source of the rivers in whose valleys and along whose banks human civi-
lization develops, this difference is largely relative. It is in the relationship
between mountains and rivers that what we might call ‘the truth’ of
mountains becomes apparent.
Here, as elsewhere in their writings, both are influenced by biblical
mountain-imagery. Again this is more explicit in the case of Ruskin and
less so in that of Heidegger, for whom this influence is mediated by, prin-
cipally, the poetry of Hölderlin, whose poetic thought fuses Greek,
Christian, and natural imagery in evoking the calling and destiny of the
poet and of the peoples he addresses. For both the mountain becomes a
privileged site of divine revelation, whether of the biblical God or, in the
case of Heidegger, the less definite ‘gods’ that appear repeatedly in his
later thought. But, again, differences do not negate convergences, and
each, in his way, illustrates the transformative reception of the Bible in
modern culture.
This chapter will therefore begin with some comments on mountain-
imagery in the Bible before looking at Heidegger and Ruskin and moving
to some preliminary and tentative conclusions focussed specifically on
how their thought, each in its own way, reflects its biblical inheritance.
Biblical Mountains
That mountains suggest spiritual values or experiences remains a feature
of modern attitudes. Even now that the ages of faith have passed, the
landscape that reveals itself when we lift up our eyes to the hills gives a
different perspective on the human world, or on our human place in the
world, from the limited view allowed for by the preoccupations of lowland
life. Still today we seemingly instinctively understand why a Wordsworth,
240 G. Pattison
feeling that ‘the world is too much with us’, would turn away to a land-
scape of hills, lakes, and waterfalls. Of course, oceans, deserts, jungles,
and other remote places far from the madding crowd (or just a corner of
ordinary countryside) may also serve the function of getting away from it
all and re-ordering our perspective on life, but mountains not only offer
the prospect of distance, they also suggest powerful ideas of elevation, of
rising above the cares that, we too often feel, drag us down. In this regard,
they seem to have a particular affinity with religious imagery that, as we
have seen, is richly seamed with images and metaphors of height and
elevation, ideas which are also discussed in Veronica Della Dora’s chapter.
In the wake of Romanticism, New Age spiritualities and Western appro-
priations of, for example Tibetan traditions, invite us to return to the
cosmic mountains of world mythologies and perhaps encourage us to see
the biblical ‘hills’ in such a mythological perspective. The much-publi-
cized episode of a British tourist sentenced in 2015 in Malaysia for dis-
honouring a sacred mountain and, as some believed, bringing about a
subsequent earthquake, found many in the West taking the side of those
defending traditional beliefs. We may have lost our own holy mountains,
but we are nostalgic for the power they represent.2
If a certain veneration of mountains remains intelligible to the post-
Christian West, it is no surprise that mountains play a prominent role in
the Bible. In the Hebrew Bible it is on a mountain that Moses is called to
lead his people to freedom in the promised land (Exodus 3), it is on a
mountain that God reveals the law his people are to obey (Exodus 19ff.),
and it is on a mountain, Mount Zion, that God chooses to make his
dwelling-place on earth (e.g., Psalm 87). It was on Mount Horeb that the
prophet Elijah, fleeing for his life, encountered God not in the storm or
tempest (as Moses had done), but in the ‘still, small voice’ (1 Kings
19.12). It was to a mountain, Mount Moriah, that Abraham was sum-
moned in order to sacrifice his son Isaac—a sacrifice averted by the last-
moment substitute of a ram (Genesis 22). The New Testament has Jesus
preaching on a mountain (Matthew 5f.), transfigured on a mountain
(Mark 9), crucified on a hill ‘outside the city wall’, and ascending from a
mountain (at least in Christian iconography—the biblical text does not spec-
ify that it was a mountain). When the psalmist sings ‘I lift up my eyes to the
hills from whence cometh my help’ (Psalm 121), he is therefore looking
towards the place that, in the biblical world, is in a special way the abode
of God, the Eternal. Following these biblical pointers, mountain-imagery
has pervaded Christian accounts of the spiritual life, accounts in which
the theme of ‘ascent’ became virtually ubiquitous—as institutionalized in
the religious order of the Carmelites (Mount Carmel being identified as
the site of the epiphany to Elijah). In Dante’s Purgatory, the ascent to
heaven is itself figured as a journey up Mount Purgatory.
But how does this relate to the biblical inheritance? Is the mountain-
imagery of the Bible one particular instance of a universal cosmic moun-
tain mythology, or is it something rather different? The thrust of my
argument here is that the ‘strength of the hills’ (Psalm 95.4) as under-
stood by the biblical authors ultimately points to something rather differ-
ent from the cosmic mountains of mythology. Of course, the Bible is an
ancient text and we should never underestimate the differences between
the traditions of ancient cultures and those of the modern world. This
means that the treatment of the mountain theme by the modern writers
Ruskin and Heidegger will prove very different from that of the Bible,
since they do not share the Bible’s focus on questions of cultic practice.
Nevertheless, and bearing these differences in mind, we may see a certain
analogy between one line of biblical thinking and what we do in fact find
in their writings, namely, that religious significance does not reside in the
mountain itself but in the cultural ritual, language, and image that make
the mountain humanly meaningful. In this regard, one of the key fault-
lines in religious thinking about mountains is therefore less between the
mountain as a (pre-modern) site for the revelation of a god and a (mod-
ern) site for the revelation of nature, but rather as the site of a call to
religious self-transformation that is mediated by very specific cultural and
textual traditions. In this regard, Petrarch’s ‘experience’ on Mount
Ventoux, which is often cited as a paradigm of the supposedly modern
way of experiencing the mountain, is itself rooted in this biblical tradi-
tion—which, given the turn to a biblical text at the high-point of
Petrarch’s account, should scarcely be surprising (see Petrarch 1948). In
this regard the Bible may be more on the ‘modern’ side of any divide than
we might at first imagine. Let us examine this further.
Although the importance of mountains in the biblical narrative is at
first glance rather varied, closer reading reveals that many of the relevant
242 G. Pattison
references bear on questions about cultic practice and, especially, about

whether any site other than Mount Zion (Jerusalem) might be consid-
ered suitable for the worship of Israel’s God. Broadly, the answer of the
Hebrew Bible is a resounding ‘No’! Jerusalem is the sole site of authentic
temple-worship of Israel’s God—although the Bible itself also bears wit-
ness to the fact that in earlier Israel (i.e., in the period between the occu-
pation of the land post-exodus and the exile to Babylon) other mountains
were consistently being used for the worship of a God who, though
denounced in the biblical text, seems to have been seen by the worship-
pers as the God of Israel.
Here, as elsewhere, historical criticism has made us aware of just how
complex a text the Bible we have inherited really is and that, especially in
the case of the Hebrew Bible, it incorporates a wealth of materials that, at
some points, seem to conflict with the main tendencies of the final edito-
rial redaction. An interesting example of this is how the mountain of
God’s revelation to Israel and the giving of the law is named in Exodus as
Sinai (Exodus 19–24) but in the book of Deuteronomy becomes Horeb.
This shift also relates to other tensions in the text, such as the tension
between seeing the mountain as the particular dwelling-place of God and
descriptions of God coming down to the mountain (i.e., from heaven).
Such inconsistencies and tensions can be seen to anticipate or, probably
more accurately, to reflect debates about the nature of God’s presence in
the Temple of Jerusalem. Such debates would swing between the view
that God dwells in Zion in a very particular and concrete way (e.g., Psalm
132.13–14) and the view, uttered in Solomon’s prayer of dedication itself,
that ‘heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee; how much less
this house which I have built’ (2 Chronicles 6. 18). Clearly these were
questions that the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians in
597 BCE and the consequent exile of the majority of the Judeans to
Babylon threw into sharp focus. As Thomas B. Dozeman sums up his
meticulous study of the Exodus and Deuteronomy traditions:
I have argued first, that the static and permanent presence of God in the
Mountain of God tradition [which Dozeman sees as continuous with
wider ancient Near Eastern sacred mountain traditions], as dwelling on the
cosmic mountain, symbolizes a metaphoric relationship of resemblance
between God and the mountain, which is reminiscent of Mount Zion in

pre-exilic Israel; second, that the mobile imagery of God in the deuterono-
mistic redaction, as ‘approaching’ (bw’) the mountain in order to speak
with Moses and Israel, symbolizes a metonymic relationship of contiguity
between God and the mountain, which is similar to the impermanent
auditory presence of the ‘name’ on Mount Horeb. (Dozeman 1989, 201)3
We might suspect a similar shift in New Testament treatments of

mountain events (the sermon on the mount, the transfiguration, the cru-
cifixion, and the ascension), as this text too witnesses and responds to a
major trauma in the history of Jerusalem worship, namely, the destruc-
tion of the Second Temple by Roman occupiers in 70 CE. Here again,
the mountain locations are actually used to relativize the claims of
Jerusalem and to privilege the Christian claims that God’s presence is
now bound solely to the highly mobile preaching of the word (cf. Paul’s
manifold journeys) and is therefore no longer bound to any specific holy
place. The Bible, then, is mistakenly interpreted if we read it as reflecting
a deep sense of cosmic mountain mythology. On the contrary, the bibli-
cal narrative is, in this respect, precisely a narrative in which cosmic
mountain mythology is, as it were, turned against itself in order to valo-
rize the word and the ethical, social, and religious teaching that is the
content of that word.
As we turn to the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1886–1976) and the
art-critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), we find that whilst neither of them
directly pick up the Bible’s ‘cultic’ concerns, both continue to give the
mountain a privileged site with regard to the relation between God
(Ruskin) or ‘the gods’ (Heidegger) and humans. At the same time they
both move away from seeing the religious significance of the mountain as
tied to its material presence and towards seeing it as most especially
meaningful in terms of how it is represented (for Ruskin in art, for
Heidegger in language). Although neither of them would have been
familiar with the kind of text-critical study that lie behind Dozeman’s
conclusions, both were exposed to the larger biblical narrative that simi-
larly moves away from cosmic mountain traditions and towards identify-
ing the divine with a mobile and place-less word, not least as it is read in
Christian traditions. Therefore, despite significant differences that should
244 G. Pattison
not be underestimated, both can be read as offering a modern analogy to

the dynamic transformation of sacral experience into linguistically medi-
ated communication that is seen in the Bible.
Heidegger on Mountains and Rivers

