 Hello everybody, thanks a lot to the organisers for this interesting session and for inviting me. I would like to speak about religious romanticism as a possible obstacle to an understanding of prehistoric sacred topographies. By religious romanticism I mean a mindset that developed in Europe from the 17th century onwards. It was particularly important in the 19th and 20th centuries and could impact our thinking about mountain sacredness in earlier periods. I'm a historian working about the last five centuries mostly relying on written sources. Many prehistoric contributions to this session deal with periods much more remote in time and on the basis of material relics. Nonetheless, I think it is important to talk to each other. Historians should have an idea about the starting point of their investigation and archaeologists are often influenced to some degree by contemporary ideas, particularly when the material relics give only scarce indications about the research subject. My goal here on this occasion is to share some experiences made by a group of historians about sacred topographies in historical perspective. A while ago the group published a special issue of journal mountain research and development. The picture here on the cover shows so called Traveling Gods in Himachal Pradesh, carried by mountain villagers to a regional religious ceremony. The issue is called Religion and Sacredness in Mountains, a historical perspective, and has articles about Asia, Latin America and Europe quite similar to our session today. We wanted to examine the idea whether mountains were focal points of religious concerns more or less equally across the planet, a view which had been promulgated by scholars in the late 20th century, or alternatively whether cultural diversity produced by different religious attitudes and doctrines prevailed in the overall picture. We all know that differences between religions belong to the elementary experience and basic knowledge. This is a world map of major religions I was brought up with in the 1960s. The reddish-brown color stands for Christians, the beige color for Muslims, green for Hindus, yellow for Buddhists, and followers of other East Asian doctrines, as the adaptation reads. And blue stands for Naturreligionen, literally nature religions, or perhaps better, animism. Sometime earlier, an atlas of this kind would have spoken not of Naturreligionen, but of Haydn, Heathen, or Pagans. Of course we know that this is a very superficial image of the complex patterns and currents of religious allegiances. Nevertheless, I think that official religion is important for the circumscription of sacred and sacredness. There is no universal definition of these terms, but many scholars agree that some aspects thereof can be generalized and that it is useful to leave other aspects open for a more context-specific use. Sacred certainly implies a contrast to profane and commandments or taboos regarding transgressions. So it has to do with hierarchy. It embodies power and creates social attention. It can be mediated through written texts or through rituals, and it can involve different layers between public or official and more hidden or unofficial expressions. A good starting point for the comparison between different mountain beliefs is the situation in the Andes in Latin America in the 17th century. On the map there. In the Andes, the colonial church of the Spanish rulers directly challenged indigenous religious attitudes towards nature. The intention of the Spanish was to destroy them in order to create devoted Christians and loyal subjects of the king. A manifesto for the campaign was printed in Lima in 1621. Exterpacion de la idolatria del Perú, in English, a eradication of idolatry in Peru, by Pablo Josef Ariago of the Jesuit Order. Ariago was a main figure of the campaign. His book contained an addict against idolatry and 20 explaining chapters. The chapter titles read, for example, as follows, what the Indians worship today and what is their idolatry, what they sacrifice and how they do it, of the Indians abuses and superstitions. Ariago gives lengthy descriptions of indigenous beliefs. They included the worship of mountains and conspicuous rocks in the Andes, called by particular names and considered of ancient human origin. For the Spanish, this was sinful behavior and idolatry, since worship could only be addressed to the Lord and not to natural and other objects. The ecclesiastical campaign was carried out by appointed visitadores who called on the parishes along with a few assistants in order to expose and punish the rampant errors. They combed each community, destroying all cult objects they could find. In several waves, these actions lasted from the beginning of the 17th to the mid 18th century. The process is well documented by written sources and well researched by modern studies. So we have here two types of religious attitudes. The indigenous open to nature and the Christian sealed off from nature. Christianity was inward looking and emphasized the community of the believers, the brothers and sisters in Christ. This anthropocentric character has often been observed by scholars. In consequence, it is hard to find a true, officially acknowledged Christian mountain cult for the earlier periods. But things were changing in transition to modernity. Indeed, the very same 17th century saw the rise of research in parts of Europe, the so called scientific revolution, and the curiosity and ideas of naturalists were an important driving force for new attitudes towards nature in Christian countries. Let us illustrate this trend with a German book of the mid 18th century. Orotheologie oder erbauliche Betrachtung über die Berge. Orotheologie means mountain theology and the title says that the text offers edifying considerations on mountains as important witnesses of God's