Architectural history for gamers 2a: the holy mountain

Not Jodorowski’s hallucinatory epic (sorry) but the whole concept of holy mountains as narrative landscapes.
…recapping the end of the last post,
Before the British conquered Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), it had an independent kingdom tucked into its central highlands, called Kandy (or “Candea” in 16th century Portuguese):

…ringed by forbidding mountains:

this is from before everyone agreed to do maps with North pointing up, so I’ve rotated it to match the map above

The Kings of Kandy ruled over a mixture of Hindu and Buddhist subjects and they presented themselves as ideal priest- or philosopher-kings in both traditions, ruling an ideal spiritual kingdom that was effectively heaven on Earth. This has been a pretty common ploy throughout… most places. China, India, SE Asia, central America, Greece…. So many places, in fact, that some early historians of religions tried to come up with ur-myths about the universality of the ideal kingdom as a mirror of the kingdom of the gods, and of the ruler being a pin or axis point that locks our dirty world together with the ideal god-world, which is usually located in a city in the sky or on a bit of land that touches the sky, i.e. a mountain top.

So a lot of temples are built in the form of holy mountains, like they’re the local version or access point to The Holy Mountain. Shown here, one of the Jain temples at Khajurato, India.

here’s a Buddhist one, from Borobudur, Java, Indonesia, complete with shlepping ascent trek and meditative wheezing.

In many Hindu traditions, that god-home mountain is Mount Meru, which is a very unusual shape:

…wider at the top than the bottom (that’s not actually perspective). It’s also square, but it’s shown trapezoidally on the picture above to show off the colors of 3 of the sides. Mt. Meru sits at the middle of the world (like Kandy in the middle of Sri Lanka), anchoring it firmly to the sky. From Mt. Meru, the world expands in all its glory until it reaches the 4 or 7 concentric seas that surround it, and beyond that is chaos and/or The Buddha. The whole thing is called a Mandala system, and it was as important to Chinese and Majapahiti political theory as to Kandyan.

Phew, that’s better: a nice, clear plan view, more like the maps we’re familiar with, no ambiguous perspective.

The god-home has 4 rivers that spring from a single source/lake and flow down the sides of the mountain, dividing the world into 4 continents – that same scheme finds its way into various Persian and Islamic cosmographies, which explains the 4-garden paradise or chahar bagh, centered on a water cross, that you’re probably familiar with from Mughal funerary parks or late Almohad palaces.

The popularity of the mountain-as-center probably has something to do with mountains being so damn visible from everywhere (and, just occasionally, powerfully explosive). There’s also a common feature that they tend to have people living on them who are regarded as original – either culturally older than valley-dwellers or at least less tractable – it’s an old saw that “civilizations can’t climb hills,” and the Portuguese and Dutch took a lot longer to colonize the hilly center of Sri Lanka than the accessible coast, just like the Romans had had a harder time Imperializing the mountain-dwelling Basques and Caucasus-folks than the valley-dwelling Goths and Franks (although James Scott says we’ve got it backwards – valley people get driven up into the hills in attempts to escape oppressive valley governments, which would support the general principle that ideologies are usually created to cover up the truth, not to represent it). And it’s remarkable how many stories there are around the world about mountains being the origin points for civilizations or the holders of ancient truth and wisdom – the Bugis have a creation myth in which they climbed down out of the sky, from the mountains of Sulawesi. In the Bible, Noah’s family repopulates the world after the flood from the peak of Mt. Ararat (an origin story asserted by, among others, Turkmenbashi).

So mountains come with inbuilt concepts of power and purity – whether that stems from their proximity to heaven or the strange vibrations in the air above the mountaintop, or their harshness, which is imagined to make people stronger. Concepts that stand in direct contradiction to the facts – that mountains suck for supporting polities (they generally have terrible topsoil and worse communications) and have historically hardly ever been origin points for empires (yes yes I know, the Inca. But they’re a special case – no beasts of burden or competition from lowlanders to speak of – they can be seen as more of a community of desperate solidarity than an ambitious and expansive imperial project).

OK so back to Kandy and its political ideology of being a mountain god-kingdom. In the 16th-18th centuries, if you applied to send an embassy to the kingdom from one of the cities down on the coast, they would send you a guide and the whole thing was presented as a pilgrimage. You’d have to bring gifts and pack elephants and it would take weeks.