Martin Heidegger, one of the great philosophers of landscape, drew
much of his imagery from his own habitual treks through the moun-
tainous landscape of his native Black Forest (a practice reflected in the
subtitle of his Collected Works: Wege nicht Werke: ‘ways not works’).
Philosophizing, he suggested, is often like wandering down a forest
track that seems at first broad and well-trodden, but gradually becomes
choked with undergrowth until it becomes impassable so that the wan-
derer has to turn back, re-trace his steps, and try a different path. From
time to time, however, the forest will suddenly open out and one finds
oneself in a clearing, the German word is Lichtung, a ‘lighting’, from
where one can get a vista and take bearings from the landmarks previ-
ously hidden by thicket and forest. And this can be connected with
another key term of Heidegger’s later philosophy ‘the open’: we can
only be human and we can only have a world because or when we our-
selves and our world have become ‘open’. ‘In the midst of beings as a
whole an open place occurs. There is a lighting. … Beings can be as
beings only if they stand within and stand out within what is lighted in
this lighting’ (Heidegger 1978a, 175).
Although Heidegger’s imagery drew richly on his Black Forest rambles,
his philosophical argument was that this ‘opening’ of the world occurred
primarily in the advent of language, the word. When we speak it, the
world is no longer just there: we see that it is there and it is this event, the
speaking of the word, that is ultimately more decisive than the immediate
effect of any natural landscape on sense or imagination. ‘Language, by
naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appear-
ance’ (Heidegger 1978a, 185). This is not a matter of linguistic idealism,
in which the human world is merely constructed in language, but the
relation of language and world is held to be essentially reciprocal: lan-
guage belongs to the world and the world to language.4 In specific relation
to landscape, the word reveals the truth of landscape, landscape gives the
possibility of truth to the word. In the event of the word, the two belong
together, conjoined in mutual attentiveness.
However, there is a further point in Heidegger that, at first, seems to
lead away from language (and from mountains) but that, in the end, will
(as we shall see) return us to a deeper understanding of what is at issue in
the linguistic revelation of the meaning of landscape and of the mountain
in shaping that landscape. This point is that, for Heidegger, landscape is
not just for wandering in; it is for living in. It was therefore crucial to him
that we attend to how we live in the landscape we inhabit or, to use his
favourite term, how we dwell in it (German: wohnen). Any house is
somewhere to live, a shelter from the storm, but not every house is, in the
strong sense, ‘a dwelling’. To dwell is to live in the world in such a way as
to know it as our home. In these terms, the modern world’s problem is
not that we are clustered together, ant-like, in cities and mega-cities, but
that, under the pressure of the ‘total mobilization’ brought about by
modern technology we are experiencing a kind of ‘planetary homeless-
ness’. Even when we sit ‘at home’ we are as likely as not to be mentally
transported by television, Facebook, or other media to television studies,
fantasy worlds, or to wherever the current global sporting jamboree is
taking place. ‘Home’ itself becomes an ensemble of technical instru-
ments—kitchen units, bedroom units, keep-fit equipment, computers,
televisions, and so on—designed and ordered to service the practical
goals of worldly living.
Heidegger acknowledged the necessity of this, but his contribution as
a philosopher was to invite us to think more carefully about what makes
it possible for us to dwell on earth or what dwelling as such could
involve—as opposed to the dominant technological and instrumental
relation to ourselves and our environment. An alternative to this modern
technical approach is what we see in the example of a Greek Temple:
A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the

middle of the rock-cleft valley. … Standing there, the building rests on the
rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the obscu-
rity of that rock’s bulky yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the build-
ing holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the
246 G. Pattison
storm itself manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone,
though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet first
brings to radiance the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness
of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of
air. The steadfastness of the work contrast with the surge of the surf, and its
own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull,
snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and thus come to
appear as and what they are. (Heidegger 1978a, 168–169)
The key point here is that this kind of building is seen by Heidegger
as essentially different from a built object placed in or perhaps imposed
on the landscape. Instead, it contributes to the landscape becoming the
landscape that it is. Of course, this will not be true of just any building
or artefact. In another much-cited essay, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’,
Heidegger describes how an old stone bridge gathers its environment:
‘It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighbourhood.
The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it
guides and attends the stream through the meadows’ (Heidegger 1978b,
330). But he would almost certainly not say the same of an industrial
age bridge that, as it were, negates the landscape in order to facilitate the
speed of travel through (rather than to) the landscape. In another essay,
‘The Question Concerning Technology’ he specifically contrasts the rela-
tionship with the river of, on the one hand, an old wooden bridge and,
on the other, a modern hydro-electric plant. Of the latter he writes that
for such a plant the river itself has been changed and has become merely
a source of power that can be stored and that from the point of view of
the consumer might equally well have been generated by wind, sun, coal,
gas, or nuclear power. The river has become, simply, Bestand, a reserve
or resource to be managed in accordance with human demands that are
only tangentially respectful of and responsive to its distinctive character.
‘But it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not?
Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspec-
tion by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry’ (Heidegger
1977, 16).5
However, recalling Heidegger’s insistence on the primacy of language,
everything that is done by the temple or by other building works that
gather their landscape is done even more powerfully by the word and,
specifically, the word of the poet and, for Heidegger himself, this means
the poet he sometimes refers to as the poet, Friedrich Hölderlin. And one
aspect of this particular focus is that Hölderlin is not just the poet of
Germany’s great defining rivers, but, in connection with this, the poet of
German identity itself. As the meditation on the bridge suggests, if we
once accept that our experience of landscape is itself mediated by the
manner of our dwelling so that we have no experiences of ‘pure’ nature,
then it will also be the case that it is inseparable from our experience and
understanding of specific historical communities, whether these are vil-
lages, tribes, or nations.
Hölderlin’s poems Germania and The Rhein were the focus of
Heidegger’s first lecture series on the poet. In The Rhein, Hölderlin por-
trays the river as the free-born progeny of the Alpine-thunder god, tumul-
tuously and heroically rushing forth to stamp his character on the lands
he waters and the peoples nurtured by that land.
From The Rhein:

But now, within the mountain range,/deep beneath the silver peaks/and
under the merry greenery, where the woods look to him/and the heads of
the rocks peer down over one another/all the day long, there/in the coldest
abyss I heard the youth/crying out for freedom/and it was heard, how he
raged/complaining to his mother earth/and to the thunderer who had
begotten him/compassionate parents, yet/mortals had fled the place/since
it was frightful, where, without light, he/writhed about in the rocks/the
raging of a half-god./The voice was that of the noblest of rivers/the free-
born Rhein,/and he was hoping for something different, when he parted
up there from his brothers, the Tessin and Rhodanus;/he separated himself
and wanted to roam/as his royal soul/impatiently drove him towards Asia,/
for wishes don’t understand/the will of destiny./Blindest of all/are the sons
of gods. … But a god will spare his sons/a hasty life and smiles, /when,
unhindered, but hemmed in/by the holy Alps, his streams/rage down into
the depths./In such a smithy/all resonance is forged,/and it is beautiful
how, then,/after leaving the mountains,/he quietly wanders through the
German land,/content, and soothing his longing/through good works,
when he builds up the land, Father Rhine, nourishing beloved children/in
the cities that he founds.6
248 G. Pattison
But, Heidegger insists, neither the poem nor the river are mere alle-
gories of German destiny. Rather, the poem is the river or the river is
the poem, because it is only in the poem that what the river means for
human dwelling comes into the open. It is only the light of the word
that shows us what it is to be children of the Rhineland and, as subse-
quent lectures suggest, the Danube. It is only in the word of the poet
that a place of human habitation finally becomes a true dwelling-place
for mortals, for only the poet brings us into that open place of lan-
guage in which we are no longer just here but also know or can learn
what it might mean for us to be here. The truth of the mountain
appears in the rivers to which it gives birth and that, in turn, provides
a place for the historical flourishing of human communities, a flour-
ishing grounded and fulfilled in the grateful word of the poet, divinely
called to sing his people’s song. In this connection the vocation of the
poet contains a twofold relationship that strongly resembles the rela-
tionship between mountain and river. For this vocation is, as Heidegger
puts it, to translate the divine thunder into mortal speech, that is, the
thunder of the mountain storm into the speech of those who dwell in
the land that has been moulded by the forces unleashed by that thun-
der. Furthermore, it is precisely this poetic speech that, in turn, teaches
the people how to honour their god and how to be grateful for the
bestowal of the land.
We may seem to have moved very far from anything specifically bibli-
cal, not least since Hölderlin’s references seem to be specifically pagan and
Alpine. However, although Heidegger himself did not pursue these, there
is a strong case for seeing the overall structure of Hölderlinian thought as
being shaped by the Christian mythos. And, certainly there seems to be a
prima facie analogy between the relationship between the divine, the
mountain revelation that we find in Hölderlin and the creation of a peo-
ple through the sacral or cultic reception and commemoration of the
original divine word that is central to the biblical understanding of the
mountain. Strangely, and perhaps despite himself, Heidegger’s poet is not
unlike the biblical Moses, since both mediate between the thunder of the
divine mountain-God and the people who, without them, would hear
only the thunder and not a word.7
Ruskin on God’s Plan for Mountains
Turning from Heidegger to Ruskin, we apparently enter an entirely differ-

ent thought-world. This chapter suggested at the outset that it is possible
to, very broadly, see both of them as, in their ways, inheritors of Romanticism
as well as of biblical traditions, but what does that actually mean? One
point does seem clear enough, namely, that there is in fact a basic and
important analogy between Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin and
Ruskin’s multi-volume eulogy of the painter J. M. W. Turner, and that this
analogy relates both to their view of the dignity of art and to the relation-
ship between art and landscape. Just as Heidegger claims that Hölderlin’s
poetic rivers are the rivers and the rivers are their eponymous poems, so
Ruskin claims that it is pre-eminently in Turner’s painting that we come to
see, on human scale, the truth of space, of clouds, of vegetation, of water,
and, in Part V of Modern Painters, of mountain beauty. In this curious,
rambling, often digressive piece of volume-length writing that is constantly
shifting amongst art-criticism, geology, and theology (with an occasional
dash of social criticism thrown in for good measure), we learn that Turner,
the greatest of all modern painters, was also the greatest painter of moun-
tain scenery. And in Ruskin, even more clearly than in Heidegger, we hear
distinct echoes of the role of the mountain in the Bible.
In many respects, Ruskin follows the kind of argument associated with
the so-called natural theology of William Paley, whereby the existence
and goodness of God could be inferred from the order of creation. Thus,
Paley-like, Ruskin argues that the wisdom of God in creation is vindi-
cated by the way in which what he calls the great ‘architecture’ of moun-
tain scenery was carefully designed by God in order to facilitate human
dwelling on earth. Now whilst Ruskin is not like contemporary funda-
mentalists and acknowledges that Genesis does not give an exact chronol-
ogy of creation, it is possible to understand what is said in the most literal
sense, as any normal untutored person would understand it. Commenting
on the biblical expression ‘God bowed the heavens and came down’, he
notes that:
the expression either has plain meaning, or it has no meaning. Understand

by the term ‘Heavens’ the compass of infinite space around the earth, and
250 G. Pattison
the expression, ‘bowed the Heavens’, however sublime, is wholly without

meaning; infinite space cannot be bowed or bent. But understand by the
‘heavens’ the veil of clouds above the earth, and the expression is neither
hyperbolical nor obscure; it is pure, plain, and accurate truth, and it
describes God, not as revealing himself in any peculiar way to David, but
doing what He is still doing before our own eyes day by day. By accepting
the words in their simple sense, we are thus led to apprehend the immedi-
ate presence of the Deity. (Ruskin 1906, 81)
And what is it we learn when we understand it in the way Ruskin sug-

