Celestial Ascent occupies a structurally central position within the depth-psychology corpus, operating simultaneously as cosmological symbol, initiatory technique, and transformative psychological event. Eliade’s encyclopedic comparative work establishes the term’s foundational phenomenological range: across Siberian, Central Asian, Australian, Southeast Asian, and Indo-European traditions, the ascent to upper realms is the defining gesture of shamanic vocation and curative power, enacted through ecstasy, ritual climbing, magical flight, and the traversal of layered heavens. Eliade insists that this motif is not reducible to psychopathology but constitutes a coherent soteriological technology. Hans Jonas complicates the picture by situating celestial ascent within Gnostic cosmology, where the soul’s passage through planetary spheres becomes a subtractive liberation from archontic bondage — a reading that charges the ascent with anti-cosmic tension absent from shamanic frameworks. Henry Corbin recasts the theme within Iranian Sufism and Ishrāqī theosophy: the ascent is not spatial but orientational, a reascent of light toward its luminous source through suprasensory heavens accessible only via visionary apperception. Alchemical literature, surveyed by Jung and Edinger, translates the motif into the sublimatio operation, the upward movement of volatile spirit extracted from dense matter. Across these traditions a key tension persists: whether celestial ascent is primarily a cosmological navigation of objective hierarchies or an interior, psychological transformation that merely employs spatial metaphor.