The Mystery of Mount Shasta
Mount Shasta
When I was thinking about the character of Tala I wanted her to come from somewhere in America that was wild, mysterious and supposedly lay on a nexus of ley lines. I looked at various locations and Mount Shasta seemed to be the perfect place.
Mount Shasta is an extinct volcano that forms part of the Cascade Mountain Range, located in Siskiyou County in Northern California. The strange cloud formations, frequent electrical storms and beautiful sunsets that appear around its twin snow-capped peaks make it look quite magical and have given rise to an extraordinary number of legends.
The Modoc Native Americans believed that the Great Spirit lived inside Mount Shasta and in the 1800s a writer called Joaquin Miller collected the legends of the Great Spirit in his book Unwritten History: Life among the Modocs. One of my favourites tells of the mountain’s role in the creation of the Modoc people…
They married and were very happy, and had many children. But, being part of the Great Spirit and part grizzly bear, these children did not exactly resemble either of their parents, but took a little bit of each of them. Which is how the first Modocs were created.”
The British settlers who came to California looking for gold created their own myths about this mysterious mountain.
One legend is that its hollow interior houses the survivors of an wise and ancient civilisation called Lemuria, which sank under the Pacific Ocean thousands of years ago.
