In Northern California, not far from the border with Oregon, stands a gigantic isolated peak rising 4,322 meters above sea level.

Mount Shasta.

More than 500 meters taller than Mount Fuji, it feels even more enormous when viewed from its foothills because there are no other major mountains surrounding it.

Yet what makes this mountain special in the United States is not its height or its beauty. It is, perhaps, one of the strangest “mountains of immortality” in the world.

Walk through the town and you will find words like crystals, channeling, healing, Lemuria, Ascended Masters, and UFOs appearing in everyday conversation. Academic research has also examined Mount Shasta as a place that has attracted New Age “spiritual pilgrims” throughout the twentieth century.

The story goes back to the late nineteenth century.

Originally, “Lemuria” was not a term born from mystical thought. In 1864, zoologist Philip Sclater hypothesized that there might once have been a landmass in the Indian Ocean to explain the distribution of lemurs across Madagascar and India. He called this lost continent “Lemuria.”

What had begun as a scientific hypothesis from the pre-plate-tectonics era was eventually absorbed into Theosophy and occultism, and its supposed location moved from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, and eventually to California.

Then, in the twentieth century, it evolved into an extraordinary story: Mount Shasta was said to be a surviving remnant of sunken Lemuria, with Lemurians possessing an advanced civilization living beneath the mountain. Even today, some people believe that the underground city is called Telos and that it is inhabited by higher-dimensional beings who are virtually free from disease and aging.

But on this mountain, outlandish legends did not simply remain old stories. Every few decades, they connected with the cutting-edge ideas of their time. The greatest example was the “I AM Movement,” which swept across the United States in the 1930s.

In 1930, a man named Guy W. Ballard, who had worked as a mining engineer and salesman, visited Mount Shasta. According to his own account, while walking on the mountain, he encountered a mysterious man near a spring.

That man, he claimed, was none other than Count Saint-Germain.

Ballard subsequently publicized the encounter. Together with his wife, Edna, he went on to develop the “I AM Movement,” which by the late 1930s had, according to the movement’s own claims, grown to around one million followers.

Who exactly was Count Saint-Germain?

Saint-Germain was a real historical figure. In the middle of the eighteenth century, this mysterious man suddenly appeared in European courts. He spoke more than a dozen languages, was an accomplished violinist, was knowledgeable in alchemy, and won the favor of Louis XV, eventually serving as a diplomatic emissary. More than anything, people were astonished by the fact that he appeared not to age at all for decades. At dinner parties, he would barely touch his food, hint that he had lived for hundreds of years, and speak of ancient events as though he had witnessed them himself. Voltaire described him, with irony, as “a man who never dies and knows everything.” There is a record of his death in 1784 in Eckernförde, in what is now northern Germany.

And yet stories of people seeing the supposedly dead Saint-Germain continued to appear across Europe. Eventually, in Theosophical circles, he came to be interpreted as an “Ascended Master,” a being who had conquered death and transcended the limitations of the physical body.

Then, approximately 150 years later, in 1930 at Mount Shasta, Guy Ballard encountered Count Saint-Germain, who was supposedly still alive. The Saint-Germain described by Guy Ballard was no longer an eighteenth-century diplomat or alchemist. He was an immortal being who guided humanity toward higher consciousness. The central teaching Ballard claimed to have received from him was “I AM”: the idea that God does not exist outside of us, but resides within us as the divine presence of “I AM”—“I exist.” By invoking this power through words, one could transcend illness, poverty, misfortune, and even the limitations of the physical body.

But the era was in the midst of the Great Depression. Wall Street had collapsed in 1929, banks were failing, companies were going bankrupt, the unemployed were flooding the streets, and suddenly the future had become impossible to see. It cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence that the I AM Movement, which preached that “there is infinite power within you” and “there is infinite abundance in the universe,” grew rapidly at precisely that time.

In sociology, there is a concept known as “existential security”: the idea that the more human beings feel their survival and economic security threatened, the more likely they are to turn toward religion and transcendent systems of meaning. When the economy is doing well, people look at the NASDAQ. When times are bad, they look at the stars. When the “reality” they believed in until yesterday—banks, companies, governments, currencies, careers—ceases to feel reliable, human beings begin searching for another order beyond reality. In fact, after the 2008 financial crisis, mindfulness, yoga, wellness, and similar practices became major cultural phenomena.

Now consider the present. The pandemic, wars, inflation, employment anxiety caused by AI, the concentration of wealth in giant technology companies, and political distrust have once again shaken “the world as we knew it.” That is why I believe interest in spirituality will continue to grow around the world.

But this time, it is somewhat different from the 1930s.

Because the “immortality” of the twenty-first century wears the face not of religion, but of technology.

In Silicon Valley, more and more people are beginning to see aging not as a “natural phenomenon,” but as a “technical problem that can be repaired.” Cellular reprogramming, gene editing, AI-powered drug discovery, and even the uploading of consciousness. The “elixir of life” once sought by alchemists has now become biotechnology. One example is the “Don’t Die” movement, which has recently attracted attention through Netflix.

When you think about it, perhaps Count Saint-Germain and Silicon Valley billionaires are not so different after all. One tried to transcend aging through alchemy; the other tries to transcend aging through cellular engineering. One calls it “Ascension.” The other calls it “Longevity Escape Velocity.”

And now, that sanctuary seems to be returning once again to Mount Shasta.

In the form of a data center.

Just outside the city of Mount Shasta, plans have emerged to build a data center on the site of what was once a Crystal Geyser bottling facility. A power-intensive facility using the existing buildings and equipped with a closed-loop water-cooling system is being considered.

A hundred years ago, people believed that beneath Mount Shasta lived beings possessing intelligence beyond that of humanity.

In 2026, humanity is actually trying to build, at the foot of the mountain, a gigantic box designed to house an intelligence that might surpass humanity.

Not the underground city of Telos.

GPU racks.

Not the Ascended Masters.

AI.

Today, AI data centers are becoming a kind of “temple” of modern civilization. Ordinary people can barely understand what is happening inside them. They consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, gather human knowledge from around the world, answer human questions, predict the future, and are expected eventually to become more intelligent than humans.

In ancient times, we might have called that an “oracle.”

In the 1930s, we might have called it an “Ascended Master.”

In the 2020s, we simply call it a “foundation model.”

For a long time, human beings believed that as science advanced, we would be liberated from the mysterious.

In reality, perhaps the opposite is true.

The more advanced technology becomes, the more humanity needs new myths.

And the more unstable the economy and society become, the stronger those myths grow.

Now the world is once again becoming unstable, and this time biotechnology aimed at overcoming aging and AI aimed at creating intelligence beyond the human are rising simultaneously.

Alchemy has become biotech, channeling has become prompting, and divine oracles have become generative AI. From I AM to AI. The “something beyond humanity” that this mountain has continued to attract for a hundred years has finally arrived—not in the form of a spirit, but in the form of semiconductors.

If Count Saint-Germain is still alive somewhere, he must be watching the news and laughing.

Humanity did not abandon alchemy.

We simply resumed alchemy inside the data center.