When the Mountain Speaks: Montserrat, Archetypes, and the Slow Evolution of the Psyche.

Today it is raining in Barcelona, and my body is still somewhere on the slopes of Montserrat. The mind is doing what minds do best - trying to categorise, explain, and give names -  but the body seems to know first. It remembers the narrow path, the height, the strange mixture of vertigo and awe.

The trip was not planned. I did not arrive with guidebooks memorised or a carefully prepared spiritual intention. I am not a hiker by nature. My natural attraction is usually toward the sea and the sun: open horizons, the soft insistence of waves, a place where one can drift, watch, and gently avoid making decisions.

Mountains are beautiful from afar and… different.

They stand there, refusing to move, and quietly ask:

So, what are you going to do now?

Apparently, I decided to climb.

Once this mountain was a river delta. Fragments of stones carried by water.

Montserrat, Catalonia.

At certain points, the path narrowed, and the height became suddenly very concrete. My body responded before I had time to psychologise it. My chest tightened, my steps became cautious, and my eyes instinctively avoided looking straight down.

I stopped frequently to “admire the view”.

Sometimes an honest moment of wonder.

Sometimes a slightly more elegant way to catch my breath and calm my nervous system.

There is something wonderfully humbling about discovering that, despite all theories, concepts, and carefully curated inner work, sometimes we are simply a human being on a mountain, hoping not to trip over a rock.

And yet, as I climbed, something else was unfolding.

The mountains of Montserrat do not look like ordinary mountains. They rise like enormous sculptures, columns and fingers of rock, almost improbable in their rounded, vertical forms. It is as if some ancient force had decided to build a cathedral out of stone and then left it open to the sky.

At one point, I had the clear sensation that I was not only looking at the mountain.

The mountain, in some quiet, impersonal way, was looking back at me.

For a brief moment, I felt small - not in a humiliating way, but in the way a child might feel standing at the foot of something immense and old. Not fear exactly.

Something closer to humility.

Sediments gatheringlayer upon layer.

Then tectonic uplift - deep forces raising the whole mass.

Montserrat, Catalonia.

Geology as a Slow Biography

Later, back in the city, I began to read about what Montserrat actually is. Geology is not my usual bedtime reading, but this time it felt personal.

Millions of years ago, this impressive mountain was not a mountain at all but part of an ancient river. Layers of sediments - sand, gravel, fragments of rock carried by rivers - settled and accumulated over vast stretches of time. Under pressure, they fused into solid rock. Later, tectonic movements slowly lifted these layers upward. Erosion, patient and persistent, carved the dramatic shapes we see today.

In other words, what now stands as a solid, vertical monument began as something fluid, scattered, and submerged.

What we experience as fixed and imposing is the visible result of countless tiny deposits and pressures over deep time.

Then I realised: this is not only a geological story.

It is also a psychological one.

A human psyche does not appear overnight. We are not born as clean, self-defined mountain peaks. We begin as something far more fluid - sensations, impressions, the emotional “weather” of our family systems.

Over years and decades, sedimented experience accumulates: a mother’s tone of voice, a father’s expression, a culture’s rules, the unspoken traumas of previous generations, the demands of school, religion, and politics.

Under pressure, these layers harden into what we later call “my personality.”

From the outside, we may look solid and coherent.

Inside, we are still made of layers.

Ruppert and the Vertical Weight of Authority

At this moment, I am also reading Franz Ruppert’s book Who Am I in a Traumatised and Traumatising Society?

His central concern is how trauma is not only a personal issue but a collective and political one - how whole societies can lose contact with their authentic selves and then reproduce structures that are traumatising in turn.

Ruppert suggests that in traumatised societies many people adapt to external authorities in order to survive.

The sentence stayed with me on the path.

On the narrower parts of the trail, I noticed how quickly my body adapted to the rock’s vertical authority. I made myself smaller, kept close to the wall, and moved carefully. It was a very sensible adaptation to gravity. But it also felt strangely familiar.

Authority has always had a vertical dimension.

Kings sit on thrones above their subjects.

Politicians speak from elevated podiums.

Religious leaders are placed on altars and platforms.

Even in families, there is often a “high” position and a “low” one: the powerful adult and the small child.

We live in systems that reward making ourselves smaller in the presence of authority. Sometimes this is practical; often it is a matter of survival. But over time, the adaptation can become a way of life.

We may forget there ever was an authentic self that wanted something else.

Climbing Montserrat, I could feel the literal weight of verticality in my legs and chest. It made me wonder: how much of our inner landscape is also shaped by the invisible pressure of “above” and “below” - those who decide and those who comply?

