Hindu PantheonMountain
Mount Meru
The cosmic mountain at the center of the universe, around which the sun, moon, and stars revolve. Home of the devas.
About Mount Meru
The mountain the heavens turn on
Meru is the cosmic axis in the Mahabharata, the Puranas, and Buddhist cosmology: gods on the slopes, continents petal-fashion around it, polaris above. It is not a Himalayan peak you summit. Jambudvipa lies to the south of it in many schemes. Vaikuntha and Kailasa are sometimes placed in relation to it, sometimes independently. There is no Meru temple with a surviving liturgy in the epics. The mountain is a diagram of order.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Mahabharata, Bhishma Parva / cosmological parvas
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.
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