Mediumship and Comparative Spirituality 12/08/2026 6 min

The Songs of Ascents: The Fifteen Psalms of Ascent and the Inner Pilgrimage to Jerusalem

An essay on the Shir HaMaalot — the fifteen Psalms of Ascent — as an itinerary of outward and inward pilgrimage toward Jerusalem, the city of peace.

I. Steps that ascend to the heart

Within the body of the Tehillim — the Book of Psalms — there is a brief and luminous sequence that the sages of Israel called Shir HaMaalot, the Songs of Degrees, or Songs of Ascent. These are fifteen compositions, gathered between chapters 120 and 134, which rabbinic tradition associates with the fifteen steps that, according to ancient accounts, led from the Court of the Women to the Court of Israel in the Second Temple of Jerusalem. Upon each step, it is said, the Levites would intone one of these songs, and the pilgrim who ascended toward the sanctuary ascended also, verse by verse, within his own soul.

It is no small thing to note that sacred architecture and liturgical poetry should meet in a single gesture: that of transforming a physical journey — from the outskirts of the city to the heart of the Temple — into a spiritual itinerary. Whoever visits Jerusalem with the feet visits, at the same time, with the spirit, something that cannot be measured in stadia nor in cubits. The Psalms of Ascent are, for this reason, more than travel hymns: they are a discreet map of the soul that longs to draw near to the sacred without losing its way along the road.

II. Pilgrimage as memory and as promise

In the Jewish calendar, three festivals — Pessach, Shavuot, and Sukkot — summoned the people of Israel to go up to Jerusalem, fulfilling the precept of pilgrimage. They came from villages of the Galilee, from towns of Judea, from distant communities, and the road was long, often arduous, subject to fatigue, uncertainty, the fear of robbers along the way, or the longing for home. It is no wonder that the Songs of Ascent speak as much of anguish and supplication as of confidence and rest: they arise from people who walk, who suffer along the way, and who place in the journey a hope greater than their weariness.

One of the best-known verses of this collection evokes the question concerning the source of help, answered by the contemplation of the mountains and, behind them, of the Creator who formed them. This image — the pilgrim who lifts his eyes to the heights along the road and there recognizes a sign of protection — captures well the spirit of the whole series: the physical landscape becomes spiritual language, and the weariness of the road is reinterpreted as part of a process of purification and drawing near. Pilgrimage, here, is not merely a social rite or cultic obligation: it is a pedagogy of trust.

III. From anguish to rest: the emotional arc of the fifteen songs

Whoever reads the Shir HaMaalot in sequence perceives an almost dramaturgical movement. The first songs bring the cry of one who feels exiled, surrounded by hostile tongues, thirsting for peace in a world that seems to know only war. In them there is an acute awareness of the distance — geographical, but also existential — between the place where one stands and the place to which one wishes to go. This is, perhaps, the first lesson of these psalms: to acknowledge honestly the starting point, without disguising affliction with hasty optimism.

As the sequence advances, the tone is transformed. Images of confidence arise — the watchman who does not sleep, the husbandman who awaits the harvest with patience, the family gathered as a sign of blessing, the servant who awaits the master's gesture as the eye awaits the hand that shall come to his aid. The final songs speak of fraternal unity, of blessing descending like dew upon the mountains, of definitive rest in the sanctuary. There is, therefore, an arc: from dispersion to unity, from outcry to stillness, from the road to the Temple. It is this arc that authorizes the symbolic reading which, through the centuries, Jewish mystics, and later Christian commentators, made of these texts — not as an itinerary of the earthly Jerusalem alone, but as the itinerary of the soul toward its own sacred center.

IV. Jerusalem as symbol of the inner center

Jewish mystical tradition has always recognized in Jerusalem a twofold nature: the historical city, of stone and memory, and the celestial Jerusalem, archetype of fullness and peace which no military conquest nor political dispute can touch. When the pilgrim ascended physically to the Temple, he ascended also — according to this reading — toward an inner state of integration, in which the fragmentations of daily life might find rest. It is no accident that the very name Yerushalayim was read by commentators as containing the root of shalom, peace: the city would be, in its symbolic essence, the dwelling of the peace that is sought and seldom possessed in full.

This reading does not belong exclusively to Judaism. Early Christianity, direct heir of the Psalter, reinterpreted the Songs of Ascent as a figure of the soul ascending toward the celestial Jerusalem mentioned in the Christian Scriptures, and Christian monks and mystics prayed them as a spiritual ladder, step by step, toward contemplation. Later esoteric traditions, including certain currents of speculative Freemasonry, absorbed the image of the steps as a metaphor for moral and initiatic progress. In every case, something common is preserved: Jerusalem ceases to be merely a geographical destination and comes to designate a symbolic center of unity, toward which each tradition points in its own language — a fact that should occasion not dispute, but rather a shared reverence before the mystery of the human quest for the sacred.

V. Prayer as pathway and the pilgrimage of every day

In Jewish liturgy, the Shir HaMaalot remain alive: they are recited on specific occasions, such as certain moments of the Shabbat and of festivals, and remain part of the devotional treasury of synagogues around the world. But their power is not exhausted in prescribed ritual use. There is something in these fifteen songs that invites any person of sincere faith — Jewish, Christian, or simply a seeker of the sacred — to recognize, within his own life, the steps he must climb. Few of us will physically make pilgrimage to Jerusalem; all of us, however, pass through valleys of anguish, wait for a help that seems delayed, and aspire, however remotely, to a rest that only true peace can grant.

It is not the place of this essay to promise that the reading or recitation of these psalms will produce any guaranteed effect, nor to suggest that they are a magical formula of instant peace. What tradition offers us, rather, is a method of attention: the possibility of transforming daily unrest into conscious prayer, the mundane displacement into a journey with meaning. To pray the Songs of Ascent — or simply to meditate upon their symbolic course — is an exercise in humility before the time that the climb demands. There is no shortcut to the steps of the Temple; there is only the patient commitment to ascend one at a time, sustained by the trust that help, should it come, will come from hands greater than the very stature of the mountains.

Eisenheim