The Seba library treats Gateway in 9 passages, across 8 authors (including Nietzsche, Friedrich, Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), Wilhelm, Richard).
and I and you at this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things — must we not all have been here before?
Nietzsche figures the gateway as the metaphysical locus of eternal recurrence, the precise point where past and future converge and where the doctrine of return is first whispered into existence.
, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883thesis
Humility is the gateway to dispassion, said St John Klimakos; and, according to St Basil the Great, the fuel of humility is gentleness.
The Philokalic tradition assigns the gateway a moral-ascetic function, designating humility as the necessary passage through which the practitioner enters the state of dispassion.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis
In the middle of the lower half of the body is drawn a germ cell by which the gateway of life is separated from the gateway of consciousness.
The Secret of the Golden Flower maps two distinct gateways within the body — one governing vital life-force and one governing consciousness — making the term a technical coordinate in Taoist psychophysiology.
, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931thesis
The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness.
Aragon’s epigraph, deployed by Perel at the opening of her chapter on erotic fantasy, frames the gateway as the threshold to the unconscious erotic imagination, activated precisely by vulnerability and transgression.
, Mating in captivity sex, lies and domestic bliss, 2007thesis
All sensory information, except for olfaction, is routed through the thalamus to the cerebral cortex, and thus the thalamus is often referred to as the sensory gateway to the cortex.
Ogden translates the gateway concept into clinical neuroscience, identifying the thalamus as the anatomical relay — the literal sensory gateway — between peripheral experience and cortical integration.
, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting
You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law.
Armstrong cites Tertullian’s invective to illustrate how the gateway image was weaponized in early Christian patriarchal theology, redeploying the sacred threshold as a designation of female culpability and moral danger.
, A History of God, 1993supporting
the Cross is the threshold to the adventure of his reunion with God the Father. Once you have crossed the threshold, if it really is your adventure
Campbell, while using ‘threshold’ rather than ‘gateway,’ presents the crossing point as the operative mythological structure of death and transformation, providing the monomythic context within which gateway symbolism functions.
, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004supporting
those stationed over the gates of the waters, Micheus and Michar those stationed over the height, Seldao and Elainos those receiving the great generation
The Sethian Gnostic cosmos is structured around named archonic wardens stationed at cosmic gates, demonstrating how the gateway functions in Gnostic cosmology as a hierarchically guarded boundary between planes of being.
, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005supporting
Or, ‘the door’ (perhaps the door of the sheepfold, as in John 10).
A translator’s note acknowledges the possible rendering of a Coptic term as ‘the door,’ linking Gnostic gateway imagery to the Johannine tradition of Christ as the entrance to salvific space.
, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005aside