The Ladder of Divine Ascent, the seventh-century masterwork of John Climacus composed at Sinai for monastic communities, occupies a distinctive position within the depth-psychology corpus as both a historical document of ascetic psychology and a living symbolic structure. Scholarship in the corpus approaches it along several axes. Sinkewicz’s close hermeneutical analysis reveals the Ladder’s internal organizing logics — bipartite, tripartite, and dyadic — each disclosing how engagement with death, repentance, mourning, and humility structures the monk’s progressive movement toward divine union. Coniaris reads the Ladder through an Orthodox pastoral lens, emphasizing its relevance to contemporary spiritual growth as an interior, grace-given process rather than a perfectionistic achievement. The primary text itself (Climacus, c. 600) furnishes the raw vocabulary of monastic ascent: obedience, hesychia, dispassion, and the imitation of Christ. Edinger and Eliade extend the symbol cross-culturally, situating the ladder within the universal mythological grammar of vertical ascent — Egyptian, shamanic, alchemical, and Christian mystic traditions all converging on the image of soul’s upward movement through hierarchically ordered realms. A key tension runs throughout: whether the Ladder’s thirty rungs constitute a closed pedagogical system or an open, ever-receding trajectory whose summit is perpetually deferred. The Palmer Philokalia corpus connects the Ladder’s rungs explicitly to the practice of obedience and the suppression of contrary passions, forging a direct link between ascetic praxis and psychological transformation.