gests? It is, he says, to recognize the ‘three great offices which mountain
ranges are appointed to fulfil, in order to preserve the health and increase
the happiness of mankind’. These are ‘to give motion to water. Every
fountain and river, from the inch-deep streamlet that crosses the village
lane in trembling clearness, to the massy and silent march of the everlast-
ing multitude of waters in Amazon or Ganges, owe their play, and purity,
and power, to the ordained elevations of the earth’. The second ‘is to
maintain a constant change in the currents and nature of the air’; the
third, ‘to cause perpetual change in the soils of the earth’ and their ‘per-
petual renovation’—without which ‘the earth must have become for the
most part desert plain, or stagnant marsh’ (Ruskin 1906, 87). Much of
Part V of Modern Painters is consequently dedicated to filling out these
claims in often extraordinary detail.
But mountains are not just there to serve as a water-conduit for an
air-purification system. Mountains are also there as a thing of sublime
beauty:
the feeding of the rivers and the purifying of the winds are the least of the
services appointed to the hills. To fill the human heart for the beauty of
God’s working—to startle its lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of
astonishment—are its higher missions. They are as great and noble archi-
tecture; first giving shelter, comfort, and rest; and covered also with mighty
sculpture and painted legend. … [E]ven the most ordinary mountain scen-
ery … has been prepared in order to unite as far as possible and in the
closest compass, every means of delighting and sanctifying the heart of
man. (Ruskin 1906, 87)
Ruskin may use a Paley-like logic, but he rises above Paley not only in
the quality and measure of his prose but also in his recognition that
human meaning—or in Heideggerian terms, human dwelling—cannot
be reduced to mechanical instrumentality. To encounter the mountain is
to encounter the mystery of life in time. Ruskin again:
The earth, as a tormented and trembling ball, may have rolled in space for
myriads of ages before humanity was formed from its dust; and as a devas-
tated ruin it may continue to roll, when all that dust shall again have been
mingled with ashes that never were warmed by life, or polluted by sin. But
for us the intelligible and substantial fact is that the earth has been brought,
by forces we know not of, into a form fitted for our habitation: on that form
a gradual, but destructive change is continually taking place, and the course
of that change points clearly to a period when it will no more be fitted for
the dwelling-place of men. … [I]n what form was the mountain originally
raised which gave that torrent its track and power? … In what form did it
stand before a single fragment fell? Yet to such questions, continually sug-
gesting themselves, it is never possible to give a complete answer. For a cer-
tain distance, the past work of existing forces can be traced; but there
gradually the mist gathers, and the footsteps of more gigantic agencies are
traceable in the darkness; and still as we endeavour to penetrate farther and
farther into departed time, the thunder of the Almighty power sounds
louder and louder; and the clouds gather broader and more fearfully, until at
last the Sinai of the world is seen altogether upon a smoke, and the fence of
its foot is reached, which none can break through. (Ruskin 1906, 134–135)
Heidegger, we have seen, claimed that it is primarily the poetic word

that opens up the event of the world as a place of human dwelling. In the
case of Ruskin, it is not the poetic word but the painterly image—and
just as Heidegger found in Hölderlin a privileged exemplar of the poet,
so Ruskin found in Turner a painter ‘who has a communion of heart with
his subject’ (Ruskin 1906, 9) that enables him to ‘speak’ with prophetic
power to the age. Even if there is no direct ‘realism’ in Turner’s painting,
it too, like Hölderlin’s poems, can reveal the heart of its subject and,
through his art, do so in a way that a direct encounter with the subject
cannot. In the painting the mountain comes to be all that we mean by
252 G. Pattison
a mountain. Now, for the first time, we see it for what it is. It has been
brought out into the open, and, therefore, we can now see, also for the
first time, who we ourselves might be as a people born to dwell in a world
shaped, watered, refreshed, and nourished by this great architecture.
Conclusion
A full exploration of the analogy between Heidegger/Hölderlin and
Ruskin/Turner and a defence of the importance if not of the correctness
of their conceptions of the relationship amongst art, landscape, and the
emergence of modern technological society would require much more
than even a longer or another paper. For now, I shall conclude with the
comment that despite significant differences in their conception of God,
their accounts of their favoured artists suggest that one of the offices of
mountain landscape is to remind human beings that their lives are sourced
by an origin that is appropriately called ‘divine’. But against another line
of Romanticism that would lead alienated Western society back to the
primordial experience of the cosmic mountain (as in Eliade) both seem
to agree that the holiness of the mountain is primarily revealed not in the
unmediated confrontation of the individual with the bare mountain but
with the mountain finding its human meaning in the work of art. In this
regard they may also have learned more from the Bible than either p erhaps
knew. For although the Bible shows little interest in what we today would
understand as art, the worship that it commends is effected through a
combination of architecture, ritual action, and musical and poetic expres-
sion, ideas which are also discussed in Kakalis’ chapter. It is through this
‘art’ of worship that Mount Zion fulfils its designated task of becoming
the place where God and humans can finally dwell together. For now, of
course, in this time of exile, that condition exists only as a memory and
as a hope. The testimony of Heidegger and Ruskin is that it is in art (for
Heidegger in poetry, for Ruskin in painting) that this utopian idea lives
on and remains present, even in the midst of the degraded landscapes of
an industrial and post-industrial world. If Heidegger’s example offers a
warning that such a focus on art can lead to disengagement from the
concrete challenges of the social world or else (as in his National Socialist
phase) a disastrous aestheticization of political life, Ruskin’s social activity

demonstrates that the preservation of such an idea may nevertheless bear
fruit in practical steps towards the amelioration of life, the building of
Jerusalem, the sacred Mountain of the Lord, in this green and pleasant
land.
Notes
1 . Discussed further below.
2. On the mythology of sacred mountains see Eliade 1986.
3. Dozeman has a further third point, but it is less relevant to our present
purpose.
4. Elsewhere, Heidegger makes this point by playing on the German word
for ‘to belong’, gehören, which derives from the same root as hören, to hear.
Thus, language ‘belongs’ to being by listening to it. See Heidegger 1969.
Can we perhaps connect this to the imagery of Moses and Elijah listening
for and to the Word of God on their respective mountains?
5. Of course, there will be many cases where there is room for dispute as to
how a work actually functions. There may be examples of high-tech
bridges that also, in their way, ‘gather’ their environment (the Golden
Gate, the eponymous ‘Bridge’ between Denmark and Sweden). And does
the installation of an Antony Gormley sculpture on a mountain-side or a
shore-line gather or negate its landscape. Judgements will, presumably
vary.
6. My translation.
7. Inevitably, there is the further and unavoidable question that the content
of these lectures can be related only too easily to Heidegger’s Nazism and
to the founding of a would-be 1000-year Reich through national ritual.
See Pattison 2015, 319–326 for further discussion.
Bibliography
Dozeman, T. B. (1989). God on the mountain. A study of redaction, theology and
canon in exodus (pp. 19–24). Atlanta: Scholars Press.
Eliade, M. (1986). Sacred architecture and symbolism. In M. Eliade (Ed.),
Symbolism, the sacred, and the arts (pp. 105–129). New York: Crossroad.
254 G. Pattison
Heidegger, M. (1969). Identity and difference (trans: Stambaugh, J.). New York:

Harper and Row.
Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology. In The question
concerning technology and other essays (pp. 3–35) (trans. and Ed. Lovitt, W.).
New York: Harper.
Heidegger, M. (1978a). The origin of the work of art. In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Basic
writings (pp. 143–187). London: Routledge.
Heidegger, M. (1978b). Building dwelling thinking. In M. Heidegger &
D. Farrell (Eds.), Basic writings (pp. 319–339). London: Routledge.
Hirsch, E. D. (1960). Wordsworth and schelling. A typological study of romanti-
cism. Newhaven: Yale University Press.
Pattison, G. (2015). Eternal god/saving time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Petrarca, F. (1948). The ascent of mount Ventoux. In E. Cassirer et al. (Eds.),
The renaissance philosophy of man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ruskin, J. (1904). The queen of the air. London: George Allen.
Ruskin, J. (1906). Modern painters (Vol. 4). London: Dent. (N.B. This is
volume 4 of the published set, but comprises Vol. 5 of Ruskin’s own volume
numbering.)
13
Mountains Run Mad: Picturesque
Signatures in the Dolomites
William Bainbridge
In a letter to a prospective contributor and friend, Charles Dickens dis-

closes the ‘maddening’ outcome of a mysterious ‘Dolomite paper’ meant
to appear in All the Year Round:
I am unable to give you any pledge or promise respecting the Dolomite

paper, for the simple reason that I can not read it. Pretty well accustomed
to messes in the way of manuscript, I never saw such a mess. I very much
doubt whether my printers can print from it, or will do so without permis-
sion. I will try them, however. If it may be possible to make the paper pass
muster, it shall go in. If it be impossible, I can’t help it. I have been at work
on a new work of my own, all day, and am half blinded and maddened by
your unintelligibility. (Dickens 2002, 12: 441–2)
The editors of the The Letters of Charles Dickens wryly remark ‘No
“Dolomite paper” appeared in AYR’ (Dickens 2002, 12: 442). A closer
W. Bainbridge (*)
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, UK

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_13
256 W. Bainbridge
scrutiny reveals instead that an article anonymously published as ‘A

Lady’s Visit to the Dolomites’ was indeed printed in the journal that year,
just a few months after Dickens’ death. Since no other article on the
Dolomite Mountains appeared in All the Year Round, Dickens’ letter
authorizes us to attribute that lady’s visit to Frances Minto Elliot—the
‘idle’ author who would later go on to produce a staggering series of
travelogues connected to Italy and the Mediterranean.1 In the article,
Elliot offers us one of the most enthusiastic scenic descriptions of the
Dolomites. The scenery described in that article is no less ‘maddening’
than the essay itself; one could easily speculate about Dickens’ bewil-
dered reaction to Elliot’s draft as the result of a particular clash between
form and content:
The whole scene comes to me like a vision; the dreary woods over the lower
heights, the pale Dolomites above, mountains everywhere, walling us up as
in a fantastic prison-house. To the left, looking through a rocky cleft of
many thousand feet, rose the splintered cliffs and clustered points of the
Drei Zinnen, nearly ten thousand feet high. Of peculiarly calcareous stone,
porous and fragile-looking, it sharply cuts against the sky in forms of tow-
ers and battlements, like some Titanic fortress, the cloud-home of the spir-
its ruling these awful solitudes. … As the night approached and the
shadows became deeper, the weird individuality and almost human expres-
sion of some of these misty giants, abrupt, and unlooked for, became
almost oppressive. I came to think that they were mountains run mad.
(Elliot 1870, 355)
In borrowing Elliot’s impression as the title of my essay, I tend to

understand ‘madness’ as a topographic trope, rather than a manic reac-
tion to a spectacular landscape, to identify a distinct subcategory of
mountains: mountains that are less striking for their elevation, famous
for their climbing history, or revered for their sacred aura, but instead
prominent for their iconic topography and chromatic allure; mountains
whose particular landforms instantly capture the gaze of the onlooker for
their steepness, their strangeness, their unfamiliar juxtaposition of famil-
iar ingredients that convey an aura of aesthetic disorder; mountains,
finally, that stand out panoramically, and whose isolated appearance is
able to attract the pen of the writer, the brush of the artist, the rope of the
13 Mountains Run Mad: Picturesque Signatures in the Dolomites 257
climber, or the camera of the tourist, with results, I claim, that shall all
pertain to the heuristic toolkit of the geographer.
These topographic characteristics aptly describe the Dolomite
Mountains (Panizza 2009). In more technical terms, they find a sum-
mary in the mountaineering concept of ‘prominence’, which becomes
their scenic ‘signature’.2 Their geological makeup allows for the fantastic
display of towers, pyramids, steeples, ledges, pinnacles, which often
appear as isolated peaks. Douglas W. Freshfield, in 1915, graphically ren-
dered this picturesque phenomenon through a comparison with the
visual arts:
The Dolomite groups would be correctly figured in the Impressionist maps

of which we have so many, not as lines but dots; big dots, no doubt, scat-
tered about in a region of valleys and pastoral heights. The valleys have a
way of ending in a low gap instead of a high ridge. Consequently you pass
from one to another with relatively little trouble. Here and there frown,
like giant castles, the red or grey-gold walls of the great Dolomites, the
Pelmo and Antelao, the Civetta and Marmolada, the fantastic Rosengarten,
and the incredible Pala. But between them spreads a bevy of green and
friendly hills. (Freshfield 1915, 426)
Figured as ‘big dots’ and not as ‘great walls’ or ‘sheer ramparts’, the
Dolomites appear as ‘giant castles’ strewn here and there about the ami-
able Italian landscape, as ‘prominent strongholds’ that offer a paradise for
rock climbers (Sanger Davies 1894; Abraham 1919). This chapter deals
with the geographical matrices of this bewildering attraction, their latent
allegiance to enduring topographic memories, and their symbolic re-
circulations in narratives, practices, and representations of sites, which
continue to harness that ‘madness’ by transforming it into a ‘cult of the
picturesque’.
Picturesque Mountains
Picturesque views of mountains appear today in glossy magazines, allur-
ing advertisements, blockbuster movies, environmental documentaries,
tourist brochures as well as in the recreation of rocky habitats in zoos and
258 W. Bainbridge
the promotion of coveted areas in national, natural, or amusement parks.

