Ascension

Ascension, as treated across the depth-psychology corpus, is far more than a theological or cosmological datum; it functions as a primary symbolic axis around which questions of spiritual ambition, psychic inflation, alchemical transformation, and soul-spirit tension are organized. The term embraces a spectrum of meanings: the literal celestial ascent of the shamanic journey and the soul-ladder described by Eliade and von Franz; the alchemical sublimatio in which fire’s upward tendency becomes the operative metaphor for psychic refinement (Edinger, Hillman); the Gnostic and Christian motifs of Christ’s ascension as individuation template (Edinger, Thielman); and the mystical ‘perpetual ascension’ articulated in Sufi sources rendered by Corbin. Hillman introduces the critical counter-pressure: the ‘ascensionist fantasy’ embedded in Western culture’s equation of height with value, growth with upward motion — a bias he reads as pathologically tied to the puer aeternus complex and spiritually inflated masculinity. Bly reinforces this critique through the figure of the ‘flying man’ who rises above earthly limitation at the cost of embodiment. Orthodox and patristic sources (Climacus, Philokalia) treat ascension as the teleological structure of prayer and monastic life itself. The productive tension between ascension-as-genuine-transformation and ascension-as-inflation-and-flight constitutes the central problematic the corpus presses upon the reader.

In the library 18 passages

Ascension: In the fire of the work, or on fire with their work, alchemists are subject to fire’s defiance of gravity, and they imagine their work pointing upward in accord with the flames and the heat they are attempting to control. From lower to higher; from inert to active; heavy to light

Hillman argues that ascension is the primary phenomenological signature of fire in alchemical psychology, grounding the spiritual concept empirically in laboratory observation and linking it to the imagination of upward transformation.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The ladder whose ascent implies spiritual progress has a long pedigree. The Hebrews, Greeks, and Christians all gave special value to the heights, and our spiritually influenced compass of Western morality tends to put all better things up high and worse things down low.

Hillman critiques what he terms the ‘ascensionist fantasy,’ identifying it as a culturally embedded bias that conflates upward movement with moral and psychological growth, to the detriment of depth and rootedness.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The Ladder—The Road of the Dead—Ascension. We have seen countless examples of shamanic ascent to the sky by means of a ladder. The same means is also employed to facilitate the gods’ descent to earth or to ensure the ascent of the dead man’s soul.

Eliade establishes ascension via the cosmic ladder as a universal shamanic and funerary motif, demonstrating its archaic structural role in mediating between the human, divine, and underworld realms.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The process of translation to eternity was graphically represented in antiquity by the image of ascending the ladder of the planetary spheres. When a soul is born into an earthly body it descends from heaven through the planetary spheres and acquires the qualities pertaining to each.

Edinger interprets the Egyptian and Neoplatonic ladder of planetary spheres as an alchemical-psychological symbol of the soul’s descent into matter and its necessary re-ascent as a process of individuation.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Ascend, my brothers, ascend eagerly. Let your hearts’ … I long to know how Jacob saw you fixed above the ladder. That climb, how was it? Tell me, for I long to know. What is the mode, what is the law joining together those steps that the lover has set as an ascent in his heart?

Climacus presents ascension as the governing metaphor and practical telos of monastic spirituality, framing the entire ladder of virtues as a structured ascent of the heart toward divine union.

Climacus, John, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 600thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In shamanism and in the initiation experiences of primitive medicine men there appears an age-old religious phenomenon, retained in part at least in later higher cultures, namely the motif of the ‘ascension of the soul,’ or a celestial journey taken by the soul, occurring in each case after death and in some cases even during the lifetime of the elect who experiences it in a state of ecstasy.

Von Franz identifies the soul’s ascension as a cross-cultural archaic motif linking shamanic ecstasy, Jewish apocalyptic literature, and depth-psychological individuation as parallel expressions of a single psychic pattern.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

It is a most extraordinary thing that man should be in a state of perpetual ascension (fi’l-taraqqi da’iman), yet unaware of it because of the lightness and subtlety of the veil and the homology of forms.

