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Diotima's Ladder
Diotima’s Ladder
Diotima’s Ladder is the ascent of erotic desire Diotima describes in Plato‘s [[plato-symposium|Symposium]] (210a–212a), the scale along which eros rises from the love of a single beautiful body, through the love of beautiful bodies in general, through the love of beautiful souls, through the love of beautiful practices and laws, through the love of beautiful knowledge, to the vision of Beauty itself — the Form, intelligible beauty — in which the philosophical ascent is completed.
The ladder is the canonical Western figure of erotic ascent and the direct source of every later figure of the soul’s ascent toward its origin: the Plotinian return of psyche to the One, the Corpus Hermeticum’s visionary ascent, the Christian mystical ascent of Denys and John of the Cross, the Dante’s ascent through the Paradiso, the Sufi ascent through the stations. For the Seba lineage the ladder is the ancient form of what individuation and what the hermetic ascent each articulate in later idioms. See eros-as-metaxy for the daimonic function by which the ascent occurs.