The picturesque programme still works; when we look at weird conglom-
erations of rocks we continue to be amazed, we continue to be attracted
by their ‘romantic topography’.
In a study entirely devoted to the inextricable relation between geology
and aesthetics, Noah Heringman reminds us that ‘as a physically descrip-
tive adjective, “romantic” … refers to the broken or dislocated character
of landforms’ and explains that ‘through its fantastic or enchanted appear-
ance, such a landscape belongs to the genre of romance and the literary
past’ (Heringman 2003, 2004, 4; 2013; Dean 2007). According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, the use of ‘romantic’ was common around
1660 to express a ‘fantastic, extravagant, quixotic idea’, something that
goes ‘beyond what is customary or practical’, and is ‘responsive to the
prompting of imagination or fancy regardless of practicality’; Addison, in
1705, defines the term by tracing its roots to literature: ‘Of places: redo-
lent or suggestive of romance; appealing to the imagination and feelings’.
If it is true, as Francis Younghusband maintained, in his 1921 mono-
graph The Heart of Nature, that ‘The picture and the poem are as legiti-
mate a part of geography as the map’, I define here ‘romantic topography’
in geographical terms as a scenery agreeable in romances, in the same way
in which ‘picturesque topography’ is defined in geographical terms as a
scenery that is agreeable in pictures (Younghusband 1921, 229).
Throughout this chapter I intend to use the two terms in this way.
An intrinsic imbalance resides, however, within this heuristic formula-
tion. Not only do I reduce here topography to a scenery or a scenic dis-
tribution of both organic and inorganic ingredients on a given terrain,
linking it inextricably to a certain act of looking, but this act of looking
operates on a different scale depending on the different scripts to which
it appears associated (Cosgrove 2008). In the case of ‘romantic topogra-
phy’ this act of looking strictly adheres to the rules of a literary genre—
the ‘romance’, with its own figurative repertoire and poetic conventions;
in the painterly case of ‘picturesque topography’, this same act of looking
is allegiant to an artistic genre that is less strictly determined—‘landscape
art’ and its numerous sub-genres. In both cases, however, the fabrication
of that particular act of looking has a history, which subtends competing
matrices of topographic memories, able to produce resilient symbols that
are both visual and performative in their nature. The scenic value depends
here on the intensity of these symbols, which fluctuate through phases of
latency and activation, engendering multiple ‘signatures’ at various points
in time and space.
The terms ‘romantic’ and ‘picturesque’ repeatedly recur in describing
the kind of landscapes that UNESCO most elusively qualifies as ‘areas of
exceptional beauty and aesthetic importance’ (Criterion VII), linking
their outstanding geological history (Criterion VIII) to different civiliza-
tional narratives (Gianolla 2008). The scenery is not just ‘romantic’ or
‘picturesque’ per se (tangible component), but it acquires its ‘romantic’ or
‘picturesque’ status through a series of privileged acts of looking that acti-
vate it as such (intangible component); thus the process through which
such a scenery becomes a heritage landscape relates to a strategy to shield
an orthodox way of seeing, treasured by temporary sojourners, from the
potential harm provoked by permanent dwellers. If picturesque topogra-
phies are static sceneries in their tangible dimension, they become
dynamic in their intangible one—landscapes that visitors construct by
‘working the scenery’ in the same way that photographers capture their
images by ‘working the shot’.
The ‘picturesque’ programme acts here as a signature that authenticates
the prestige of a ‘romantic’ scenery. As Giorgio Agamben explains, signa-
tures are precisely what ‘orients and determines the interpretation and
efficacy of signs in a certain context’ (Agamben 2009, 64); they carry an
operation manual with them that tells the user how to use the signs.
Signatures, according to Agamben, are the conditions for the emergence
of signs; they hold a sacramental power that is ‘inseparable from the sign
yet irreducible to it, a character … that by insisting on a sign makes it
powerful and capable of action’ (Agamben 2009, 50). In elevating the
notion of natural beauty to a criterion of outstanding universal value, the
UNESCO protects in fact the ‘signature’ of a prestigious act of looking.
This privileged act of looking governs the relationship between viewer
and subject, stipulating a set of conditional norms for the appreciation of
a landscape, and a set of behavioural protocols for its conservation, man-
agement, and sustainability.
The case of the Dolomites is in this sense paradigmatic. Their inclusion
on the World Heritage List is owed to two criteria: Criterion VII, describing
260 W. Bainbridge
‘properties that contain superlative natural phenomena or areas of excep-

tional natural beauty and aesthetic importance’; and Criterion VIII, denot-
ing ‘outstanding examples representing major stages of earth’s history’.
These criteria define the Dolomites as a landscape of uncontaminated
beauty, whose ‘scientific sign’ and ‘aesthetic signature’ mutually reinforce
the idea of an uncontested heritage situated at the level of its inhospitable
peaks (core zones) and their immediate grassland areas (buffer zones), leav-
ing the contested heritage of its valleys—divided by different ethnic, lin-
guistic, and historical frontiers—fully unconsidered:
The Dolomites can be perfectly interpreted both scientifically and aestheti-

cally and therefore their nomination is deliberately proposed under
Criterion VIII and Criterion VII simultaneously. As the history of their
discovery explains, these two criteria are indissolubly linked, just as the tie
between scientific interest and love of natural beauty of their ‘discoverers’ is
inseparable. (Gianolla 2008, 32)
The exclusion of the valleys is justified as ‘a historically proven fact,

confirmed in art and literature’ (Gianolla 2008, 282). The inclusion
within buffer zones of grasslands, above the tree line, with limited and
transitory human activity, merely serves to protect the landscape scenery.
The valleys and villages are therefore confined outside the nine UNESCO
areas because from them ‘a complete vision of the ranges is rendered
impossible by the slopes themselves’ (Gianolla 2008, 282).
The ‘heritage’ that the UNESCO protects under these two criteria is
the product of foreign gazes, which emerged and operated during the
nineteenth century, gazes allegiant to two distinct cultural traditions—
British and German—and identity-building processes. This heritage
operates as a complex cluster of symbolic ingredients oscillating between
four competing poles of civilizational prestige—Venice and its Romantic
aura, Switzerland and its Alpine sensationalism, Austria and its Germanic
folklore, London and its embodiment of modernity—coexisting today in
a multi-layered heritage, jumbled, at the local level, through the interplay
between competing imaginative geographies and political appropriations
(Bainbridge 2016). I intend to illustrate some of the ways in which the
dolomitic topography has acquired its symbolic value as the product of
spontaneous generation, patterns of emulation, and imaginary attachment

linked together by a prestigious ‘signature’, which constantly oscillates
between different, sometimes opposite and competing, cultural
poles.
Gothic Mountains
The coincidence of Criterion VII (outstanding landscape scenery) and
Criterion VIII (outstanding landform history) already appeared in the
very first mentioning of the Dolomite Mountains in a tourist guide—
Murray’s landmark A Handbook for Travellers in Southern Germany, pub-
lished in London in 1836. In it the Dolomites are clearly described as an
unheard-of pile of ‘romantic rocks’ forming a perfect ‘picturesque
outline’:
They form a most striking contrast to all other mountains—in their daz-
zling whiteness, in their barren sterility, in their steepness, in the innumer-
able cracks and clefts which traverse their gigantic walls, all running in a
vertical direction, and above all, in their sharp peaks and tooth-like ridges,
rising many thousand feet into the air, which present the most picturesque
outline. Sometimes they take the appearance of towers and obelisks,
divided from one another by cracks some thousand feet deep; at others the
points are so numerous and slender, that they put one in mind of a bundle
of bayonets or sword-blades. Altogether, they impart an air of novelty and
sublime grandeur to the scene, which can only be appreciated by those who
have viewed it. (Murray 1836, 241)
Only a few pages later, the description continues, reiterating the same
architectural repertoire to describe their topography and highlighting
their unique scenic magnetism:
They are unlike any other mountains, and are to be seen nowhere else
among the Alps. They arrest the attention by the singularity and pictur-
esqueness of their forms, by their sharp peaks or horns, sometimes rising
up in pinnacles and obelisks, at others extending in serrated ridges, teethed
like the jaw of an alligator; now fencing in the valley with an escarped
262 W. Bainbridge
precipice many thousand feet high, and often cleft with numerous fissures
all running nearly vertically. They are perfectly barren, destitute of
vegetation of any sort, and usually of a light yellow or whitish colour.
(Murray 1836, 247)
This kind of architectural vocabulary would become commonplace in

all subsequent Victorian travelogues as a distinctive ‘signature’ pertaining
almost uniquely to the Dolomite Mountains.3
Forty years after Murray, Thomas Cook would couch that architectural
vocabulary into a set of fantastic references able to paint an alluring pic-
ture of the Dolomites:
Latterly much attention has been called to the Dolomite Mountains, and
Botzen is the station from which they are most accessible. These moun-
tains, named after a French geologist, Dolomieu, are among the wonders
of the world. They are of yellow and slaty limestone, utterly treeless, and by
atmospheric and other influences have been fashioned into playing fantas-
tic tricks before high heaven. Ruined castles, mouldering towers, weird,
witch-like ravines and gorges,—everything, in short, that imagination likes
to see, may be seen in this wondrous region. (Cook 1875, 17)
The picturesque description of Murray is here almost entirely substi-

