Culture and Mountains: The Semiosphere of the Vertical Introduction: The Mountain as a Cultural Construct Mountains, being one of the fundamental elements of the physical landscape, are also powerful cultural constructs. They function in mythological, religious, artistic, and philosophical systems not as a passive backdrop, but as active agents of meaning-making. The cultural conquest of mountains is a process of their semantization, endowing them with meanings that vary from sacred terror to aesthetic rapture, from an insurmountable barrier to a symbol of spiritual ascent. The study of the interaction between culture and mountains lies in the field of cultural geography, imagology (the science of images), and ecocriticism. Mountains in Mythology and Religion: Axis of the World and Abodes of the Gods Since ancient times, mountains have served as axis mundi (the axis of the world), a connecting link between heaven, earth, and the underworld. The Olympus of Ancient Greece — the abode of the gods, inaccessible to mortals. Sion in Jewish and then Christian tradition — a symbol of divine presence and salvation. Meru/Sumeru in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain cosmology — a cosmic mountain at the center of the universe. Fuji in Shintoism — a sacred mountain, the embodiment of a deity, an object of pilgrimage. These sacred mountains were not necessarily the highest, but they became centers of the cultural universe, organizing around them spaces of meaning. Philosophical and aesthetic revolution: from terror to the sublime A cardinal shift in the perception of mountains in Western culture occurred at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries within the framework of the aesthetics of the sublime, developed by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. If previously mountains were considered "ugly growths" on the body of the earth (as philosopher Thomas Hobbes expressed it), now they have become the standard of the sublime — an experience combining terror and ecstasy before the grandeur and power of ... Read more