The stacked Kālī image — corpse at the bottom, Sadāśiva, Bhairava in union, Kālī on top — isn't a picture about the path. It's the path's curriculum drawn as one body. You don't read it top-down or bottom-up. You climb it.
The Live Wire: Every tradition that draws its whole cosmology as a single vertical figure (the Śaiva totem-pole, the Kabbalist Tree, the alchemical Rebis, the tarot Fool's journey laid as a column) is doing the same trick — compressing a reading sequence into a thing you can hold in one glance. The icon is lossless compression; the teacher is the decompression key. Which means the image can be fully public and still esoteric: the cipher is on every temple wall, but the key is lineage. Second framing: what would it mean to build an icon of your own discipline — to draw your craft as one climbable body, so that a student could see the whole arc before they understand a single rung? The diagram that is also the syllabus that is also the initiation.
Related: The Stacked Icon as the Tradition's Trajectory, A Tantra Is a Text