Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ancient Greeks noted seven objects in the sky that move in a regular fashion against the background of stars: the five planets visible to the naked eye (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn); the sun; and the moon. These mobile lights they called planetes - "wanderers". The mysteriously regular motions of these seven classical planets reminded the wise that our terrestrial world, the stage on which all of human life is played, is connected to vast and largely invisible truths. Both the outer realm of bodies and the inner domain of souls are linked to secret immensities.
Various mythologies evolved to symbolize this fact. The planets were personified as divine beings, each one lord of a facet of nature and of culture. As the soul voyages from its Source to embodied life on earth, the wise taught, it passes through the orbits of the seven planets, acquiring a coat or sheath from each one. During the soul's descent, the order of these encounters was thought to be in the sequence of the planets' apparent speeds through the sky, from slowest to quickest: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. The soul can raise itself to awareness of its supercelestial origin by contemplating the planets in ascending order: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.
To those who view life negatively, the planets are jailers and the coats are chains; to those who consider life as a holy (if often daunting) sojourn, the planetary garbs are the soul's adornments (the original meaning of the Greek word kosmos was "adornment" - the sensory world as the adornment of the hidden one). Many ancient philosophers taught that the best sort of life is one in which our interior planets are harmonized with the outer ones; in other words, if we try to cultivate a humble, flexible, compassionate relationship with the seven aspects of life symbolized by the planetary deities, we are nurturing wisdom. This idea was resurrected by the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433 - 1499), who wrote:
These celestial bodies are not to be sought by us outside, in some other place; for the heavens in their entirety are within us, in whom the light of life and the origin of heaven dwell. If you temper within yourself the heavenly signs and the heavenly gifts, you will flee far from all the menaces of the Fates, and without doubt will live a blessed life under divine auspices.
Today, half a millennium of science has amply confirmed the truth of the ancient insight - we are indeed intimately fused with the cosmos on every level. But the pace and jangle of modern life can numb us to this truth, and to the healing it holds. How can we awaken in feeling the connection that our scientific minds know to be so? Maybe the planets can help. Over the past five centuries we have learned more about the starry wanderers as physical objects than the ancients ever knew. But we can still employ the old planetary personifications and symbols as reminders of our immersion in the "music of the spheres". Study the characteristics of the seven planets. Visualize their symbols. Sing their songs. Sense your life as a thread in their tapestry. Most important, honour them, and love them; and through these seven gates you will honour and love their Source in all of its unfathomable harmonies. Then act on this love. As a human being, that is what you can do. Wisdom has no expiry date.
Please explore this Gallery of Planets in whatever way you please. The planetary images are illuminations from a fifteenth century Italian manuscript entitled De Sphaera - the artist is unknown. The texts are Orphic Hymns to the planetary deities, written down in the first centuries A.D. but likely containing material that is much more ancient. These delightfully quaint translations were made by Thomas Taylor (1758-1835), who did the first English translations of many Platonic and Neoplatonic works.
I encourage you to listen to beautiful recreations of the planetary Orphic Hymns as performed in Ficino's time; they are on a CD called Secrets of the Heavens: Seven Invocations for the Contemplation of Things Eternal by Riverrun Studios. Visit their website.
He who is born in imagination discovers the latent forces of Nature.
- Paracelsus
