To say that Daumal holds mountains as an ideal would be making a gross understatement. Mount Analogue is filled to the brim with helcionic comparisons between ideal states of being and mountaineering. Daumal makes an excellent point that in myth and folklore mountains are heavily featured as a means in which divinity meets humanity upon; as he uses Mt. Olympus and Mt.Sinai as examples and then he goes to take it to the next level and suggest that perhaps mountains are more than mere conduits but a means of obtaining a sort of grace in and of themselves. On page 83 Daumal describes the children born on the shores of Mt. Analogue and how being born there has removed themselves from the “nefarious influences of the degenerate cultures that flourish on our continents” and they are able to undergo the pilgimage up the mountain. Furthermore the mountain guides living on Mount Analogue are placed at the very top of society, with the peoples living on the shores working to aid and support the lifestyles of the guides because they are not fortunate enough to have the ability or drive to climb. It is as if the guides are almost like monks – living in the most ideal state, above the concerns of working society, and placed in high esteem. More of a sense of grace is placed upon on the mountain and being directly tied into religion when the narrator describes his wife’s work in researching the island religions and their “modifications (and especially, she assumed, the purifications and enrichments) brought to the churches by the influence of Mount Analogue.” Pg 86.

Daumal was not alone in his thought of mountains having a redeeming grace or religious qualities du Maurier’s Mount Vireta is filled with religious undertones but in a quite different angle. Mount Analogue is not just a great massive mountain but an almost transcending means of grace. Mount Vireta holds a mythic unknown wildness to it that is slightly beyond tangibility to place into words.

There is an enduring theme of Paganism in Mount Vireta, from the second page the Moon is mentioned and then later Anna’s fascination with it in an almost pagan like ritual of going out barefoot underneath the full moon and taking it in. It almost evokes images of the Greek goddess Artemis, goddess of the Moon and of the hunt, at least that is the impression that I gleaned. Furthermore the loss of the girls and young women from the village who are “worthy” and lost to the conclave on the summit is reminiscent of the cult of Artemis in which virgins would come to serve for a year at Artemis’ temple.

Mountains themselves take on a redeeming quality and a persona to Victor and the narrator as being friends not a summit to conquer but a process of climbing as a way to get to know them. Mount Verita in itself to me remains enigmatic, it does not seem to have the redeeming and friendly quality that the narrator attributes to other mountains but was a strange place calling forth women and taking Anna away from Victor who preceded to waste away his life on the slopes.