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Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists, and the Art of Spiritual Transformation | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter Levenda
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 173543
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0826428509
Dewey Decimal Number: 204.2
EAN: 9780826428509
ASIN: 0826428509
Publication Date: June 2008
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Book Description
Stairway to Heaven is an incredibly broad ranging new study that stretches from ancient Egypt and Babylon to Jewish and Christian Kabbalists, Chinese Daoists, Hindu Tantra and Haitian Vodun and finally to 19th and 20th century European occult societies, uncovering a hitherto unrecognized common myth that has been employed the world over in roughly the same form since the earliest recorded texts. Beginning with the oldest form of Jewish mysticism and extending this search through the dead sea scrolls, Levenda reveals a consistent emphasis on the number seven and its association with heavenly themes, including those of a chariot, a Throne, a Temple and a divine Being. The author then examines the myths and rituals of egypt, sumer and Babylon to locate the origin of this myth and comes up with some surprising results in the ascent rituals of the middle east. Shifting to the far east, Levenda demonstrates how the mystical practices of China and India display important similarities to these rituals, most notably in the practices of the Chinese alchemists who used a map of seven stars as their ladder to heaven. Reinforced by visits to the Buddhist shrine of Borobudur in indonesia, Levenda concludes that there was a myth common to peoples across the ancient world that an ascent to the heavens was possible using a ladder of seven stars, a process running parallel to the alchemical idea of the perfection of metals and the perfectibility of the soul. This concept was enshrined in the rituals of the Western secret societies of the 19th and 20th centuries such as the golden dawn and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, and influenced the development of new age occultism. exhaustive in scope and revealing in its scholarship, Stairway to Heaven casts a fascinating new multidisciplinary perspective on the mystical practices of heavenly ascent.
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Seven Steps to Heaven June 20, 2008
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
It is easy to look at the mysticism of the ancients and see nothing but unintelligible mumbo-jumbo. But while we are free to reject myth and mysticism as incorrect, we would be foolish to dismiss them as nonsense. There is simply too much articulation, sophistication, and structural rigor to these systems of practice and belief. Scientology they ain't.
But what were the ancients doing? Why did they devote so much time to the stars, the human body, and the connections they believed existed between them? The notion that myth encodes astronomical information was first advanced by Santillana and von Deschend in Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth. Levenda takes their work a step further by identifying in the various seven-step spiritual traditions of the world's religions a reference to the seven stars of the Big Dipper.
We in the modern West just don't look at the night sky very often. But in our ancestors' "world lit only by fire," the sky was much more important to daily life. For bronze age people sitting around the campfire, the celestial procession must have been a lot like television. Certainly they gave the stars at least the same depth of narrative significance we today find in Lost, the Hills, and professional wrestling. But was there more going on?
If you live in the Northen Hemisphere, Polaris is the fixed point around which the night sky rotates - the crown of the "axis mundi." In a world changed by the weather, the seasons, and inexplicable catastrophes, the Pole Star was the only constant. For people who took the notion of "heaven" literally, the Pole Star was an obvious candidate for the seat of God (or gods, or whatever). Levenda argues that the ancients of all (or many) cultures understood the seven stars of the Big Dipper as the seven-step "stairway to heaven." And he finds in their seven-step rituals a means of transcending the world of impermanence, achieving immortality, and ascending to communion with the Supreme.
This is pretty groundbreaking stuff and Levenda makes his argument in a very precise and scholarly way. This is, however, not the Jerry Bruckheimer-style thrill ride that readers of Sinister Forces-The Nine: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Sinister Forces) may be anticipating. Like Hamlet's Mill, this is a fairly dry book about one seriously mind-opening idea. Unless you are interested in the details of archaic wisdom traditions and the "connective tissue" between them, you may find yourself skimming. But there's no flakiness here either. This is a book that will be read by serious people for some time to come.
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