And the path up the mountains was strictly laid out by the guide: setting out from a courtyard with a bodhi tree (like the one the Buddha died under) you pass through 7 “thorn gates” to have your initiation checked before reaching another bodhi tree just outside the hidden valley

and beyond that, you’d wait at the border of the great lake – source of the life-giving rivers of Sri Lanka.

If the chamberlain invited you across, then you’d ascend another 7 layers at the palace.

from the Wave Swell Wall (symbolizing the waters of the lake) to the Meru Gate, to the Cloud Drift Wall (entering heaven), to the Terrace (with a floor like the sea), Upper Terrace, Lower Audience Hall and, finally, the Throne Room, where the king was displayed, remotely, at the end of another indoor stage-set-like garden, attended by courtiers who would interpret your requests.

Dutch East India Company delegation to Kandy, 1796

So, how to use all this in games?

…published adventures often make some use of landscape in setting the scene – the entrance to the dungeon is in the ruins of a long-lost civilization, multiple layers of history inform the presence of different factions of enemies – but they seldom make the landscape set the scene in a way that makes it relevant to the current action, that frames what the game will really be about. Two notable exceptions are Patrick and Scrap’s Deep Carbon Observatory and Zedeck Siew’s Lorn Song of the Bachelor – the latter, in particular, has the landscape reconfiguring as the adventure runs, to show the current state of play. (Go read those books. I don’t want to spoiler them)

A great example from video game is Tim Schafer’s Grim Fandango, which not only uses a Holy Mountain pilgrimage as its overall frame, it also uses that frame to make it natural that the interaction possibilities and interconnection of spaces reduce steadily as you progress along the game’s journey. It’s a Noir detective story set in the Mexican Land of the Dead, and you start out in a mythologized, Americanized-Modern Mexico City:

which is a whole lot like Raymond Chandler’s LA, plus some of that kinda-Mayan styling that was so popular in the American West in the 1930s. The soundtrack is Mariachi bands and 40s jazz. The plot propels you out of this, into a sort of Tom Waits fool’s journey of thorny forests and doomed dockside casinos and a damnation/redemption narrative that’s more Spanish and Catholic in mood and Casablanca/Third Man in style, with art reminiscent of Diego Rivera murals, all set to tangos and 20s speakeasy jazz.

Along the way, your Jacquayed dungeons get steadily smaller and the puzzles get more elemental, until finally you reach the spiritual showdown, and it’s… a pre-Columbian mountaintop (perhaps Monte Alban) with nothing but the wind, heaven, hell, and pan pipes.

The story these shifting landscapes tell is one of choices narrowing down into destiny – you start in an expansive city, trying to do your job and accidentally discovering something’s wrong. Along your journey you get into claustrophobic environments of the trapped dead – souls who have lost their way and have nothing left to do but gamble and make each other miserable, clustered in a little town in a canyon, dominated by symbols of how they can’t escape – a gigantic ship and zeppelin that are unreachable because they’re too expensive, because you don’t have the right ticket. And finally the place of judgment is all sheer faces of stone with no refuges or toeholds.

“No ticket? I can’t do nothin’ for ya. Go back where ya came from.” You know I never noticed before how much that eagle looks like the US border control logo…

It’s also, by the way, the kind of narrative of Mexican nationalism you get if you go on a tour to see the ancient ruins – you start in the (relative) lowlands, taking in the big city sights to see how modern Mexico can be, then go up into the Spanish heritage staging towns below Monte Alban or Teotihuacan, and finally… stones, grass and sky. What we have left of the Aztecs, Zapotecs and Mayans.

Another way to go with this is to pick up on the fact that this little paradise is just a mirror of the greater one that you can’t visit. If mountain-shaped temples get their power from mimesis of the Original Mountain, like franchise outlets of a Master Brand, then having something go wrong with the power network is a great way to launch a campaign – what if the life-waters stop flowing from the Paradise spring? Or communications stop between the franchise and Head Office? What if the orcs next door have their own alternative mountain cult and the townsfolk are converting for access to cheap candy? Then the landscape the players know from their own local temple can inform their investigation – first as a standard to hold the rest of the world to (“hey, these pyramids don’t look anything like the ones we have back home!”), later maybe as a sign of how badly things have gone wrong (“you mean we’re the only ones that kill the goblins?”)

part 3 – Mountains of Lies – coming soon…