Violet Flame on Mt. Shasta, CA [actual photo]

Mount Shasta, located near the Oregon border in northern California, holds the distinction of being one of the world’s preeminent sacred mountains. It is recognized as an eligible Native American cultural and cosmological property on the National Register of Historic Places.

Artifacts found in the surrounding area conservatively suggest at least 11,000 years of human habitation, designating this region as one of the longest-occupied areas of North America.

Northwestern California Native American tribes traditionally view Mount Shasta as being structurally and energetically connected to a wide range of important volcanic landscapes and mountains, which extend northwards and southwards of their tribal territories.

A primordial spiritual connection is believed to link all these energetically powerful sites together, including Mount Shasta, Lassen Peak, Lava Beds, Medicine Lake Highlands, Crater Lake , as well as many other lesser landmarks found throughout the region.

Mount Shasta’s vast antiquity and mythic relevance places its significance on par, historically and categorically, with other sacred sites found among the world’s oldest known civilizations, including the temples and pyramids of Egypt, Stonehenge, the Mayan pyramids$ Machu Picchu

Native Americans have observed Mount Shasta as a sacred mountain from time immemorial; they viewed the mountain and its surroundings as holy ground; it is thought to be one of the first earthly places created by the Great Spirit.

In the past, no one but medicine men or women climbed up the mountain beyond the tree line. It was thought to be too powerful for ordinary people to visit, inhabited by hosts of potentially dangerous spirits guardians who could harm person who traveled up the mountain unprepared.

There is, we feel, something different about a sacred mountain which cannot be easily explained, something that makes it exceptional. It possesses a kind of energy that’s unique to itself, which can be sensed and felt as much as seen. It draws people to it…inexplicably,

mysteriously: “The power of such a mountain,” writes Lama Anagarki Govinda,
“is so great and yet so subtle that without compulsion pilgrims are drawn to the mountain from near and far, as if by the force of some invisible magnet, and they will undergo untold hardships

and privations in their inexplicable urge to approach and to worship the sacred spot. Nobody has conferred the title of sacredness upon such a mountain; by virtue of its own magnetic and psychic emanations the mountain is intuitively recognized to be sacred.