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.

But what makes this mountain special in the United States is neither its height nor its beauty. It is, perhaps, the strangest “mountain of immortality” in the world.

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

The largest of these spiritual movements was I AM, which swept across the United States in the 1930s and drew as many as one million people to Shasta.

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 named “Count Saint-Germain” near a spring.

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 well versed in alchemy, and won the favor of Louis XV, eventually serving as a diplomatic emissary. What astonished people most was that he appeared not to age at all for decades. At dinner parties, he barely touched his food, hinted that he had lived for hundreds of years, and spoke of ancient events as though he had witnessed them himself. He was rumored to drink the legendary magical potion known as the “Elixir of Life,” which medieval alchemists believed could grant immortality. Voltaire described him ironically as “a man who never dies and knows everything.” And in 1784, there is a record of his death 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 physical limitations of the 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 artist or alchemist, but an immortal being who guided humanity toward higher consciousness. The core 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 an indwelling divine presence—“I AM,” or “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 collapsed in 1929, banks failed, companies went bankrupt, the unemployed flooded the streets, and suddenly the future became impossible to see. It cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence that I AM, 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 be 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 currents.

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.” Perhaps, from here on, interest in spirituality will continue to grow around the world.

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

Because the “immortality” and spirituality of the twenty-first century wear 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 tries to overcome aging through alchemy, while the other tries to overcome aging through cellular engineering. One calls it “Ascension,” while 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 there were beings at Mount Shasta possessing intelligence beyond that of humanity.

In 2026, people are actually trying to build at Mount Shasta a gigantic box designed to house an intelligence that might surpass humanity.

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 it an “oracle.”

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

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

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

But perhaps the opposite is actually 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.

Alchemy has become biotech, channeling has become prompting, and divine oracles have become generative 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.

From I AM to AI.

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

Humanity has not abandoned alchemy.

It has simply resumed alchemy inside the data center.