Corbin, drawing on Ibn Arabi, articulates a Sufi doctrine of perpetual involuntary ascension through successive theophanies, a process largely unconscious to the participant and structurally parallel to depth-psychological notions of continuous transformation.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

‘Prayer,’ writes St. John of the Ladder, ‘is a continuous ascension to heaven.’ We may add, so is the liturgy and the reading of God’s word—a continuous ascension to where God is.

Coniaris, in the Orthodox hesychast tradition, equates ascension with the continuous structure of prayer and liturgy, presenting it not as a singular event but as the ongoing movement of the soul toward God.

Coniaris, Anthony M., Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Blessings on those who have proclaimed the son before he came down, so that, when I did come, I might ascend. … When he said this, he left. Peter and I knelt down, gave thanks, and sent our hearts up to heaven.

This Gnostic text frames Christ’s ascension as the fulfillment of a cosmic descent-and-return structure, with the disciples’ own ecstatic upward sending of hearts and minds as a participatory re-enactment.

Marvin W. Meyer, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Many contemporary sons … instead ascend above him, beyond him. We have Transcendental Psychology, the psychology of men like Thoreau determined to have a higher consciousness than their fathers. … Such a son attempts to redeem the ‘endarkened father’ by becoming ‘enlightened.’

Bly reframes ascension as a psychologically symptomatic flight from paternal darkness, diagnosing ‘transcendence’ as a masculine defense mechanism that substitutes vertical inflation for genuine confrontation with the father complex.

Bly, Robert, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Grandiose ascenders sometimes dream of rising in an elevator that is attached to the outside of a building, but when they get to an upper floor, they often find themselves with no entrance to the building.

Bly illustrates the pathological pole of ascension through a dream image of the puer aeternus: the grandiose ascent that achieves height but loses interiority, arriving at elevation without access.

Bly, Robert, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Inherent in human nature is the transcendent capacity to rise above and walk at cross purposes with the horizontal world. We can, of course, stand too straight with pride (superbia) and fly too high with inflation (hubris), but ambition learns little from advice and heeds no caution.

Hillman situates the puer’s ascensional impulse as structurally inherent to human nature while distinguishing its creative upward drive from the destructive inflations of superbia and hubris.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Rather than loving fate or being driven by it, the puer escapes from fate in magical, ecstatic flight. Puer aspirations are fed with new fu…

Hillman identifies ecstatic ascent as the puer’s characteristic evasion of fate and limitation, linking upward flight to the mother-son archetype and distinguishing it from genuine transcendence.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Whether those be ‘fundamental, practical, theoretical,’ or ‘repentance, mourning, humility,’ each reading sees a heavenly trajectory at work in Climacus’ spirituality.

Sinkewicz demonstrates that the Ladder of Divine Ascent is structured throughout by a heavenward trajectory, with every tripartite or bipartite reading of its stages presupposing ascension as the telos of ascetic progress.

Sinkewicz, Robert E., Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, 2003supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

ascendent, 454, 455n, 461, 528 … ascension experiences, 507

Jung’s index notation of ‘ascension experiences’ within a discussion of astrological and synchronistic phenomena signals the term’s place as a recognized category in his broader typology of altered states and psychic events.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Other Stones of Rape, Consolation and Ascension … In the foregoing story Hades carried off Persephone from the distant shore of Okeanos…

Kerényi includes ascension as a discrete mythological category alongside rape and consolation in Greek mythology, pointing to its structural role in the Persephone narrative and kindred myths of abduction, descent, and return.

Kerényi, Karl, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In the (Jewish-Christian?) apocalypse, the ‘Ascension of Isaiah,’ we find, in the middle section, Isaiah’s vision of the seven heavens through which he was rapt.

Jung invokes the Ascension of Isaiah as an early Jewish-Christian apocalyptic text providing mythological precedent for the motif of multi-layered heavenly ascent, relevant to his analysis of the Self’s archetypal imagery.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms