A dictionary of symbols by Chevalier Jean

Author:Chevalier, Jean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Signs and symbols -- Dictionaries, Folklore -- Dictionaries, Mythology -- Dictionaries, Symbolism in folklore -- Dictionaries
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1996-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

LADDER

myth of the centre of the world. However, all holy places can become centres and thus make contact with Heaven.

'The Egyptians preserved in their funeral texts the expression asket pet (asket means "step") which shows that the ladder offered to Ra for him to climb from earth to heaven was a real ladder. "The ladder is in place for me to see the gods", says the Book of the Dead.... In a great many tombs of the Old and Middle Kingdoms amulets have been found bearing a picture of a ladder (maqet) or a staircase' (ELIT pp. 102-3).

The Uralo-Altaic shaman performed his ascent to offer the soul of the sacrificial horse to Bai-Ulgen by means of the seven rungs notched in a birch tree. Each of these rungs also marked his passage through one of the planetary spheres. As in the Mithraic Mysteries, the sixth rung corresponded to the Moon and the seventh to the Sun. Travelling from Asia to America, shamanism is found to preserve the same symbolic framework. As Metraux explains, among the Taulipang Indians in Amazonia 'in order to reach the land of spirits, the shaman drinks an infusion made from a liana whose form suggests a ladder' (quoted in ELIC p. 328).

The Turks have the same ascension symbol. 'In the Uighur poem Kadatku Bilik, a hero dreamed that he was climbing a fifty-runged ladder, at the top of which a woman gave him water to drink; thus revived he was able to get to heaven' (ELIT p. 107).

Eliade sums up the lesson to be drawn from all these examples, that all ascension symbols 'signify a transcending of the human and a penetration into higher cosmic levels' (ELIT p. 108).

Ladders, however, may be used by deities to come down to Earth from Heaven. In eastern Timor the Sun-Lord, the supreme deity, comes down once a year into a fig-tree to make his wife, the Earth Mother, pregnant. To help him down, a seven- or ten-runged ladder is set up against the fig-tree. This festival is held at the start of the rainy season.

In many accounts of Amerindians there are references to a ladder which leads up to the rainbow, and the rainbow itself is often depicted as a ladder, for example by the Pueblo Indians (LEHC). The rainbow is the road taken by the dead. It is, however, a road which leads down as well as up, and along it the inhabitants of Heaven make contact with those on Earth, as if by means of a ladder.

From the rainbow one is led naturally to consideration of the especial symbolism of the double ladder. This is an extremely ancient image, believed to originate with the Chaldaeans. Sometimes it is drawn within a star or a crowned circle. It is the symbol of justice since ascent and descent are precisely matched, as crime and punishment should be. Similarities have been drawn between the two equal lengths of ladder swivelling upon the bar which joins them at the top, and the scales and the symbol of immanent justice.

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