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Paolo Veronese, Jacob’s Dream, circa 1555–1556, Venice, Italy, San Sebastiano. (Courtesy of Osvaldo Böhm)

he endless variety of symbols indicating ascent and descent, climbing up or climbing down, ascending and descending, must be attributed to the imperative—human, nat- ural, and divine—to explore the heights and depths of the world. More than all other animals humans have pushed the limits of the vertical dimension of space, making it as true of mortals as of God, “If I ascend into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me” (Psalms 139:8–10).

Mountains, towers, trees, and ladders are all means by which people rise and are symbols of ascent and descent. The human being is the animal who strives to reach heaven and who falls into hell (homo ascendens et descendens), and when we employ these symbols we recognize that we rise and we fall. The cultural evidence for this is the perennial appeal of the symbols, which the biblical prophets used to express their rev- elations, Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic architects used in their designs, and later churches display in their spires (Patrides, “Hierarchy”). One important work expressing the Judeo-Christian sense of hierarchy is Dante’s Divine Comedy, which challenges graphic artists to illustrate the levels of the pit of hell, the mountain of purgatory, and the heavenly levels of paradise. There are as many illustrations of Dante in the twen- tieth century as were earlier executed by Giovanni di Paolo, Sandro Botticelli, William Blake, and Gustave Doré. This divine hierarchy was also present in ancient Greece, which depicted Hades as the underworld while the gods enjoyed Mount Olympus as their home.

As with other animals that move, humans find themselves in space and in a landscape that is rarely flat or level. Hills and mountains rise up by degrees, land slopes down into valleys. To gain control over land, the top of the mountain makes possible vision in all directions, while the valley, however pleasant, is a place in danger of attack (e.g., “the valley of the shadow of death” from Psalms 23). Humans build towers and protect them by digging ditches, so extending the height and depth pro- vided by the environment. Every culture has some holy moun- tains, where a prophet such as Moses ascends to meet with the Lord and receive the tablets of the Law. And every culture has valleys, sometimes accursed, as was the valley outside Jerusalem that held the foul city dump, Tophet, in the Valley of Hinom (II Kings 23:10; Isaiah 30:33; Jeremiah 7:31–33). Primitive groups believed that above the clouds of heaven is the abode of gods and in the pit of hell are the devils. People live in a middle world, beneath heaven and above hell, and in that ambiguous realm good and evil are mixed, so that constantly everyone is faced with choices between them. The most striking

example of this generic characteristic of the human moral predicament is the long tradition of depicting Adam and Eve beneath the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and their expulsion from paradise (Genesis 2–3). Two great examples of this scene are those created by Masaccio and Michelangelo, in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence and in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, respectively.

To ascend is generally to become better by degree, and to descend to become worse. But there are also visual symbols of ascent that cannot succeed, as building the Tower of Babel is still a symbol of vain ambition. To occupy the place of gods produces the confusion of tongues (Genesis 11). The Greek myth of Otus and Ephialtes, two giants who stacked up moun- tains in order to reach the home of the gods, also shows the consequences of hubris. The Greek gods punished Sisyphus in Hades for his many deceptions by condemning him eternally to roll a giant boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down again just as it reached the summit. In medieval and Renaissance symbolism ascent may be merely riding fortune’s wheel up, to be followed by inevitable decline and ruin.

The ultimate of good and evil in vital terms is life and death. The natural world provides the symbols of light and dark as the associated characters of good and evil because above are sources of light, especially the sun, without which there can be no life. Since dark is only the absence of light, it is natural to assume that being in itself is good and that evil ultimately is nothingness.

The hierarchy of being can be constructed between self-sub- sistent being and all that is below and dependent on it, the nec- essary contrasted to the contingent. This range by degrees, including all the opposites—spiritual-material, living-dead, intelligent-brute—is expressed abstractly by the symbolic Tree of Porphory, and diagrammed chiefly in books of logic and metaphysics. Unfortunately the best known book, The Great

Chain of Being by Arthur O. Lovejoy (Cambridge,

Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1936), a masterpiece of the history of ideas, pays no attention, other than Homer’s Golden Chain, to the visual arts. The few examples of chains are all from literary sources.

The Tree of Life is spread worldwide in many different forms. The Norse picture of the world is the evergreen ash tree, Yggdrasil, populated by humans created out of ash and elm trees. Is the mythic Tree of Life true in the sense that all species can be considered branches and that the trunk grew from com- mon roots? Biologist Stephen Jay Gould points out that Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, especially in its early chapters, employs the Tree of Life as a guide to construing temporally the mass of observed facts of kinship.

