The shape of the journey

Some sacred texts are itineraries: they script a passage, hour by hour or chapter by chapter, through territory the reader is meant to traverse. Seven texts in this corpus do this: the Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol, the Dark Night of the Soul, the Epic of Gilgamish (whose hero walks twelve double-hours of total darkness through the mountain of Mashu), the Descent of Ishtar through the seven gates, the Mithras Liturgy's staged ascent, and now the Amduat itself, the hour-by-hour guide through the twelve regions of the night. The hypothesis, drawn from the architecture of ritual spaces, is that these texts trace a characteristic sensory arc (a descent into darkness, then an emergence) that other genres do not.

Method: each verse is scored on a darkness-to-light axis defined as a direction in embedding space (seed phrases for each pole, projection of the verse embedding, z-normalized). Scores are plotted in narrative order, smoothed, and resampled to 100 points per text.