In Shasta’s Shadow, Reality Is as Relative as UFOs and ‘Mu’

Ellin Stamps says she saw a refugee from a lost continent who lives in the volcano at Mt. Shasta.

Sharon Rose says she has seen UFOs over the volcano. She also believes the mountain spews energy that helps people deal with negative feelings.

Rose says she heard a disembodied voice say, “Welcome, you’re home,” when she first saw the mountain.

Giant faces of spirits sometimes appear on the 14,161-foot peak, says Irene Annell Binder, who goes by the nickname Prune Cake.

All three people and scores more are called “cosmic muffins” by some longtime residents. They are New Age believers who have flocked to the small towns of Weed and Mt. Shasta at the base of the mountain.

“The fake core beliefs you were raised with begin dropping away here,” Rose said.

Weed and Mt. Shasta, 260 miles north of San Francisco, have become New Age capitals. Believers among the combined population of more than 7,000 immerse themselves in alternative lifestyles and philosophies.

“We’re apart from the rest of the world and we’re in the energy vortex of the mountain,” Rose said. “You sit in the vortex and you stew. The vortex brings unhappiness and sorrow to the surface for resolution. It helps you empty out.

“It’s hell. Tears come up. Entire concepts of what life is about go out the window. It’s very disconcerting. It’s like, who am I?”

Longtime residents don’t think the mountain is all that mysterious.

“I was born and raised here. I’ve never seen a UFO or someone from a lost continent and I’ve never felt a vortex,” said Josie Merrill, a 42-year-old waitress.

But the newcomers are credited with helping the sagging economy of this timber and tourist region.

Mt. Shasta is among several volcanoes in the Cascade Range, which includes Mt. St. Helens--which blew its top in 1980. Shasta is considered among the most likely volcanoes in the lower 48 states to erupt sometime in the future. Its last eruption was in 1786.

Many of the New Age believers got their first look at the mountain in 1987, when 5,000 people held a “harmonic convergence” to celebrate a planetary alignment. Some never left. Others returned to stay.

“We’re in the beginning of the New Age and this is a safe place for it to happen,” Rose said.

Numerous sects around the snowcapped peak consider it a magic mountain, a gateway to the spirit world or to another dimension. They maintain informational shops and publish pamphlets and newspapers.

The summer edition of “Mt. Shasta’s New Directions” includes an interview with Princess Sharula Dux from Telos, which is identified as a Lemurian city within Mt. Shasta.

Lemurians are defined as highly civilized refugees from the ancient kingdom of Mu, now submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean. They supposedly are tall, communicate by extrasensory perception, and appear and vanish at will. They are reputed to live in an elaborate underground tunnel system within the mountain.

Stamps, 55, who calls herself a spiritual healer, said she saw a Lemurian at a vista point overlooking the mountain.

“He was 7 feet tall and had long golden hair. I wanted to call him a hippie, but it was my mind trying to rationalize,” she said.

She said she was paralyzed through what seemed a brief episode, which ended when the Lemurian vanished. But two hours had elapsed on her watch, she said.

“In the future, we’ll know what this all is and it won’t be mystical,” Stamps said.

Native Americans have long considered the mountain spiritual. The Klamath and Modoc tribes told of a cataclysmic battle between the sky spirit chief Skell, who lived atop Mt. Shasta, and Llao, spirit chief of the underworld.

Binder, 50, a retired paper-plant worker, said she keeps her eyes on the mountain as much as possible.

“One of the faces I see is of Eve, as in the Bible. I see the same faces over and over. They’re spiritual somehow,” Binder said. “I try to feel the spirits of the mountain, to find the good ones.”