Jacob’s Ladder enters the depth-psychological corpus not as a single, stable symbol but as a polysemous archetype of vertical mediation — the axis between immanent and transcendent, between earth and heaven, between the ego and the Self. The corpus distributes treatment of this image across several distinct registers. In the Jungian-alchemical tradition, Edinger reads the ladder as a symbol of sublimatio, tracing it through Egyptian funerary texts, Pythagorean-Platonic soul-descent cosmology, Hasidic sayings, and the martyrdom dreams of St. Perpetua, locating its psychological meaning in the soul’s ordered traversal of qualitative levels of being. Eliade, working comparatively, identifies the ladder as a near-universal shamanic and funerary technology of ascent — appearing in Malay, Nepalese, Egyptian, African, and alchemical initiatory contexts — and so treats Jacob’s dream as one instantiation of a primordial motif. The Orthodox Christian tradition, represented by Climacus and Coniaris, interiorizes the ladder radically: the rungs are virtues and passions, the ascent is the monk’s lifelong purgation, and Christ himself is the ladder. Place’s Tarot study reads the image through Neoplatonic and Hermetic emanation theory, where ascent reverses the soul’s planetary descent at birth. Armstrong situates the original Genesis episode within Canaanite theological geography, reading it as a theophanic encounter structurally homologous to the Mesopotamian ziggurat. Tension persists throughout the corpus between exteriorized cosmological and interiorized psychological readings of the image.