  Ficino’s ontology thus shared aspects with Plotinus’s, including: the hierarchy which human beings, through their birth and appearance in the world, have descended; the importance of meditation and philosophical practices in fashioning re-ascent; the presence of “sympathies,” or hidden connections (which the properly observant philosopher could find and reveal) between material and celestial things that helped link the different levels of the hierarchy; and the hierarchy’s background of Platonic echoes (such as the cave imagery from the Republic and the same dialogue’s myth of Er, and the post-death journey in the Phaedo).