Within the depth-psychology corpus, the stairway — along with its cognate forms, the ladder and the graduated steps — functions as one of the most persistent and polyvalent symbols of vertical movement between psychic registers. The image organizes itself around two fundamental axes: ascent toward transcendence and descent into the underworld, with the mediating structure itself carrying its own significance as threshold and passage. Eliade’s encyclopaedic survey establishes the shamanic and archaic substrate, demonstrating that stairways of knives, notched sticks, and seven-runged ladders constitute technologically diverse yet symbolically unified instruments of celestial ascent across Siberian, African, Oceanic, and American traditions. The Christian mystical corpus, represented above all by John Climacus’s Ladder of Divine Ascent, transforms this archaic motif into a rigorously articulated psychology of moral and spiritual progress through thirty ascending steps. Edinger, drawing on alchemical sublimatio, reads the ladder as the psyche’s archetypal image of its own upward movement — a trajectory validated by Hasidic and Augustinian parallels. Place extends the image into Neoplatonic emanation, where the stairway enables bidirectional movement between archetypal and physical poles. Hillman, characteristically contrarian, critiques the ascensionist fantasy embedded in the ladder metaphor, insisting that maturation equally requires downward rooting. Jung’s Red Book offers the stairway as a transitional liminal object — worn, dark, leading to an encounter with the autonomous psyche. The term thus stands at the intersection of individuation, spiritual disciplines, shamanic technique, and archetypal cosmology.
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 the ladder/stairway as the universal shamanic and funerary instrument of vertical passage between cosmic planes, attested across the Indian Archipelago, Malay, Nepalese, and Egyptian traditions.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
the ascensional role of stairs is attested elsewhere in Asia… the Chingpaw shaman of Upper Burma ascends a stairway of knives during his initiation. The same initiation rite is found in China
Eliade demonstrates that the stairway of knives constitutes a pan-Asian shamanic initiation structure whose symbolism of dangerous ascent is too geographically distributed to be assigned a single historical origin.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
Emanation introduces a stairway that allows the archetypal to descend to the physical and the physical to ascend to the archetypal. The trumps in the Tarot act as a symbolic stairway in the same way.
Place argues that the Neoplatonic concept of emanation structures the Tarot trumps as a symbolic stairway mediating bidirectional movement between archetypal and physical orders.
, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005thesis
Man is a ladder placed on the earth and the top of it touches heaven. And all his movements and doings and words leave traces in the upper world.
Edinger presents the Hasidic doctrine that the human being is itself a ladder — the alchemical sublimatio motif translated into a depth-psychological understanding of the psyche’s vertical extension between earthly and celestial registers.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
The ladder with seven rungs was also preserved in alchemical tradition. A codex represents alchemical initiation by a seven-runged ladder up which climb blindfolded men; on the seventh rung stands a man with the blindfold removed from his eyes.
Eliade traces the seven-runged ladder into alchemical initiation iconography, where the removal of the blindfold at the summit encodes the attainment of enlightened vision as the telos of graduated ascent.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
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 the ascensionist fantasy encoded in the ladder symbol, arguing that Western depth and biological reality alike require growth downward as much as upward.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
The very meaning of ladder associates itself with progress and growth… spirituality according to St. John Climacus, is not mere perfectionism… but a never-ending process of climbing and growth leading to new levels of knowledge of God.
Coniaris elaborates the Climacean ladder as an open-ended symbol of spiritual growth resistant to any claim of final arrival, insisting on perpetual ascent as the authentic mode of theosis.
, Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998supporting
the higher you climb, one day of trust at a time, the more you discover that the weight of your trust in God combines with His love for you to give you a steady and secure feeling.
Coniaris draws a phenomenological analogy between the physics of climbing an extension ladder and the psychology of faith, arguing that the stairway becomes more stable precisely as the ascending soul commits its weight to it.
, Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998supporting
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 interrogates the inner law governing the ladder’s steps, framing the stairway not merely as a cosmological image but as an interior topology of desire and its orientation toward the divine.
, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 600supporting
‘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 extends the stairway metaphor to encompass prayer, liturgy, and scripture as equivalent modalities of continuous ascent, identifying the Church itself as a ladder-structure.
, Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998supporting
he leads me up an old, worn-out stairway. At the top I come to a wider and higher hall-like space with white walls, lined with black chests and wardrobes.
In the Red Book, Jung records a visionary ascent via a deteriorated stairway that functions as a transitional liminal structure leading to an encounter with a numinous scholarly elder — an image of the autonomous psyche.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting
The American poet is to mount to paradise on the stairway of surprise: Great is the art, Great be the manners, of the bard.
Bloom identifies Emerson’s deployment of the stairway as a figure for the American poet’s Orphic ascent through surprise — relocating the mystical ladder within the aesthetics of creative sublimation.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting
a tripartite reading of the Ladder reminds us just how much progress means to John. The ascetic life can be divided into stages through which monks progress… each reading sees a heavenly trajectory at work in Climacus’ spirituality.
Sinkewicz demonstrates that the tripartite structure of Climacus’s Ladder encodes a graduated psychology of ascetic transformation aligned with patristic divisions between practical and contemplative modes of life.
, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, 2003supporting
Climacus arranges the steps in general accord with traditional divisions of the ascetic life into basic monastic virtues, followed by the practical life… and the contemplative life.
Sinkewicz situates the Climacean ladder within the Greek philosophical tradition of graduated stages, linking the stairway’s rungs to the Evagrian and Aristotelian distinction between practical and intellectual virtues.
, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, 2003supporting
‘Face of Glory’ (Kirttimukha). At Top of Temple Stairway (Detail of Figure 81.) Borobudur, Java.
Campbell documents the architectural placement of the ‘Face of Glory’ at the summit of the Borobudur temple stairway, situating the threshold guardian precisely at the point of transition between lower and upper cosmic registers.
, The Mythic Image, 1974aside
the Babylonian ziggurat was sometimes represented with seven colors, symbolizing the seven celestial regions; he who climbed its storeys attained the summit of the cosmic world.
Eliade places the ziggurat’s graduated storeys within the same symbolic complex as the shaman’s ladder, identifying architecturally staged ascent as a ritual enactment of cosmic vertical passage.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951aside