tuted by a blend of topographic ingredients most obviously akin to the
world of the Gothic novel; the task of conveying the picturesque mood of
the scenery is performed by the ‘word-painting’ provided by the descrip-
tion: what the ‘imagination likes to see’ is evoked by a cascade of terms
pertinent to a ‘romance’ (Landow 1971, 232–6; Stein 1975, 49). It
should be noticed that while Murray’s description is included in A
Handbook for Travellers in Southern Germany, Cook’s one is printed in a
Tourist’s Handbook for Northern Italy. It is not so much the change of the
intended audience, from ‘traveller’ to ‘tourist’, that interests me here, but
the change of geographical context, from Southern Germany to Northern
Italy. I shall return to this point later on.
In 1869, the year of Elliot’s submission to All the Year Round, her paper
could only rely on Murray and the pioneering travelogue The Dolomite
Mountains, published by painter Josiah Gilbert and botanist George
Cheetham Churchill in 1864, the book credited today for bestowing
the current label to the Dolomite district. From that moment on, the
once called Venetian or Tyrolean Alps would be collectively identified as
‘Dolomite Mountains’.4 Their text extended the name of the mineral to
the entire region, and their work provided the milestone that qualified
the classic literature on the Dolomites for the years to come. The ‘roman-
tic’ dimension of both Cook’s and Elliot’s descriptions derive from this
canonical travelogue.
The acknowledgement of the source does not explain its success. If we
take a closer look at Cook’s promotion of the Dolomites as a picturesque
land of romance, for instance, a number of questions can be formulated.
How does Cook’s promotion of the Dolomites as a land of romance
work? What are the ingredients circulating in it? And what are the
intended results that this circulation is supposed to achieve? By suggest-
ing that the Dolomite landform plays ‘fantastic tricks’ before the eyes of
tourists, Cook instils in their imagination the thrill of being projected
inside the scenery of a Gothic novel in the manner of Ann Radcliffe. Yet
the wonders of this ‘wondrous region’—a region where one can find
‘everything that imagination likes to see’—are not ‘geological’ per se.
They are ‘wondrous’ because of the ‘family resemblances’ that inextricably
link physical topography to the production of fantastic places, nurturing
in the mind of Cook’s readers the desire of inhabiting a Radcliffe novel or
a canvas by Rosa via a ‘symbolic pilgrimage’ to the Dolomites.
We are far away here from what we would call today ‘geo-tourism’
(Gordon 2011; Reynard et al. 2011); Elliot’s readers and Cook’s tourists
are not encouraged to appreciate the geo-morphology of the Dolomites
as such—as in the case, one could argue, of Murray’s Handbook. Their
manoeuvre is harnessing here an existing ‘cult geography’, in the sense
expounded by Matt Hills in his intriguing study on Fan Cultures. Hills
observes that by ‘visiting cult geographies, the cult-fan is able to extend
an engagement with a text or icon by extra-textually inhabiting the world
of the media cult’, which means to say that ‘cult geographies’ sustain fans’
fantasies of ‘entering into the cult text’, while allowing the ‘text’ itself to
leak out into different creative transpositions (Hills 2002, 144–57). In
other words, Cook does not promote a setting that the reader could find
already named and portrayed in an existing novel or painting; we are not
talking here about the creation of a hypothetical Rosa or Radcliffe
264 W. Bainbridge
Country, in the same way that we may talk about a Constable or Brontë
Country (Daniels 1993, 205; Pocock 1987).5 Rather, Cook capitalizes on
a stock of emotional energy already stored in his reader’s mind, a mind
saturated with topographic symbols derived from that novel or that
painting. His procedure clearly exemplifies here what Hills calls a ‘cre-
ative transposition’, an affective process that spills into and redefines
material space through the activity of family resemblances.
The Dolomites, of course, never offered a setting for a Radcliffe novel
or a Rosa painting, but they could have done. Their association with that
imaginary world presupposes the existence of a specific cult formation
able to equip the tourist with a set of familiar tropes that would ulti-
mately make him or her feel at home while abroad, confirming James
Buzard’s observation that ‘abroad, the tourist is the relentless representa-
tive of home’ (Buzard 1993, 8).6 In a way, this is the same process that
had allowed Charles Bucke to describe Radcliffe, in 1837, as the writer
‘whom the Muses recognize as the sister of Salvator Rosa’, and Robert
Chambers, in 1844, as ‘the Salvator Rosa of British novelists’—that very
Ann Radcliffe, we should remember, who had not only never been in the
Dolomites but also had never been to Italy (Bucke 1837, 2: 122;
Chambers 1844, 554).
The script that enables this cult formation is found in The Dolomite
Mountains by Gilbert and Churchill. It suffices here to signal just few
examples to find in their text the same Gothic tone:
The Dolomites seized upon us with the spell of witchery. … The view to
the south as the sun’s rays began to slant was a fairyland for variety and
intricacy of mountain form … a wondrous scene of boiling mists and shiv-
ered pinnacles, all glory-tinted … all the Scotch-like mist, all the romantic
richness and grandeur of the Italian Alps. (Gilbert and Churchill 1864, 24,
35, 410)
Any one of these topographic qualifiers could hint at the Gothic: the
spell of witchery, the fairyland comparison, the boiling and Scotch-like
mist, and so on. The Scottish Presbyterian minister in Venice, Alexander
Robertson, would go as far as to promote his guidebook to the Dolomites
as A Practical, Historical, and Descriptive Guide-Book to the Scotland of
Italy (1896).
Similarly, also the recirculation of Salvator Rosa’s imagery appears

already in Gilbert and Churchill:
These old roots are quite a feature in the wild scenery. White with age, and
partially blackened by fire, they look as uncanny as may be, and perhaps
have aided by their appearance the peasant superstition, which reckons it
of evil omen to stumble over them in the dark. Here they gave a very
Salvator Rosa aspect to many a craggy corner, where the light struck faintly
down. If, according to some critics, Salvator is not like nature, nature, in
these instances, was very like Salvator. (Gilbert and Churchill 1864, 151)
The Gothic-like atmosphere of the Rosaesque scenery is here further

enhanced by references to Ruskin ideally corrected by Gustave Doré
(Fig. 13.1):
Mr. Ruskin affirms that overhanging, or even perpendicular precipices,

though often represented [in art] are not really found in nature. We
agreed there that here there are plenty of both sorts, and the aptness of
A—’s remark was at once appreciated when she compared the scene to
one of Gustave Doré’s marvellous grouping of peak and precipices in his
illustrations to the ‘Wandering Jew’. … Again occurred the resemblance
to Doré’s designs, far above the funereal tops gleamed pale spires of
Dolomite, in ghastly accord; and below, the roots of destroyed trees con-
torted themselves into every dragon semblance. (Gilbert and Churchill
1864, 49–50)
The gaze filled with artistic memories and literary reminiscences

composes a Romantic landscape scenery, revealing the discursive inter-
action between Gilbert and Anna Maitland Laurie, Churchill’s wife,
who will be charged with filling an entire chapter with her letters from
the Dolomites to the party’s English friends. As for Doré, Gilbert adds
that ‘His magnificent illustrations to the Inferno … are thoroughly
Dolomitic in character’ (Gilbert and Churchill 1864, 149, note). What
is at stake here is the attempt to substitute literary and artistic qualifi-
ers, such as ‘romantic’ and ‘picturesque’—but also ‘fairy’, ‘wondrous’,
‘witchlike’, and so on—with ‘dolomitic’ as a key to open the door to
the fantastic.
266 W. Bainbridge
Fig. 13.1 Gustave Doré, La légende du juif errant, Paris, 1856, plate VIII
Renaissance Mountains
The evocation of illustrious authors associated with a clear topographic
repertoire, such as, Rosa or Doré in the examples provided, reveals an
anxiety on the part of the authors to find a suitable ‘sponsor’, possibly one
whose cult was already secured in Britain. Amelia B. Edwards, in 1873,
would even dare to associate the mystery of those misty peaks to the
Etruscan civilization, mentioning a bounty of archaeological findings in
the area, captured by a Viennese collector.7
In 1869, quite opposite to the travelogue written with Churchill,
Gilbert would find that sponsor in Venice itself under the name of Titian.
The Gothic dimension that had imbued The Dolomite Mountains book
gives way to another inflection of the picturesque, a new Arcadian
Picturesque, re-fashioning those peaks as ‘Renaissance mountains’. The
Dolomites, here, are not picturesque because they are agreeable in a paint-
ing by Rosa, but because we could find them exactly reproduced in a
canvas by Titian, who in the Dolomites was born. The Dolomite district
becomes utterly Italian, and re-baptized as Titian Country. Frances Elliot,
in her article for All the Year Round, is quick to endorse the novelty:
Those mountains, which ignorant criticism has dared to censure as impos-

sible, not only in his [Titian’s] backgrounds, but in those of other Venetian
artists, are nothing in the world but Dolomites, under whose shadows so
many painters were born. So much has been written on the subject, that I
cannot allow myself to expatiate on how the very shape of the stifflarch fir-
trees about Cadore, stripped to the stem of their lower branches, and feath-
ering out towards the tops, the villages crowning Dolomite excrescences,
piled block upon block, like fortresses, the rich tints of the narrow valleys,
shaded by chestnut woods, whose silvery trunks catch up the sunshine, all
reminded me of ‘bits’ by Titian. (Elliot 1870, 365)
Gustave Doré’s ‘Wanderer’, who found himself surrounded by the

ghostly figures of these ‘impossible mountains’ along his endless journey,
is now walking on a different ground—in the background of a Titian’s
painting, showing how the Dolomites as trapped in a complex web of
different cultural signatures.
268 W. Bainbridge
No one denies that in promoting and spreading the cult of Titian dur-
ing the Victorian era John Ruskin and Anna Jameson played a seminal
role (Johnston 1994; Thomas 2004, 71–78; Hanley and Sdegno 2010).
Already in 1846, Anna Jameson claimed to have located the actual
Venetian house that belonged to Titian in the area of the Fondamenta
Nuove, and from the garden there she fancied about the view Titian
could have seen from it during his working life spent in Venice.
Distinguishing clearly among a watery foreground (the Lagoon), a pasto-
ral middle ground (the mainland and the Euganean hills), and a rugged
background (the Friuli Alps), Jameson imagined the view Titian himself
would have seen:
[Titian] looked over the wide canal, which is the thoroughfare between the
city of Venice and the Island of Murano; in front the two smaller islands of
San Cristoforo and San Michele; and beyond them Murano, rising on the
right, with all its domes and campanili, like another Venice. Far off
extended the level line of the mainland, and, in the distance, the towering
chain of the Friuli Alps, sublime, half defined, with jagged snow-peaks
soaring against the sky; and more to the left, the Euganean hills, Petrarch’s
home, melting, like visions, into golden light. … This was the view from
the garden of Titian; so unlike any other in the world, that it never would
occur to me to compare it with any other. More glorious combinations of
sea, mountain, shore, there may be—I cannot tell; like it, is nothing that I
have ever beheld or imagined. (Jameson 1846, 42–43)
Jameson’s ‘glorious combination’ of foreground, middle ground, and

background is here staged like a vision of an expanded scenery, ‘melting
… into the golden light’ of Venice. The significance of this, however, is
that Jameson knows very well that those mountains surround the Alpine
birthplace of Titian. As Adele Ernstrom rightly observed, her piece
appealed ‘to the English tourist’s fantasized desire to approach or recap-
ture the painter’s aura by visiting his former haunts’ (Ernstrom 1999,
430). In a more practical sense, however, Jameson managed to make of
Titian’s house in Venice the starting point for a tourist itinerary ending at
Titian’s house in Piave di Cadore, in the geographic heart of the Dolomite
Mountains.
Jameson’s ‘petit tour’ quickly found its way into the leading periodicals
of the day. In Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Mrs. Oliphant, for exam-
ple, added to Jameson’s itinerary a further picturesque component: ‘From
the garden of Titian, yet wildly luxuriant, we looked up to Cadore,—to
the splintered, fantastic pinnacles, whose very names were then unknown
to us’ (Wilson 1888, 185). Leader Scott (the alias of Lucy Emily Baxter),
in The Magazine of Art would transform this view into a ‘pilgrimage’ fol-
lowing the footpath of Titan himself:
He sat musing in his garden on summer evenings the memories of things

that had vanished were more potent than the joys which were left. His gaze
turned northward, where, far, far away, peaked Antelao shot its spires up
into the sky like a white phantom above the mists of the lagoons, and the
ghostlike points seemed fingers beckoning him back to the home of his
youth. Year after year had he answered their call. … We will follow in spirit
the course of his pilgrimage. (Scott 1893, 29)
Distinct from Anna Jameson’s imaginative depiction of the Dolomite

