Mountains hold religious significance in traditions spread across every inhabited continent, including cultures that had no contact with one another. The convergence is easier to explain than it first appears.
They are visible from everywhere
A prominent peak is the one feature of a landscape that everyone in a wide region can see from their own doorway. It becomes a shared reference point without anyone deciding that it should.
Shared visibility supports shared meaning. A feature that a whole valley orients itself by can carry stories that a hidden cave or a private spring cannot.
Direction and orientation follow from this. Communities frequently arranged buildings, graves and processions in relation to a peak long before any doctrine explained why.
They are difficult to reach
Height imposes real cost. Reaching a summit takes preparation, time and physical effort, and the people who have done it form a small group within any population.
Difficulty of that kind maps easily onto ideas of ascent, purification and worthiness. The physical journey and the described inner journey have the same shape.
Traditions that developed mountain pilgrimage generally kept the difficulty rather than removing it, treating the climb itself as part of what the practice consists of.
They generate their own weather
High ground produces cloud, sudden storms, mist and snow that the plain below does not experience. From a distance the summit is often hidden entirely.
A place that is regularly concealed and periodically violent invites description in terms of presence and disposition. Weather made mountains seem responsive to those watching them.
They are also where rivers begin, which links the peak to the water supply of everything downstream. The connection is observable and consequential.
They mark the edge of ordinary life
Cultivation stops at a certain height, and above that line the land is not farmed, owned or lived in continuously. The boundary is visible on the slope itself.
That produces a natural category of place that is near but not domestic, which is exactly the position sacred sites tend to occupy in a settlement's geography.
Many traditions formalised the boundary with a gate, a shrine or a rule about who may pass, giving the physical transition a ritual counterpart.
The shared logic behind the variety
The specific meanings differ enormously: dwelling of deities, site of revelation, ancestor, axis of the world, place of retreat. None of these is reducible to the others.
What recurs is the underlying situation rather than the doctrine. A large, visible, difficult, weather-making landform sits at the edge of every community that lives near one.
Recognising the common ground does not flatten the traditions. It explains why so many independent answers were given to a question the terrain kept asking.