  "The Lord made me a very great favor in an imaginary vision" wrote Maria de
Agreda in the seventeenth century, "His Majesty put me at the foot of a
beautiful Ladder, and showed me I had to climb it." These words refer to the
spiritual ascent, present in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and crystallized in
the visions of prophets and Catholic saints. Genesis (18: 10-22) narrates that
Jacob, going to Haran, slept on some stones and saw a ladder between heaven and
earth along which angels were ascending and descending. From this dream, the
symbolic union between heaven and earth has been figured with stairs, ascribing
to it different meanings over the centuries. On the steps of the ladder people
saw a metaphor for the graduality of ascent; Benedict used a ladder of twelve
steps of humility in his Regula, and in the seventh century AD John Climacus,
Bishop of Sinai, established a thirty-step Scala Paradisi of meditation leading
to God. In this work we discuss the historical echoes of the Benedictine rule,
together with Climacus' voice in the desert and the visualization of celestial
mysteries, in the case of the Cuzco school painting Allegory of the firmament,
with the representation of the planets' seven heavens (XVIII century). In this
way we try and analyze the intersection between science and mysticism in the
representation of the heavenly stairs, in order to show the cultural anchorage
of the symbology employed in these cases [abridged].