Mountains, Leader Scott’s ‘pilgrimage’ to Cadore provides us with a
description in which a mountain is named. The Antelao, the highest
mountain of Cadore is difficult to see from Venice, even on the clearest
of summers. This mountain, however, became such a symbolic marker of
that scenery that a simple knot of clouds could be misinterpreted and
transfigured into an authentic view of it. Such was the power that the
legacy of that cultivated gaze possessed, a power further enhanced in
approaching the birthplace of Titian in the Dolomites where travellers
would first get a real glimpse of the Antelao: ‘We know at once that yon-
der vague and shadowy mass which soars beyond our sight and seems to
gather up the slopes of the valley as a robe, can be none other than the
Antelao. A grand, but a momentary sight!’ (Edwards 1873, 43).
Even those who arrived to the Dolomites from the northern route,
such as Frances Elliot, could not forbear from imagining its sight viewed
in a painting by Titian: ‘Antalao (sic), with its magnificent pinnacles blaz-
ing with magic colours in the morning sun, seemed to me but a
great landmark pointing to the wonder-land behind … all reminded
me of “bits” by Titian’ (Elliot 1870, 356). The ‘bits by Titian’ evoked
270 W. Bainbridge
here in a close-up encounter with the Dolomites were directly mediated

by Josiah Gilbert, who had literally reduced Titian’s backgrounds into
pieces to be admired not from Venice but from Cadore itself, amid the
mountains. The peaks portrayed in Titian’s paintings were conveniently
reproduced in his book Cadore, or Titian’s Country (1869) with an indica-
tion of their tentative names, and the same was done also for the paint-
ings of other painters of the Venetian school, such as Giovanni Bellini
(Fig. 13.2, Bainbridge 2017).
Modern Mountains
In sharp contrast with the Venetian allure that Titian’s house in Cadore
could provide, the Dolomite peaks continue to grant access to realm of
the fairy tale, offering many ways to harness ‘the liberating potential of
the fantastic’ (Zipes 2006, 169–91). For ‘romantic anti-capitalist writers
of fairy tales like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’, this outlandish realm
allowed them to ‘look back conservatively to the past for salvation’, trans-
forming the real experience of picturesque gazing into a fantastic vision
of picturesque dreaming constructed in a mediated encounter with an
imagined mountain scenery born out of childhood memories (Zipes
2006, 185).
Although still hazy in its evidence, it has been advanced that the bizarre
forms of the Dolomite Mountains inspired the creation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s
‘Middle Earth’. It is enough to recall here that Tolkien possessed a post-
card with a reproduction of Josef Madlener’s Der Berggeist (‘the spirit or
the ghost of the mountain’), portraying a wizard-like man, seated alone
in a forest but surrounded by a friendly and beneficial wild-life. On the
envelope in which the author kept it, Tolkien wrote ‘The origin of
Gandalf ’ (Carpenter 2000, 59; Kiermeier-Debre and Vogel 2007;
Zimmerman 1983). Despite the fantastic atmosphere emanating from
the picture, it is here clearly possible to distinguish not only a dolomitic
aura surrounding the pink mountains in the background, but the actual
topographic features, I suggest here, of the Cinque Torri, near Cortina
d’Ampezzo (Fig. 13.3).
Fig. 13.2 Josiah Gilbert, Dolomite Forms in Titian and others of the Venetian
School, in Gilbert (1869, plate XII, page 74)
272 W. Bainbridge
Fig. 13.3 Josef Madlener, The Berggeist, 1920s, ink, watercolour and gouache,
675×508 cm, private collection, sold at Sotheby’s in 2005. Image provided courtesy
of Sotheby’s London
The Dolomite background of Titian’s paintings, so much cherished

by Josiah Gilbert is gone. Madlener’s foreground replaces here Venetian
civilized classicism (civilisation) with German cultural rooted in Nature
(Kultur)—columns become trees, buildings become boulders, cherubs
become squirrels, and architectural adornments become wild flowers,
wrapped in the solitude of a gaze that is not cast from an Italian city
anymore but from a German forest. The Dolomites are surrounded by
an evocative mysterious iconography that is not immediately recogniz-
able through classical or biblical erudition, but perceived instead as a
fantastic stage without prescriptive narrative open to fabulous and pri-
meval reformulations—as if the written script of the Grand Tour
would be replaced by the oral tales of a Germanic Wanderer (Busk
1871, 1874).
Madlener’s scene was most probably taken from the Dolomitenstrasse—
the new spectacular Dolomite Road that the Austrians opened in 1909 as
an alternative to the old Titian Route linking Venice to Cadore. By then,
the commercial exploitation of the Dolomite region had already become
an Austrian affair. The staggering series of Grand Hotels that tourists
could find along the great ‘Dolomite Road’, conceived and realized by
Theodor Christomannos to link Bozen to Cortina d’Ampezzo through
some of the most spectacular Dolomite passes, bore unambiguously
Austrian names. In 1896, following the Swiss model, Christomannos—
certainly the most glittering figure in the history of tourism in Tyrol—
founded the Tyrolean Alpine Hotel Association to develop the high
valleys of the Dolomite District through the building and running of
new comfortable hotels, linked together in a well-organized network of
luxurious tourist resorts (Faggioni 2012, 132–66; Hartungen 2006,
25–27; Kramer 1972; Patzeit 2010). Christomannos’ hotels inserted an
‘urban interzone’ in the mountainous landscape of Tyrol, allowing it to
become part of an updated version of the Grand Tour—the ‘Grand Hotel
Tour’ (Knoch 2008; Pitscheider 2005; Trentin-Meyer 2000). These tem-
porary and transitory zones constituted seasonal urban islands within
isolated upland communities, cosmopolitan islands in which chunks of
modernity suddenly appeared.
British travellers, who had promoted the Dolomites as a ‘new play-
ground’ distinct from the ‘old playground’ represented by the Swiss Alps,
274 W. Bainbridge
lost their exclusive access to the region, confirming what Elliot had said
back in 1870 that without the Dolomites ‘Tyrol is a bad Switzerland’
(1870, 353). The loss of this exclusivity transformed itself into a nostalgic
claim over the real ‘soul’ of the Dolomite landscape, threatened by
Austrian encroachers. The debatable character of the region became then
palpable (Bainbridge 2014, 2016).
In introducing his well-informed lecture on ‘The Southern Frontiers of
Austria’ to the members of the Royal Geographical Society in 1915,
Douglas W. Freshfield—president of the Society and former president of
the Alpine Club—could not forbear evoking ‘the reasoned opinion’
expressed by Friedrich Ratzel, one of the acknowledged pioneers of polit-
ical geography (Farinelli 2000, 200; Mikesell 1978). In a short article on
the political subdivision of the Alpine regions, Ratzel defended the view
that the so-called Southern Alps were wholly Italian: ‘ganz Italienish’
(Freshfield 1915, 415).8 One year after the outbreak of World War I, in a
period that had already witnessed the beginning of the conflict between
the Kingdom of Italy and the Austrian Empire for the renegotiation of
their Alpine frontiers, Freshfield’s choice could not have been more
polemical. Not only was Ratzel one of the fathers of political geography,
and therefore an absolute authority in the field, not only was he German,
but his article was published in the official journal of the German–
Austrian Alpine Club.
Unlike the British Alpine Club, with its restrictive membership
requirements, the Alpenverein had adopted a rather universal ethos
towards mountaineering, welcoming members from all social strata of
the population (but excluding Jews and socialists) and thus functioning
as the symbolic site for gathering different mountain identities under
the all-inclusive rubric of German Heimat (Holt 2008, 5; Hansen
1995).9 The outburst of World War I intensified this approach and
spurred the Alpenverein to transform the role of the German mountain-
eer from a physically powerful, nature-loving individual to a thoroughly
nationalist, militarized defender of the Heimat, qualifying itself as an
organization dedicated to the production of an invincible, masculine
Germany. One of the privileged fields in which this new turn could
fully express itself was the Austrian district of Tyrol, which at that time
also included the Italian district of Trentino—the Italian-speaking part

of the region.
Forty years before, in a humorous page of his Italian Alps (1875),
Freshfield had already drawn a clear line between the German and the
English interpretations of mountaineering, acknowledging the open
competition between the two respective nations:
The races of English and German mountaineers, after making due allow-
ance for the exceptions which there are to every rule, will be found respec-
tively to embody many of the characteristics of the two nations. Our Alpine
Clubman affords while in the Alps an example of almost perpetual motion.
… He dashes from peak to peak, from group to group, even from one end
of the Alps to the other, in the course of a short summer holiday. Exercise
in the best of air, a dash of adventure, and a love of nature, not felt the less
because it is not always on his tongue, are his chief motives. A little botany,
or chartography (sic), may come into his plans, but only by the way and in
a secondary place. He is out on a holiday and in a holiday humour.
(Freshfield 1875, 182–3)
The speedy pace of the British mountaineer functions here as a trope

for ‘lightness’—lightness of spirit, lightness of equipment, and lightness
of goals. And while the German mountaineer ‘continues to revolve like a
satellite, throwing considerable light on the mass to which he is attached,
round the Ortler or the Marmolata … his English rival dashes comet-
wise, doing little that is immediately useful’ (Freshfield 1875, 184):
Far different is the scheme and mode of operation of the German moun-
taineer. To him his summer journey is no holiday, but part of the business
of life. He either deliberately selects his ‘Excursions-Gebiet’ in the early
spring with a view to do some good work in geology or mapping, or more
probably has it selected for him by a committee of his club. About August
you will find him seriously at work. While on the march he shows in many
little ways his sense of the importance of his task. His coat is decorated
with a ribbon bearing on it the badge or decoration of his club. He carries
in his pockets a notebook, ruled in columns, for observations of every con-
ceivable kind, and a supply of printed cards ready to deposit on the heights
he aims at. (Freshfield 1875, 183–4)
276 W. Bainbridge
If the British mountaineer, once back home, ‘hurries off in the inter-
vals of other business a ten-page paper for the “Alpine Journal”’, the
German one produces ‘a solid monograph, properly divided into heads,
“orographical, geological, botanical, and touristical”, … published in
the leading geographical magazine of Germany’ and ‘followed by a
thick volume, printed in luxurious type, and adorned with highly
coloured illustrations and a prodigious map, most valuable doubtless,
but, alas! to weak English appetites somewhat indigestible’ (Freshfield
1875, 185).
The real reason, however, behind this clearly stereotypical characteriza-
tion seems to be another. Despite the witty, if not sarcastic, tone—impos-
sible to be replicated in 1915—Freshfield vigorously contested the
inclusion of the Trentino within the ‘German Alps’:
The exertions of our German fellow-climbers can, however, scarcely jus-

tify the annexation of the district calmly carried out by one of their writ-
ers. ‘In all our German Alps’, says a learned doctor, ‘there is hardly a more
forsaken or unknown corner than the Adamello.’ ‘In unseren Deutschen
Alpen!’ There is not in the whole Alps a region which is more thoroughly
Italian than the mountain-mass of which the Presanella is the highest, the
Adamello the most famous, summit. … The mountains of the Trentino
may be still, politically speaking, Austro-Italian Alps; in every other
respect they belong entirely to the southern peninsula. (Freshfield 1875,
185–6)
By 1915, the expression ‘unsere Deutschen Alpen’ (‘our German Alps’)

had already mutated into a claim that gave political weight to the open
conflict over the frontiers between Italy and Austria. The Austrians not
only claimed Trentino as part of their own territory, but also the Ampezzo
Valley, with Cortina—the geographical and cultural background of
Titian’s Cadore:
Yes; Italian they are [the Southern Alps], and their peculiar charm lies in
the combination they display of Italian space and serenity with Alpine
grandeur. There is a delightful element of surprise when the wide harmoni-
ous sweep of the landscape is interrupted by the strange shapes of the spires
and obelisks that suddenly surge up above the lower hills. The eyes of the
traveller, in place of being confined between two mountain walls, wander

out into great distances, over wide expanses, and his imagination follows
them to recall past rambles, or anticipate fresh adventure. (Freshfield 1915,
415–6)
No need, at this point, to further discuss the relevance of those ‘spires’

