Blast from the literary criticism past this morning. We trace how Northrup Frye's scale of reading levels ties in with Dante's(who Frye of course stole from). For Frye, the go in order from the highest to lowest thus:
1.Anagogic - monad
2.Mythical - archetypal
3. Moral -image
4. Literal - sign

This also ties in with Giambatisto Vico's Ages as well:
1. Gods
2. Heroes
3. Men
4.Chaos

Frye also lays out, in his dense and dry but perversely palatable The Anatomy of Criticism, literary symbols of the epiphany. They are the mountaintop, the tower, the lighthouse, and the ladder. All of which we can find in expected or unexpected places. All of this is important information because we are officially about to begin (re)reading To the Lighthouse , and we are required to read it on the level of anagogy and Gods, not of the literal. Because we have to have the experience and the meaning, not just the one.

It was apparently Jorge Luis Borges who said that there only two stories really, the crucifixion on Golgotha and the search for an island in the Mediterranean where magical things exist.