Stairs were used to represent the dialogue between the earthly and the divine long before the birth of Christian culture, in ancient architectural forms such as the Babylonian ziggurat and the Egyptian pyramid (markedly in the step pyramid of Djoser), symbolizing the ascent from various elements of nature to a common divine whole. The Dogon people’s stairs (V1: 217) are both a manifestation of the hierarchic nature of the cosmic world order, and in addition to their ritual character have a utilitarian function. The long, winding sandstone stairs, with graded steps and forked peaks, allow the inhabitants of the area around the Rocks of Mali to get to and from their homes.

Some Biblical scholars have noted the connection of the heavenly stairway with the Egyptian Ladder of Hathor, along which the souls of the dead ascend to heaven. Based on texts inscribed on the walls of corridors and pyramid chambers, Egyptologists concluded that the inhabitants of Ancient Egypt believed that they could reach the world of the dead only by climbing this ladder, and that deities guarding it (Horus and Set) assisted the deceased, turning the ladder into a path to heaven. During the Ancient and Middle Kingdoms, a wooden model of the ladder would often be placed in tombs; later, priests would draw a ladder on papyrus to illustrate texts from the Book of the Dead.

Stairs and ladders as ritual symbols have developed into a familiar metaphor for the passage out of the world of the living. In this context, a ladder appears in the finale of Slava Polunin’s lyrical show “Chu”. The show tells the story of a group of old clowns, who have only one thing left to do as their lives near their end: to leave on time. A ladder decorated with gold funereal tassels, lowered from “heaven”, indicates the solemnity of the moment; but it is not the ladder that predicts the clowns’ departure. At the appointed hour, an angelic guide comes for the hero, who is late, and punches his one-way ticket, thus marking the end…

Chaim Soutine, The Red Staircase at Cagnes, 1923–1924, oil on canvas, 28.5 × 21.25 ins

In Mihail Chemiakin’s work “The Ladder” (V1: 253) a border between two planes is clearly marked. The passage here represents not the transition between worlds, but rather the choice of a moral path. The change in color from red to white can be seen to symbolize the choice between spiritual purity (white) or bodily passions (red), if we consider red and white to be symbols of the diabolical and the divine. The dichotomy of red and white, present in European culture since the early Middle Ages, today is most often associated with the Russian Revolution.

Red and white tones predominate in Chaim Soutine’s paintings, notably in his “Red Staircase at Cagnes” – a profoundly tragic image that reflects the artist’s dramatic life and its constant psychological stress. This landscape from the artist’s early period is an attempt to comprehend the meaning of color. Soutine was very interested in red as the color of both life and death. His red staircase, reminiscent of the backbone of the split carcasses so often depicted by the artist, runs along a crooked street, conveying the finiteness of the flesh and the “fluidity” of being. Here once again we find the heavenly staircase, uniting the carnal and the sublime, the inaccessible but possible.