Abstract
A fission formalism which describes transmission and absorption through multiple humped barriers using a recursive method is proposed. Developed within the optical model for fission, it accounts for the fission mechanisms associated to the different degrees of damping of the vibrational states accommodated by the minima of the fission path. It can provide accurate description of experimental fission cross sections, including their resonant structure at low energies, and could be used in conjunction with global microscopic parameters in blind calculations of the fission process even for nuclei far from stability.