and ‘obelisks’ as figurative tropes almost uniquely associated with the
Dolomites in British travel literature since the times of Murray. Freshfield’s
sketches recirculated in the Austro-Italian debate a set of symbols com-
mon to a British context. It is neither the idea of Heimat, defended by the
Austrians, nor the idea of the ‘bastions of the nation’, defended by the
Italians that motivates those sketches (Armiero 2011, 87; Cuaz 2005,
167), but the idea of a shared sensibility, which received its symbolic
consolidation in the loop of a movable framework of cultural practices
(Wickberg 2007)—the idea, we could say, of a sensibility in transition.
The nostalgia for a cultivated gaze, for a refined but conversational
vocabulary to express it, for a set of established interactions between per-
manent dwellers and temporary sojourners is coupled here with the fear
of losing the Arcadian fantasy of English mountaineering—‘now this
Garden of Proserpine, the haunt of shepherds and peaceful herds, is
being defaced by trenches and watered with blood. The pity of it!’
(Wickberg 2007, 426). The image used to further develop and in some
ways appropriate this sobering scene derives, perhaps not surprisingly,
from the poetic works of one of the acknowledged pioneers of that sensi-
bility—William Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’ (Wordsworth 2008,
151–2):
Here a few years, and flowers will cover the trenches and the graves and
there will be only an echo in the valley homes to tell ‘old unhappy far-off
things, and battles long ago’ [from Wordsworth, ‘The Solitary Reaper, 1805,
ll. 19–20’]. Battles I fear with relatively small results. (Freshfield 1915, 426)
Indeed, the great season of the British discovery of the Dolomites was
destined to end with the Great War—if not earlier, with the development
of the modern tourism business in South Tyrol, between the 1890s and
the 1910s.
278 W. Bainbridge
Notes
1. Elliot’s titles would include Diary of an Idle Woman in Italy (1871), Pictures
of Old Rome (1872), The Italians (1875), The Diary of an Idle Woman in
Sicily (1881), Roman Gossip (1894), besides novels and studies of ‘Old
Court Life’ in France and Spain.
2. From a technical point of view, topographic prominence is conventionally
defined as the height of a peak’s summit above the lowest contour line
encircling it, sometimes referred to as ‘lowest pass’, ‘saddle point’, or
‘col’—‘the height of a mountain above the saddle of the highest ridge con-
necting it to a peak higher still’ (Helman and Earl 2005, 5).
3. Murray’s description refers quite closely to the one provided by Leopold
von Buch, one of the most celebrated earth scientists of the time (Buch
1823); on the parallels between the two, see Bainbridge (2016).
4. What are known as the Dolomites remained variously dubbed also as
‘Friuli’s Mountains’, ‘Rhætian Hills’, ‘Mystic Mountains’, ‘Pale
Mountains’, and so on, until the publication of The Dolomite Mountains
(Gilbert and Churchill 1864); for the current debate surrounding the his-
torical naming of the region, see Torchio and Decarli (2013).
5. In a similar way, for instance, Nicola Watson explored the making and
unmaking of ‘Scott Country’ (2012); Stephen Daniels noted that by the
1890s tours to ‘Constable Country’ in Suffolk prompted tourists to expe-
rience in reality the landscape painted in works such as The Hay Wain
(1821), a painting which had come to symbolize an ‘essential England’
(Daniels 1993; Matless 1998); Shelagh Squire has shown that visits to
Hill Top Farm, the Lake District home of Beatrix Potter, conjured up
emotions and meanings which connected less with the writer herself or
the content of her Peter Rabbit books than ‘values about happy child-
hoods and nostalgia for English country life’ (1994, 117).
6. During the Grand Tour, Anglo-Italian travellers negotiated their British
gaze by inhabiting a liminal space between home and abroad, entrapped
in a positional ‘betweenness’ as the deictic locus for casting their Self in
subjective views (Schoina 2009, 6–16; Saglia 2000, 144). Un-Italianized
tourists, instead, constructed their British gaze by relentlessly representing
home while abroad, caught in an inescapable ‘stayathomeativeness’—as
Mary Shelley put it—as the hegemonic template for confirming their self
in objective views (Shelley 1826, 327). The legacy of the Grand Tour
emerged as a heritage to be revived by some Victorian travellers and be
exploited by others, marking a clear distinction between two different

travel styles—the one interpreted by the ‘traveller’ and the one performed
by the ‘tourist’ (Buzard 1993, 18–79).
7. Edwards is interested in the cabinet of curiosities she finds in the hotel
Nave D’Oro in Predazzo, a town noted in the early nineteenth century as
privileged site for leading mineralogists and geologists, see Ciancio (1999)
and Vardabasso (1950). Her curiosity is here entirely absorbed by a small
bronze bracelet of Etruscan origin found in the area together with a series
of other similar objects (Edwards 1873, 282); her archaeological interests
were driven by the publication of Ludwig Steub’s theory on the unity of
the Etruscan and Rhaetian languages, and on the ethnic link between the
people of Tyrol and the Etruscans (1843).
8. Freshfield is referring here to Ratzel (1896, 79).
9. For the relevance of Heimat in this context, see Applegate (1990), Blickle
(2004), Confino (1997), Jacobson (2003), and Pasinato (2000, 2004).
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Index1
A architecture, 5–7, 51, 52, 89, 95,

Ackermann, Diane, 17–20, 32n2 124, 178, 183, 220, 225, 226,
Addison, Joseph, 220, 258 249, 250, 252
aesthetics, 3, 7, 9, 17, 25, 29, 91, Arendt, Hannah, 132
155–70, 193, 195, 202, 203, Athens, 6, 81–3, 89–91, 96–7, 98n3
218–20, 223, 227, 229, 230, Augustine (Saint), 70, 71, 73, 74,
256, 258–60 78n4, 197, 198
Alcazaba, 213 aura, 41, 85, 256, 260, 268, 270
Alhambra, 28, 223, 225–7, 229, Axis Mundi, 2, 40, 41
231
Alps, 15–34, 138–40, 155, 190, 197,
202, 207, 213–15, 218–24, B
230, 247, 261, 263, 264, 268, Balmat, Jacques, 21
273–6 Beatus of Liébana, 60, 62
Altdorfer, Albrecht, 200–2 Bings, 172–3
Andalusia, 213 bird’s-eye view, 214
apostles, 40, 63, 68, 70, 71, 73 Bourrit, Marc-Théodore, 205, 219
Arcadia, 218–30, 267, 277 bridge, 173, 238, 246, 247, 253n5
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refers to notes.

1

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3
286 Index
British Alpine Club, 274 da Vinci, Leonardo, 198, 199

Buffon, Comte de (Leclerc, Georges Deleuze, Gilles, 93, 94, 100n16,
Louis), 129–31, 133, 134 100n17
Burke, Edmund, 220 Della Dora, Veronica, 10, 44, 55n5,
Burning Bush, 107, 108, 111, 115, 189–210, 214, 218, 229, 240
116, 118–21, 123, 126n5 Dent, Clinton Thomas, 156, 157,
Byers, Elizabeth A., 131–3 166–8
Dickens, Charles, 255, 256
dioramas, 22, 24, 27, 207
C Dolomite Mountains, 9, 255–79
Carmelites, 241 Doré, Gustave, 265–7
Carr, John, 228, 229 Dorrian, Mark, 6, 92–4
cartography/cartographic, 6, 63–5, Duccio di Bueninsegno, 190–2, 194,
67, 69, 76, 78n3, 81–101, 198
190, 193–5
cartosemiotics, 64, 78n3
Cassiodorus, 71, 78n4 E
Caucasus mountains, 214 ecological praxis, 83, 94
caves, 37, 38, 44–50, 53, 54, 61, ecosophy, 81–101
109, 111, 202 Eden, 65, 194, 195, 221–3, 228
Célérier, Jean, 130, 132, 134 Egeria, 110, 111, 191, 193, 195,
Chamonix, 25, 219, 224 198, 203
Chronicle of 754, 59–61, 71, 72 Eiger, 4, 17, 20–30, 33n12
Clark, William George, 224 Eliade, Mircea, 40, 252, 253n2
Climacus, John (Saint), 40, 119 Elliot, Frances Minto, 256, 262,
climbing, 3, 7, 18, 20, 25, 26, 28, 263, 267, 269, 274, 278n1
33n15, 51, 52, 61, 74,
107–27, 137, 155–70, 180,
223, 256 F
communal ritual, 5, 37–9, 43, 50–4 Ford, Richard, 223, 224, 228
Cook, Thomas, 262–4
Corner, James, 6, 93, 94, 100n17
cultural geography, 83, 92, 100n14, G
215, 216 Geertz, Clifford, 18–20, 23, 27, 30,
31, 32n2
geographic, 2, 9, 38, 62, 64, 81,
D 92–7, 99n14, 129, 132, 133,
Dante, 241 147–9, 206, 213–31, 257,
Danube, 190, 239, 248 258, 262, 268, 276
Index
287
geological, 2, 9, 11, 17, 69, 70, 81, iconography/iconographical, 6, 29,

