The mountain · The hidden ones

The siddhas of Arunachala: the hidden sages of the hill

The hill is not empty. Beneath its visible life runs an older tradition ~ that Arunachala is the dwelling-place of siddhas, perfected beings living unseen upon and within it, revealing themselves only to those who are ready. One of the most haunting traditions of the mountain.

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Ask anyone who has lived long at Arunachala, and sooner or later, if they trust you, they will lower their voice a little and tell you: the hill is not empty. Beneath the visible life of the town and the ashrams runs an older, stranger tradition ~ that Arunachala is, and has always been, the dwelling-place of siddhas: perfected beings, hidden sages, some said to be of immense age, living unseen upon the mountain and within it, and revealing themselves only rarely, and only to those who are ready. It is one of the most haunting of all the traditions of the hill, and whether you take it as literal fact or sacred poetry, it points to something true that every sensitive visitor comes, in time, to feel.

What is a siddha?

A siddha, in the Tamil and wider Indian tradition, is one who has attained siddhi ~ perfection, accomplishment, the goal of the spiritual path ~ and often, in the popular understanding, one who has thereby gained mastery over the ordinary limits of body and world: over death, over time, over distance. The great Tamil Siddha tradition is ancient and distinct, a lineage of realised yogi-sages (the eighteen Siddhars and many more) who were also poets, alchemists, and healers, and who left behind a body of cryptic, powerful verse. Such beings, the tradition holds, do not always announce themselves. They may live as beggars, as madmen, as ordinary poor folk ~ or they may withdraw from human sight altogether, into the caves and secret places of the sacred mountains. And of all the sacred mountains, Arunachala is held to be among the most favoured of their haunts.

Arunachala, the mountain of the siddhas

Why Arunachala? Because, the scriptures say, it is the very fire-form of Shiva, the secret Heart-centre ~ and so it draws the perfected as a flame draws light. The tradition holds that the hill is never without its hidden sages; that within it (the interior of Arunachala is itself, in the lore, a realm of the siddhas) and upon its slopes, realised beings abide in states of absorption that may last, it is said, for ages. The sealed tunnel spoken of at Adi Annamalai, running toward the hill's centre, belongs to this same body of lore ~ the idea that Arunachala has an inner sanctum, not to be entered by ordinary means, where the deepest mysteries and their guardians reside.

The hill is never without its hidden sages, the tradition holds ~ perfected beings abiding unseen, revealing themselves only to those who are ready.

Ramana and the hidden ones

Even Ramana stands within this tradition. In his early silent years on the hill, wandering its slopes and sitting in its caves, he is said to have had encounters with such hidden beings ~ and, more profoundly, he came to speak of Arunachala itself as his Guru, a living presence that taught him in silence. Some of the old devotees held that Ramana was himself a great siddha in the fullest sense, and that his outwardly simple life at the foot of the hill concealed a stature belonging to that hidden order. Whether or not one accepts the more marvellous stories, this much is clear: Ramana treated the hill as a conscious, living power, and lived his whole life within the field of that conviction. He was, at the very least, one who knew the mountain's secret from the inside.

Meeting the mountain's secret

What should a modern visitor make of all this? Not, perhaps, to go hunting for immortal yogis in the caves ~ that misses the point, and the hidden do not reward the merely curious. The truer meaning of the siddha tradition is a kind of instruction in humility before the hill. It says: you are not seeing all that is here. This mountain that looks, to the casual eye, like an ordinary hill above an ordinary town, is regarded by an unbroken tradition of the wise as one of the most charged and secret places on earth, thick with a presence and a company you cannot see. To walk Girivalam knowing this ~ to move around the hill as though through the invisible court of the perfected ~ is to walk it with the reverence the tradition intends. The siddhas, seen or unseen, teach the visitor the first thing Arunachala asks of everyone: to take off the shoes of one's certainty, and tread softly, for the ground is holier than it looks.

Last updated 19 October 2026. Following the documented record preserved by Sri Ramanasramam and his devotees; where an account is traditional, it is told as such.