It is all too easy and too simple to disdain as "superstition" everything one cannot understand, but the ancients themselves knew very well what they meant when they used symbolic language...the Spirit can always come back to breathe fresh life into the symbols and rites and give them back their lost meaning and the fullness of their original virtue.
It seems to me that a mountain is an image of the soul as it lifts itself up in contemplation. For in the same manner as the mountain towers above the valleys and lowlands at its foot, so does the soul of the one who prays mount into the higher regions up to God like an eagle taking wing.