In two other ways the symbols of the vertical dimension are as much used in the modern world as they were in the medieval ascent / descent 71

period, when artists were more deeply inspired to use symbols of heaven and hell than we are today. Economic success is attained by climbing a ladder, and the rails and rungs are some- times compared to the spiral of the symbol of the United States dollar ($). We still represent visually the steps to be mounted to own one’s own home or to rise to the eminence of chief execu- tive. The reaction against materialism also takes the hierarchi- cal form, in that spirituality is conceived as advancing beyond sensation to perception and from imagination to intellect. The ascent of spirit is commonly thought of as inner development, going beyond calculating reason to appreciation and devotion to ideals for their own sake. In particular, the depth psycholo- gy of Carl Jung finds significance in ancient myths, theology, and alchemy, as well as the arts that use symbols of mountains, towers, trees, ladders, and bridges. The spirit naturally seeks to rise, as the sparks fly upward. It is doubtful whether concern with symbolism would have developed apart from a revulsion against reducing all life to a dead and monotonous level, thus depriving us of what psychologist Abraham Maslow called “peak experiences.”

Throughout the discussion of the meaning of mountains, towers, ladders, and trees we will observe that although these symbols can be found in very diverse cultures, there is a tension between their peculiar cosmological and moral connotations and the syncretistic tendency of Jungian thought to claim one essential underlying denotation. Many interpreters find essen- tial meaning in one archetype of ascent and descent: the center and world axis, as in the iconographic philosophy of Mircea Eliade.

Salvation is sometimes a descent into the womb of mother Earth rather than an ascent to the heavenly father. Even in Western culture, with Mount Olympus as the home of Zeus and the other Greek gods and Sinai as the mountain of the covenant with the god of Israel, mountains were for centuries regarded by Europeans as blemishes on a good creation (Nicolson).

Mountains

Israelites were provided with Psalms to sing as they made pil- grimages to their temple in Jerusalem on Mount Zion. There are 15 “Psalms of Ascent,” and the most famous verse is still used in worship by people far from the Holy Land and by those who are not descended from the Hebrews: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help” (Psalms 121:1). This is only one of many such expressions. It occurs in paintings with Chinese characters telling of mountain peaks that lead beyond the clouds to heaven. In India there is Mount Meru, which Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains believe to be the center of the world. From this center are spread out four lotus-petal continents, and the mountain is the seed-cup of the world lotus. From ancient Greece we are acquainted with temples built on high promontories, such as the Parthenon on the crest of the Acropolis of Athens. For many Native American peoples the mountain was itself the divin- ity. The Japanese also celebrate Mount Fuji, with its springs that provide water to the rice paddies.

The peak of the mountain is a place of exalted vision, as depicted in the middle panel of Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim

Altarpiece. Explorers commonly tell of their ecstatic experi-

ences, as did Hudson Stuck and three others who in 1913 were the first to climb Mount McKinley in Alaska. We can therefore gain common feeling for the Hebrews, led by Moses from Egypt to Mount Sinai. The power of Yahweh was manifested in storm, fire, and lightning. The people must stay behind, await- ing the return of the prophet Moses.

The earliest representation of Moses receiving the Law from above is in a fresco in the Synagogue of Dura-Europus, now in Syria (third century a.d.). The image of Moses ascending the mountain became standard in Byzantine representations, par- ticularly because Emperor Justinian established the great monastery of St. Katherine at the foot of Mount Sinai. A mosa- ic at Ravenna, Italy, presents a high mountain with a sharply precipitous drop from level to level, reminding us of the metaphor used by American monk Thomas Merton in his auto- biography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948).

The Israelites had to remain below while Moses ascended the height. In Jewish and Byzantine art only the hand of God is shown coming from a heavenly cloud. It is said of Moses on the height that after fasting 40 days and 40 nights he spoke to the Lord “face to face,” but in other texts it is only the Lord’s back- side that Moses can glimpse. Moses is given the aureole of a saint, and in Western art from the twelfth century until the eighteenth there are horns from his forehead or cheeks, such as those in the illuminated manuscript by Rudolf von Ems. Iconographer Ruth Mellinkoff accounts for this as a translation of the Hebrew by St. Jerome as a horned face. We now agree with the traditional Hebrew and Greek interpretation that the meaning more properly is that Moses’ face was radiant. Rarely, Moses is shown with face veiled as he presents the tablets of the Law to the people.

The people grow impatient during their long wait for the divine terms of the covenant of Yahweh and induce Moses’ brother, Aaron the priest, to melt down jewelry into a golden calf. This is commonly presented as an idol set upon a column or a monumental platform. The scene was a favorite of Renaissance and Baroque painters and perhaps best known because of Nicolas Poussin. Because the text tells of the daugh- ters of Israel singing and dancing around the idol, the painter had the opportunity to depict an orgy. Moses is presented in anger because of the idolatrous infidelity of his people, and Moses in anger smashing the tablets is a standard episode of the Moses cycle. The best known, in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, is by Rembrandt van Rijn.

The stones of the mountain, inscribed by the finger of God with the Ten Commandments, are not found in the earliest depictions. The ancients were acquainted with writing on a scroll, and only in the Middle Ages did Moses appear carrying the rounded-top stones. Jewish scholars have established that this shape, called compass-top, was first devised by Christian artists and borrowed by the synagogue, where it has become the most familiar symbol of Judaism as a religion (in contrast to the six-pointed Magen David used by the state of Israel).