88, 92–7, 109, 113, 163, 164, 65, 113, 118, 124, 126n3,
193, 205, 218, 219, 257, 259, 214, 231, 240, 273
263, 276 identity/identities, 7, 28, 50, 62, 74,
geo-tourism, 263 91, 92, 131–4, 136–41, 143,
Gothic revival, 215, 218, 220 145–9, 247, 274
Granada, 213–31 images, 9–11, 22, 59, 60, 62–5,
Grand Tour, 222, 273, 278n6 67–9, 71, 73, 77, 77n1, 81,
Gregory of Nyssa, 119, 120 82, 88, 90, 109, 113, 116,
Gregory the Great, 70 118, 191, 194, 215, 217–20,
Guattari, Félix, 82, 83, 93–6, 223, 226, 240, 259
100n17, 101n19, 101n20 imitation, 112, 125
guidebooks, 159, 160, 264 industrialization, 238
Inglis, David Henry, 225, 229, 231
Irving, Washington, 229
H Islam, 72, 77
Haemus range, 190
Harrer, Heinrich, 23–5
Heidegger, Martin, 11, 237–9, 241, J
243–9, 251, 252, 253n4, Jameson, Anna, 268, 269
253n7 Jennings, Robert, 226, 227
Heimat, 274, 277, 279n9 Jerusalem, 6, 60, 69, 74–7, 115,
hesychasm/hesychast, 37–55 193, 242, 243, 253
hesychast practice, 38, 45, 48 Jesus prayer, 39, 45, 48, 51
historiographies, 83 Jones, Owen Glynne, 156–8
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 11, 239,
247–9, 251, 252
Holy Land, 77, 110, 193 K
holy mountain, 41, 107, 113, 114, Kepler, Johannes, 219
125, 240 Korres, Manolis, 89
horizons, 8, 43, 95, 132, 190,
198–200, 204, 206, 208
Humboldt, Chimborazo, 203 L
Lake Geneva, 238
landscapes, 2, 17, 38, 65, 81–5, 92,
I 115, 164, 171, 189, 198–202,
Iberia/Iberian peninsula, 6, 213–31, 239, 256
59, 60, 62, 65, 71–3, 75, Lewis, C.S., 136, 270
76, 78n4, 213, 215, 222, lines, 6–8, 11, 19, 26, 29, 42, 51,
227, 230 64, 74, 75, 93, 155–69, 225,
288 Index
241, 252, 257, 260, 268, 275, monastic, 8, 37–9, 42, 44, 46, 53,
278n2 54n2, 55n3, 55n4, 59–78
linguistic, 60, 64, 65, 69, 244, 245, montagnards, 129–50
260 Mont Blanc, 4, 17, 21–30, 32n6,
loca sancta, 110, 119, 120, 124, 126 32n8, 32n9, 157, 189–210,
219, 224
mosaic, 8, 40, 107–27
M Moses, 41, 107, 109, 111, 112,
MacLeod, Dave, 156, 166–9 115–22, 124, 125, 193, 198,
Madaba map, 193, 194 240, 243, 248, 253n4
Madlener, Joseph, 270, 272, 273 mountaineering, 7, 19, 21, 22, 24,
Mappamundi, 63 26, 27, 33n10, 51, 137, 155,
mapping, 3, 6, 7, 39, 43, 44, 49, 88, 156, 163, 214, 257, 274, 275,
89, 93, 98n7, 275 277
maps, 2, 6, 47, 63–70, 73, 75, 76, Mountain forum, 131–3, 144
77n1, 83, 93, 95, 97, 99n14, mountain people, 131, 133, 134,
100n16, 100n17, 160, 193–5, 136, 138, 141, 146–9, 150n1
206, 224, 257, 258, 276 Mount Athos, 5, 37–55, 196
marble, 6, 81–5, 87–91, 96, 97, Mount Bouet, 205
98n6, 98n7, 115 Mount Casius, 190
massif, 17, 144, 148, 213–15, 218, Mount Dindymon, 189
219, 223, 225, 228, 230 Mount Everest, 25, 28, 33n10,
materiality, 2, 50, 60–5, 85, 91, 92, 34n23, 159
97, 174, 215, 218 Mount Horeb, 107, 109–11, 113,
materials, 6, 10, 11, 22, 28, 38–40, 121, 240, 242, 243
52, 81, 82, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91, Mount Moriah, 240
95, 155, 164, 172–80, 183, Mount Nebo, 191, 193, 198
214, 216, 223, 238, 242, 243, Mount of Temptation, 189–210
264 Mount Olympus, 196
matter, 8, 22, 81, 96, 97, 139, 140, Mount Pentelicon, 81–101
164, 171–84, 193, 244 Mount Purgatory, 241
Matterhorn, 4, 17, 21–30, 34n23, Mount Sinai, 40, 107–27, 242,
34n24 251
medieval, 6, 59, 66, 67, 74, 77, 194, Mount Ventoux, 196, 198, 241
198, 218, 220, 221, 223, 225–7 Mount Zion, 240, 242, 243, 252
Milton, John, 200, 202, 219 Mulhacen peak, 213
mining, 171, 177, 180, 183 Murray, John, 261–3, 277, 278n3
Mission of the Apostles, 63, 70, 73 Mūsā, Jabal, 107–10, 112, 113
Mona Lisa, 199 muslims, 5, 59–62, 71–3, 75–7
Index
289
N R
New Materialism, 8, 172–83 Ratzel, Friedrich, 274
Niddry Bing, 8, 172, 173, 176, 179, representation/representational, 2, 3,
183 10, 11, 16, 17, 19, 60–5, 69,
73, 76, 83, 88, 89, 97, 98n7,
124, 125, 133, 134, 136, 137,
O 190, 200, 215–18, 230, 257
oil shale, 171–3, 176–80, 183 Rhine, 22, 239, 246, 247
Orientalism, 215 risk, 15, 19, 30, 31, 60, 72
Roberts, David, 226, 227
rock climbing, 156, 164, 167
P Romanticism, 238, 240, 249, 252
Paccard, Gabriel, 21 Rome, 66, 190, 196
Paley, William, 249, 251 Rose, Gillian, 92–4, 216
performance, 4, 5, 11, 15–17, 19, Ruskin, John, 11, 237–9, 241, 243,
20, 23, 28, 65–76, 100n17, 249–53, 265, 268
180, 218
Petrarch, F., 196–8, 202, 203, 241,
268 S
pilgrimages, 8, 37, 38, 42, 43, 51–4, Said, Edward, 217
55n5, 107, 109, 110, 120, Saint Basil, the Younger, 194
193, 263, 269 St Gregory Palamas, 40
play Saussure, Horace Bénédict, 191,
dark play, 4, 15–34 202–5, 207, 208, 219
deep play, 15–20, 27, 30, 31, Schechner, Richard, 4, 15, 16, 19, 30
32n2 Semple, Robert, 223
policies, 131, 137–40, 143–7 Shepherd, Nan, 208, 209
postures, 50, 115, 121, 122, 126n3 Sierra Nevada, 10, 16, 213–31
Prezi, 83–5, 97, 98n3 silence, 5, 37–9, 43–54, 178, 183
Procopius of Caesarea, 109 Sinai, 40, 107–27, 242, 251
Pyrenees mountains, 140, 214 Smith, Albert, 17, 21–3, 25, 27, 28,
30, 32n8, 32n9, 207
Smith, Richard William, 190, 192,
Q 198
quarries, 82, 83, 85–7, 89–91, 98n5, Stephen, Leslie, 156, 157, 161
98n6, 99n13 storytelling, 16, 22, 24
290 Index
sublime, 31, 43, 85, 208, 215, V

218–20, 222–30, 250, 261, Vega, 214, 215, 218, 223, 227–31
268 Veleta peak, 213, 223, 224
Victorian, 17, 21, 29, 262, 268,
278n6
T views, 16, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 29, 43,
telescopes, 4, 24–7, 30, 165, 202 88, 91, 93, 95, 108, 113, 124,
territoriality, 129–50 159, 165, 174, 176, 190, 193,
texts, 6, 11, 59–67, 70, 71, 75–7, 194, 196–200, 202–9, 214,
77n1, 114, 118, 129–31, 133, 226, 230, 238, 239, 242, 246,
136, 139, 156, 161, 162, 217, 249, 257, 264, 268, 269, 274,
237, 240–3, 263, 264 275, 278n2, 278n6
Theodoret of Cyrrhus, 110, 112 Virgin of the Rocks, 199
theophanies, 40, 109, 115, 118, 119,
121
Titian, 267–71, 273, 276 W
Tolkien, J.R.R., 270 walking, 43, 46, 51, 53, 54, 193,
tourism, 9, 20, 142, 231, 273, 277 208, 267
tracing, 37–55, 93, 100n17, 258 West Lothian, 171, 172
travelogues, 256, 262, 263, 267 Whymper, Edward, 27, 29, 137
Turner, J. M. W., 11, 249, 251, 252 Wordsworth, William, 224, 238,
239, 277
Wren, Christopher, 226
U
UNESCO, 259, 260
United Nations Conference on Y
Environment and Young, Geoffrey Winthrop, 7,
Development (UNCED), 141, 155–7, 159–62, 165, 167
142 Young, James, 172

Mountains, Mobilities and Movement

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Mountains,

ISBN 978-1-137-58634-6 ISBN 978-1-137-58635-3 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952596

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: agustavop/gettyimages

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

I once heard a talk by one of the world’s greatest mountaineers, a man

and altitude—the space of human habitation. These are the themes of

every child is expected to follow in the course of their education. In this

tacted by civilisation or incorporated into the human fold. It promptly

a campaign, fitting himself up against a perceived adversary and hoping to

the mountaineer, however. From his telescopic perspective the ground

University of Aberdeen Tim Ingold

Part 1 Performativity 13

2 Deep and Dark Play in the Alps: Daring Acts and Their

3 In the Shadow of the Mountain: Tracing the Hesychast

4 Reading Mountains: Performative Visual Language in

5 ‘Ecosophic Cartographies’ of Mount Pentelicon 81

Part 2 Changing Perspectives 105

6 Climbing the Invisible Mountain: The Apse

7 How Can One Be a ‘Montagnard’? Social and Political

8 A Difficult Line: The Aesthetics of Mountain

9 Untimely Mountains | Entangled Matter171

Part 3 Mobility 187

10 Mountains as a Way of Seeing: From Mount of

11 Representing the Landscape of the Sierra Nevada

12 ‘I Lift Up My Eyes to the Hills …’237

13 Mountains Run Mad: Picturesque Signatures

William Bainbridge Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London,

Landscape is tension, the tension between perceiver and perceived, subject

Landscape isn’t either objective or subjective; it’s precisely an intertwining, a

© The Author(s) 2018 1

We often think of the landscape as something static or slowly changing,

landscapes and agents of interpretation. Concepts of performance, practice

Following a similar track, the connection between performativity and

Expanding on Wylie’s aforementioned theme of place, Emily Goetsch

movement and performativity play in the landscape. Dynamically

core of practical artistic and architectural processes which develop into

Further developing the tension between polarities, William Bainbridge

symbolic meanings of the material environment’, and which ‘foregrounds

Della Dora, V. (2009). Travelling landscape-objects. Progress in Human

Introduction: Defining and Reassessing Deep

© The Author(s) 2018 15

of particular interest to the discussion proposed here, dark play in the

Female: I was 16 years old and on vacation at Yosemite with my father. I

In a very literal testing of boundaries, the student’s taunting of succes-

sports emphasize the creative, aesthetic and performative ­expressions of

(3) Geertz’s sensitivity to the cockfight as performance—where melodra-

Whilst mountaineering writers have appropriated the term ‘deep

taken to intense and transcendent heights’, argues Diane Ackermann

Positioned as such, dark play relates to other forms of dark culture,

 erformed Retellings of Dark Play: Mont Blanc,

The exterior of a two-storied chalet with projecting eaves, carved balcony

The ‘views’ referred to here were in fact dioramas, created by William

Beverley’s brilliantly backlit images of the climbers sought to bring the

In 1966, when the next mountaineering challenge after climbing the

Gillman was unfortunate enough to witness the death of US climber

From stage fright at realising I was a performer in a gigantic vertical arena

With tourist guide Lonely Planet: Switzerland noting the history of

If the Eigerwand has a grim past of failed attempts, there is an equally

the Alps will be examined—wingsuiting from the Matterhorn—to reveal

ing from or around the Matterhorn. As a headcam video, it naturally

thanks to the connecting technologies of the internet, YouTube’s facility

University of Aberdeen Tim Ingold

Part 1 Performativity 13

2 Deep and Dark Play in the Alps: Daring Acts and Their

3 In the Shadow of the Mountain: Tracing the Hesychast

4 Reading Mountains: Performative Visual Language in

5 ‘Ecosophic Cartographies’ of Mount Pentelicon 81

Part 2 Changing Perspectives 105

6 Climbing the Invisible Mountain: The Apse

7 How Can One Be a ‘Montagnard’? Social and Political

8 A Difficult Line: The Aesthetics of Mountain

9 Untimely Mountains | Entangled Matter171

Part 3 Mobility 187

10 Mountains as a Way of Seeing: From Mount of

11 Representing the Landscape of the Sierra Nevada

12 ‘I Lift Up My Eyes to the Hills …’237

13 Mountains Run Mad: Picturesque Signatures

Introduction: Defining and Reassessing Deep

sports emphasize the creative, aesthetic and performative expressions of

erformed Retellings of Dark Play: Mont Blanc,

The Mountain of Athos

The Annual Ascent to the Peak of the Mountain

he Silence of the Mountain: The Desert, the Cave

Hesychasm, Silence and Communal Ritual

ountain Language, Materiality

Osma, Archivo de la Catedral, Cod. 1, folios 34v–35r) and the Saint-

Attic Marble Landscape

rioritizing a reading of Guattari’s theorization, this chapter explores sit-

uarrying, Representing, Imagining

found in travel journals, paintings and essays, depicting the quarried

‘Geological and Geographic [and Ecological]