Native American Views on Mt. Shasta


The Native American peoples who historically have inhabited the area around Mount Shasta were as culturally diverse as the geography they occupied. The major indigenous peoples of this area were: the Shastans, Achumawi, Atsugewi, Wintu, and Modoc. These peoples all lived on lands, which both touch on and were affected by Mount Shasta. This landscape dominated by Mount Shasta provided for everything that the indigenous people needed - food, shelter, clothing, and tools. The mountains and streams of Siskiyou County provided the Indians with their most important foods: acorns, salmon, and deer. Other animals and plants were utilized for food, clothing, medicines, tools and trade goods. Timber was used for shelter and boats, and volcanic stone (basalt and obsidian) were fashioned into useful tools and weapons. Mount Shasta and the surrounding ecosystems provided everything for Siskiyou County's first inhabitants.

Dominating the landscape, Mount Shasta was also an important part of the Indians' worldview. A number of researchers have reported a variety of Indian terms used to refer to Mount Shasta. Zanger states that the Achumawi and Atsugewi called the mountain "Yet", the Wintu referred to it as "Behem Puyok", and the Modoc identified Mount Shasta as "Melaikshi" ). A survey of Miesses's Mount Shasta: An Annotated Bibliography, reveals these additional Indians references to Mount Shasta: the Shasta people called the mountain withassa , or wai-i-ki ; the Wintun utilized wai-mak , way wan buli, bulim phuyng, bulit , and Bú-lam Pó-yok .

Floyd Buckskin is Headman of the Ajumawi Band, Pit River Tribe whose traditional lands lie east and south of Mount Shasta. He wrote the following about realizing the Creator's purpose in Mount Shasta:

The mountain is sacred just as all things created by the Creator God are, but are we supposed to worship and glorify things created above the Creator himself? Where is that love for him? I love Mount Shasta because the Creator made it just like he created everything. But I love him more because he can help me, teach me, love me. He can heal and correct me. Mount Shasta cannot do that of itself. But the Creator's active spirit through Mount Shasta, through you or anything or direct from the Creator himself, can. It is the Creator's active spirit in all of creation that keeps us alive. It is in all of us if we just acknowledge and honor the Creator. Worship him in spirit aud truth, and throw out the middleman.

The only reason that Mount Shasta is important and any of his creation including you and me, is to remind one another of the Creator, God, and that his purposes will be realized in all of creation, so that honor and worship are directed to him, not to the thing created. I love the Creator, I love you, I love life, I love the earth, there is no need to fight over that. Let the Creator be praised on the mountain, in your home, in your heart, by the river, beneath the shade tree; everywhere at all times and places let him be praised. No mountain can contain him, no temple, no palace, even the earth, nor the stars, but he contains and maintains them all. He establishes his tents with us, and these things that we are expire and cease to exist efore him, but he calls us into being and we exist again, because he loves us, and his will and purpose is realized forever.

Then why protect anything? It's because the Creator gave us a responsibility the day of our creation to take care of the earth. Our people have been here for thousands of years. One of the old prophesies speaks about how we had to take care of this place, take care of this land, take care of this earth, these plants and things, because that's our life. The prophesy says that when the snow begins to disappear on Mount Shasta, we as a people will also disappear. It says that when the snow disappears, things will come upon your people, upon the land, that will threaten your very existence.

That's why we make any effort to protect sacred places, mountains, streams or lakes, animals. We don't own it, the Creator owns it, but he gave it to us to use, to respect and take care of it, until such time as he comes to reclaim it. The earth isn't just the planet, it's you and me. Do we love one another, take care of one another, feed one another? We're not Americans, we're nor Europeans, we're not Indians. We're not our own people but his people. The things that belong to him are his. So he is returning to examine us to see if we have fulfilled what he has put us here for. And if we have lived up to that, then we can enter into his joy, his life.

So what does Mount Shasta mean to Native people?. It means our culture, our way of life, our food, our religion, our symbols, and all those things like that. It's important to us. And those are for our teaching and our understanding, and they're not necessary for you. You have your teachings and traditions that you can draw on. It's available, it's not hidden anywhere. Eagle feathers aren't necessary to pray, to communicate with the Spirit.. We can do that freely, without material things before us. So we can go to the mountains, the rives, the streams, the quiet places, because the Creator calls us to those quiet places so that we can talk to him without interruption and without confusion. We need these places; that's why we need to take cart of them, because we're taking care of our need to be with and communicate with the Creator in a beautiful way.