Probably unique in Christian churches is the altarpiece of San Moisè in Venice, Italy. Rocks are piled up to replicate a mountain, with God the Father giving the Law to the prophet Moses. Both are bearded patriarchs, surrounded by angels with 72 ascent / descent

trumpets. At the foot of the mountain stands brother Aaron on the left and sister Miriam on the right.

The modern love of wild mountain scenery is evident in Henry Cheever Pratt’s Moses on the Mount (1828–1829, for- merly attributed to Thomas Cole). This work is unusual in that the human figures are tiny, dwarfed by the majestic mountains above the prophet and the priest. Paul Cézanne became fixated on nearby Mont Sainte-Victoire and painted it many times over the last two decades of his life. Fascination with mountains has received perhaps its most vivid modern treatment in the motion picture Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). A seeming- ly random selection of people across the country become obsessed with the image of a mountain and engage in an all- encompassing pursuit of its meaning. Their quest ends with an alien race making contact with Earth at the mountain, perhaps a secular analogue to epiphany.

Towers

People have constructed artificial mountains across the globe, including pyramid tombs in Egypt, pyramids for sacrifice and worship in Aztec Mexico, and ziggurats in the river valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates. All are awesome means of attain- ing the height, and some have steps of ascent, sometimes strict- ly limited to use by the priesthood or royalty who attained divine elevation.

The most significant symbol of a tower in Western art is not associated with success in reaching heaven, but with human failure. The account of the Tower of Babylon is retold in the Bible as the Tower of Babel, and Babel now signifies the conse- quent confusion of tongues. The intent of the Babylonians is stated in Genesis: “Let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” (Genesis 11:4). The account comes from Hebrews who were convinced that their true God had led Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, and that it was proper to forsake a city noted for its tower. In contrast to true contact with God (as in the case of Jacob and his vision of a ladder let down from heaven), the attempt to build a tower to heaven became the symbol of human pride and the consequent confu- sion, the symbol of meaninglessness. The Hebrew scribes were also rejecting the Babylonian story of creation, which involved the copulation of the male and female deities and the imitation of the creation by the divine marriage rite of the king with the priestess in the temple on top of the tower.

In contrast to the rather standard construction of a ladder, which may vary somewhat in width and much in height and angles, the towers that are represented in medieval and Renaissance art have far greater variety. Sometimes it is depict- ed in the early stages being constructed of brick, as in a mosa- ic in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, but more commonly its height may reach to the clouds of heaven. Sometimes it is an erect tower, square, with windows to indicate internal stories, but more frequently it is a construction with higher levels receding, often with a spiral staircase leading upward. There is usually an indication of scaffolding used by workmen, because the tower remains unfinished. Sometimes it has many sur- rounding buildings, for the biblical account is of a “city and a tower.” In the version by Jan Brueghel the Elder (Brueghel de

Velours) painted before 1625, there are two rivers and a busy city on what seems to be an island, with mountains in the back- ground. In the nineteenth-century version by Gustave Doré, the stress is placed on the height piercing the clouds, while pagan worship occupies the foreground. Sometimes the general theme of pride of the high and never-to-be-finished structure is rein- forced by representation of a king, Nimrod, in some pose of arrogance. Another way of pointing to the moral that pride is followed by destruction (Proverbs 16:18, 29:23, etc.) is to show a vast structure collapsing into a ruin.

The tower is not always a symbol of bad ascent and failure, indeed it is sometimes the opposite. The tower often means unassailable purity. St. Barbara, imprisoned by her father to protect her Christian virginity, is often pictured with a win- dowless tower. This also serves as a symbol of the Virgin Mary. The tower that signifies sainthood may have three windows, signifying the Holy Trinity.

Humanists of the Renaissance used the symbol of a tower- like mountain, usually with an external sprawling pathway that could be used to ascend the heights above the clouds. There are frequent representations of the Tablet of Cebes from the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries. Cebes, a student of Socrates and a Pythagorean, is one of the speakers in the Phaedo of Plato. The text of his Tabula comes from a Neoplatonic manu- script of the first century a.d. It offers an explanation of a large picture on the wall of a temple of Cronus. The story is of a pil- grim traveling on a highway and visiting this temple. According to the allegory, life’s meaning is found in learning to distinguish true from false, virtue from vice, and the way to cope with bad luck, and in spite of all misfortune to gain happiness in the end. There are 27 lessons to be learned, and the illumination leads by spirals up toward a temple at the summit.

The tower can be the symbol of the object of conquest for the soldier and by analogy the scholar’s goal. Encamped in the plain beneath the forbidding height, the tabula militiae scholas-

ticae are various tents (of wickedness?): ignorance, laziness,

pleasure, fear, and three more. The steps up are the seven liber-