power, wisdom, prestige and benignity. Composed by the Protestant pastor Johann Christoph Wolff. This is a typical example of a religious tendency called natural theology or physical theology. The tendency started some generations earlier and considered nature as God's creation. The act of admiring the creation was a way of praising the Lord. Wolff begins with this idea, I quote and translate from German. There are two books by which we can achieve the knowledge of the great God the creator, namely the book of Revelation, that is the Holy Scripture on the one side and the book of nature on the other side. Wolff takes care not to put these two books on an equal level. To be sure, the book of Revelation is the Hauptbuch, the main book and the book of nature only the Nebenbuch or a side book. It would have been outside of legitimate religious discourse to proceed otherwise. And even to include the Nebenbuch like this was a change from former practice and therefore in need of lengthy justification. Wolff provides various information and considerations on mountains, particularly the sizable and respectable ones. Yet these remarks are not an end in itself. The pleasures thereof would be totally negligible and imperfect, Wolff writes, unless they were combined from the very beginning with attention for the creator of the mountains. The praise of the mountain creator however does not mean to behave like heathen since the heathen considered mountain themselves to be there it is. The explicit differentiation of these two ways of mountain praise is typical of the move towards nature. It reflected the criticism of the orthodox towards the new natural theology. Their advocates had to stress that they did not behave like pagans. Yet in the long run the official attitude of the churches changed as well and nature became a more important reference for mainstream Christianity. The change from an introverted religion to a religion paying attention to the environment paralleled the general discovery of nature in European culture including the discovery of the Alps and other mountains. It was a complex process influenced by naturalists and giving new impulses to other scholars. One particular current focused on popular culture or folklore and linked them to remote pasts. This kind of what we can may call romantic scholarship claimed to be to dig beneath official religion and disclose an ancient folk's seal national soul completely in tune with nature. The most celebrated folklorists were of course the brothers Grimm. In this place I would like to present shortly Wilhelm Mannhardt, a student and ardent follower of them. Mannhardt was a German folklorist, mythologist and librarian. Today he is mainly remembered for his pioneering inquiry of 1865 using printed questionnaires. Mannhardt sent 15,000 copies of this questionnaire to teachers, pastors and other potential correspondents in many countries. One work written after that major enterprise was entitled Wald und Feldkulte, Forest and Field Cults. This was a kind of animistic encyclopedia started with a baumseile, soul of trees. According to Mannhardt prehistoric populations considered trees to be of human nature. Of course the Urmensch, the original man or woman was not really able to respond to his printed questionnaire in 1865, but this did not impede the work to become a huge success. The mythological school was already criticized by some contemporary scholars. One critic said that soon there would remain no red cock or stinking ran in Germany that would not be in danger to be declared a Germanic deity. Nonetheless romantic scholarship celebrating nature cults of the remote past proved to remain attractive also in the 20th century. The publications often used some elements of oral or semi-oral tradition recorded in present times. In the Alps they were usually attentive to the mountainous landscape. Let me mention two Swiss examples. Edward Renner, Golden Ring over Uri, Golden Ring above Uri, a book about experience and thinking of our mountain folks about magic and ghosts and about the first and the last things. First printed in 1941, fifth edition in 2016. Christian Caminada if a Talbotan tailor. The enchanted valets, prehistoric cults and customs in the ancient Gryzins, 7th edition 2006. This is not to say of course that everything is fake in such works, but it is important to point to the fact that the authors did not restrict their statements to what could reasonably be known. That is their methods were lacking according to current standards. To some degree the romantic illusion concerns also this knowledgeable and beautiful is illustrated book by Edwin Bernbaum. Sacred Mountains of the World published in 1990, not yet as successful as the other books, but with a second edition. With Bernbaum, a nation scholar, alpinists and deep ecologists, we contour the planet from one mountain region to the other one. And everywhere we discover Sacred Mountains. This is indeed the standard book that we wanted to examine with a group of historians mentioned at the beginning of my talk. And our conclusion pointed more to the importance of cultural diversity and less to a universal mountain pattern. In particular the older periods of Christian belief did not fit into a generalized mountain sacredness. But there were differences and changes on other continents as well. When I wrote the editorial to the special issue, I remember having had an interesting discussion with my co-editor Chetan Singh, an expert on Himalayan history. In order to underline the reasons for diversity, I proposed among others this sentence. After all, it is men who speak to mountains not mountains to men. Coming from the Indian tradition, my colleague considered the statements too hard and we changed it to a softer version. It is men who speak more often to mountains than mountains to men. Thank you.