http://www.siskiyous.edu/shasta/fol/index.htm

The Lemurian Legend

Perhaps the most popular example of Mount Shasta lore, and a legend involving the first claim by non-Native Americans for a spiritual connection with the mountain, concerns the mystical brotherhood believed to roam through jeweled corridors deep inside the mountain. According to Miesse, "In the mid-19th Century paleontologists coined the term "Lemuria" to describe a hypothetical continent, bridging the Indian Ocean, which would have explained the migration of lemurs from Madagascar to India. Lemuria was a continent which submerged and was no longer to be seen. By the late 19th Century occult theories had developed, mostly through the theosophists, that the people of this lost continent of Lemuria were highly advanced beings. The location of the folklore 'Lemuria' changed over time to include much of the Pacific Ocean. In the 1880s a Siskiyou County, California, resident named Frederick Spencer Oliver wrote A Dweller on Two Plants, or, the Dividing of the Way which described a secret city inside of Mount Shasta, and in passing mentioned Lemuria. Edgar Lucian Larkin, a writer and astronomer, wrote in 1913 an article in which he reviewed the Oliver book. In 1925 a writer by the name of Selvius wrote "Descendants of Lemuria: A Description of an Ancient Cult in America" which was published in the Mystic Triangle, Aug., 1925 and which was entirely about the mystic Lemurian village at Mount Shasta. Selvius reported that Larkin had seen the Lemurian village through a telescope. In 1931 Wisar Spenle Cerve published a widely read book entitled Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific in which the Selvius material appeared in a slightly elaborated fashion. The Lemuria-Mount Shasta legend has developed into one of Mount Shasta's most prominent legends" 

According to Zanger, Frederick Spencer Oliver was a Yrekan teen who claimed that his hand began to uncontrollably write a manuscript dictated to him by Phylos, a Lemurian spirit . Meisse points out that Oliver's novel of spiritual fiction is "The single most important source of  Mount Shasta's esoteric legends. The book contains the first published references linking Mt. Shasta to: 1) a mystical brotherhood; 2) a tunnel entrance to a secret city inside Mount Shasta; 3) Lemuria; 4) the concept of "I AM"; 5) "channeling" of ethreal spirits; 6)a panther surprise" . The author claims to have written most of the novel within sight of Mount Shasta, and autobiographical telling of the story from Phylos the Thibetan's point of view is an interesting twist. We have included a few pages of text from the novel, including the reference to the mystic brotherhood that lives amid "the walls, polished as by jewelers, though excavated by giants; floors carpeted with long, fleecy gray fabric that looked like fur, but was a mineral product; ledges intersected by the builders, and in their wonderful polish exhibiting veinings of gold, of silver, of green copper ores, and maculations of precious stones." 

In 1908, Adelia H. Taffinder wrote an article, "A Fragment of the Ancient Continent of Lemuria," for the Atlantic Monthly. In her article she links the concept of Lemuria to California, and Meisse proposses that the article, "with its Theosophical teachings and extension of the Lemurian Myth to California, may have been part of the research material involved in the creation of the Mount Shasta Lemurian Myth as presented by Selvius in 1925 and Creve in 1931" 

Selvius' 1925 two-page article, "Decendants of Lemuria" is, according to Meisse, "the singlemost inportant document in the establishment of the modern Mt. Shasta-Lemurian myth," so we have included Selvius' full-text article.  Selvius claims that Professor Edgar Lucian Larkin viewed the Lemurian site on Mount Shasta using his telescope: "Even no less a careful investigator and scientist than Prof. Edgar Lucin Larkin, for many years director of Mount Lowe Observatory, said in newspaper and magazine articles that he had seen, on many occasions, the great temple of this mystic village, while gazing through a long-distance telescope."

Although Selvius' article is the most historically interesting, Wishar Spenle Cerve's 1931 Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific is, according to Meisse, "responsible for the legend's widespread popularity" . Perhaps most intriging is Meisse's speculation that "it appears from the similarity of material that "Selvius" and "Cerve" were one and the same person" . Further muddying the waters is Edward Stul's worth claim that "Wishar Spenly Cerve" is really a letter-for-letter pseudonym for "Harve Spencer Lewis,"  first Imperator of the Rosicrucian Order of North and South America.  Still, it is Cerve's book, published by the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, that has provided the popular description of the Lemurians as "tall, graceful, and agile," and as visitors that "would come to one of the smaller towns and trade nuggets and gold dust for some modern commodities" .

The idea of a lost continent (and the subsequent existence of Lemurians on Mount Shasta), quickly became widely known, though perhaps not so widely believed. In 1939, Mount Shasta botanist William Cooke was in a Cincinati library when he was asked if he "knew anything about the LeMurians." A few months later, in a Mount Shasta Herald article called "Lights on Mt. Shasta: Evidences Discounted,"  Cooke questions the legend that Larkin could have used a telescope to see any structures on Mount Shasta. About a year later, in another Herald article, titled "Wm. Bridge Cooke Discusses 'Lost Continent' Book," Cooke questioned the possibility of a Lemuria or Mu .

Today the belief that Lemurians inhabit the mountain is still very popular, and anyone visiting the local bookstores will likely be suprised by the plethora of texts on the subject.

Ascended Masters