Does a mountain topography lend itself to group solidarity, ecstatic spiritual experience, and social isolation? The author asks this question as he compares Pentecostal communities in the Arkansas Ozarks to the rise of the Hasidic movement in Carpathian Mountains of eighteenth-century Ukraine. Mountains have been universally revered as places of divine/human encounter—from Machu Picchu in Peru and Mount Olympus in Greece to Mount Sinai in Egypt and the five sacred mountains of China. Mountains are places of transformation. Alchemists in the Middle Ages regarded the mountain peak as “the philosopher’s oven.” The Baal Shem Tov, founder of the modern Hasidic movement, argued that authentic spiritual knowledge was best found among the simple, unpretentious people of the mountain villages. These were the shoemakers, chicken farmers, tailors, and innkeepers who made up his followers. He pointed out that God had appeared to Moses in an ordinary thorn bush, set aflame in the desert. “It is in the simple folk—the ‘lowly’ thorn-bush,” he said, “that this insatiable Divine flame is found.”
