ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the monumentalism and sanctuarism in the writings of John Muir, father of the American national parks, or at least of the idea for them. It also analyzes the gender politics of Muir's contradictory ideas of nature divided between a stern and sublime Father God in the mountains and a soft and smiling Mother Goddess in the swamps. Muir vacillates between nature aestheticized for nature lovers, nature preserved for city dwellers and tourists, and nature inhabited. The forested and/or mountainous national park as modern cathedral is the outdoor extra-urban counterpart to the indoor urban cathedrals of the modern world. Besides a view of nature sublimated in national parks, Muir also propounded a view of God-the-Father-nature incarnated in mountains, or mountainous scenery, with its dawn lights and alpenglows as a kind of God-the-Son figure. The alpenglow, sublimated above the mountains themselves, could manifest God, and mountains could even be God.
