Mountains Analogous? The Academic Urban Legend of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Cult Film Adaptation of René Daumal’s Esoteric Novel

Abstract

The Chilean-French avant-garde filmmaker and self-styled spiritual teacher Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film, The Holy Mountain (1973), is often referred to as a ‘surrealistic’ exploration of Western Esotericism, and was a pivotal cinematic moment for what Christopher Partridge (2004, 2005) has termed ‘occulture’. It is often claimed in secondary literature and informally online that the film is based on the unfinished novel Mount Analogue (1952) by René Daumal, French writer and follower of the esotericist G.I. Gurdjieff. The Holy Mountain is thus a clear candidate for testing theories about the cultural production of ‘Gurdjieffian’ film adaptations. A closer reading, however, shows that the two texts share few ideological or even structural elements. In the wake of the film’s reception and Jodorowsky’s growing cultural importance, this article maps the congruence of the film to the novel by focusing on the role played by the eponymous mountain as the only invariant symbol in both. Some of the biographical contours of the two artists’ relationship to Gurdjieffian and wider occultural esoteric discourses will also be traced to reveal the pre-critical and largely self referential narrative of the film adaptation in the secondary literature as a species of academic urban legend-making.