Jung’s Archetypes in Stone and Sanctuary

Carl Jung believed that beneath our individual stories lies the collective unconscious: a deeper layer of the psyche structured by archetypes.

Archetypes are recurring symbolic patterns shaping how humans across cultures experience motherhood, fatherhood, authority, death, rebirth, and belonging.

We might say archetypes are to psychology what geological structures are to mountains: they shape what is possible, what tends to appear, how forces move through us.

Montserrat offers a fascinating archetypal scene.

On the outside, we see vertical rock: firm, towering, imposing. It evokes associations with paternal authority, structure, law, and the world of “shoulds.”

Inside this mountain, in the basilica, sits the Black Madonna -  La Moreneta -  a dark-skinned maternal figure holding the Christ child, venerated for centuries by pilgrims.

The symbolism almost writes itself.

Within this massive geological “father” stands a mysterious “mother” – a figure of origin, nourishment, and protection.

Structure and tenderness.

Law and mercy.

Height and depth.

The Black Madonna - symbol, a reminder that the divine does not always appear in pale, palatable forms.

The psyche recognises these images even if we cannot immediately explain why.

A mountain with a mother inside it is not just a tourist attraction.

It is a living metaphor.

Systems, Politics, and the Question of Authenticity

One of Ruppert’s most unsettling points is that traumatised individuals often build traumatising systems. When we lose access to our authentic self, we become more easily available to ideologies, authoritarian leaders, and rigid institutions that promise safety at the price of our inner truth.

Modern politics is full of vertical imagery: “strong leaders,” “top” positions, “higher” powers, “the people below.”

We still speak the language of mountains without noticing.

Many institutions ask us to climb their hierarchies, but only if we are willing to adapt - to leave certain parts of ourselves at the bottom.

Looking around Montserrat — at the church, the gift shops, the architecture of devotion and tourism -  I could feel how seamlessly spirituality, economy, and politics can interweave. None of this is unique to this place; it is simply visible here in a concentrated form. The human tendency to build structures and then bow to them is alive and well.

The question that arises is not: Is authority always bad?

Climbing a mountain without respecting gravity would be suicidal.

The deeper question is:

Where do we submit out of fear, and where do we stand from a grounded sense of authenticity?

What does it mean to have an inner ground that does not collapse the moment someone taller raises their voice?

And over immense time, wind, rain, temperature shaping the rock.

Different processes working together.

Montserrat, Catalonia.

The Psyche Continues the Work at Night

After returning from Montserrat, sleep brought its own continuation of the day.

In the dream, I was moving through an old space from my life - a garage connected with my family home.

There were boxes, clothes, and inherited objects from another time. I was sorting through them, deciding what to keep, what to move, what to quietly give away.

Nothing dramatic happened.

Yet the atmosphere carried a quiet sense of purpose, as if some inner committee had finally convened and was calmly reorganising my personal archive.

Looking back, it felt as though I was handling not just objects but stories: family narratives, cultural expectations, internalised authorities.

Some of them still felt alive and necessary.

Others seemed heavy, unnecessary, ready to be released.

Jung once wrote that a dream is like a small hidden door in the most secret recesses of the soul.

Perhaps landscapes like Montserrat help loosen that door.

The mountain stands outside us, but something in its form mirrors the processes unfolding within. Just as geological pressures slowly lift ancient sediments into visible peaks, psychological pressures and insights can slowly bring buried material to the surface of consciousness.

None of this happens quickly.

Mountains rise slowly.

Societies evolve slowly.

The human psyche, especially in traumatised systems, takes its time.

On this rainy day in Barcelona, my legs still remember the climb, my mind is still sorting sentences.

Some small part of me is still standing on that path between rock and sky, between the old seabed and the emerging mountain.

Perhaps the work of a lifetime is to let our own inner mountain rise -  not by force, not by ideology, but by patiently integrating the sediments of experience until something solid, grounded, and authentically ours comes into view.

And perhaps, in the same slow way, our collective psyche is also evolving: questioning its old gods, reworking its hierarchies, and learning, step by step, not to confuse height with wisdom.

Mountains rise slowly.

And perhaps the psyche - personal and collective - does too.

Ku moiemu zyciu.

Gosia

Until these forms emerged -

huge solid almost like giants.

Nature did not hesitate.It followed its forces.

Perhaps the psyche asksfor the same.

Listening closely —what holdswhat does not.

Montserrat, Catalonia.

References:

Ruppert, F. (2018). Who Am I in a Traumatised and Traumatising Society?

Jung, C.G. (1959). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Jung, C.G. (1933). The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man