I personally had a lot of luck save-scumming by savequitting the game and copying the files elsewhere at every holy mountain. (there are scripts floating around that make this easier) Then when I died, I could revisit that area without risking much progress, and it made the game much more fun while I tried to scale the truly formidable learning curve.
Nowadays I feel much more comfortable just doing normal runs, so I guess I ‘graduated’ lol, some understanding of the wand-building goes wayyyyy further than I expected.
Humanity always seems to learn the wrong lessons from historical events, doesn’t it? Hurt people hurt people, I guess…