The Seven Planets

Something else occurs to me in looking through the Book T stuff.

People keep saying that they don't now much about astrology, and I realized that for lots of people astrology is just that goofy drivel that turns up in short paragraphs in the paper. The modern obsession with sunsigns is the direct result of a man named Alan Leo who "simplified" astrology by throwing out most anything that was complicated or effective. Because of the prevalence of (lobotomized) sunsign astrology, moderns have an inflated idea about the significance of the Zodiac and the sun's position in it.

For a couple thousand years Astrology was far more concerned with the planets and their interrelationship. This is reflected in the Ptolemaic models of nested planetary spheres, in the Gnostic belief in planetary Archons, the alchemical characterization of the 7 terrestrial planets (aka metals), and the 7 day week.

The planets (from Greek planetes, meaning "wanderer") showed the evershifting perfection and power of the cosmos.The planets were the source of the energy that was filtered/charged by the sign.

The Seven planets were (moving from the Earth outward towards the fixed stars):

The Moon
Mercury
Venus
The Sun
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn

This order reflects their relative speeds, and is also the order with which they are mapped onto the Hermetic Tree of Life used by the Golden Dawn. This order ecame associated by various authors with everything from the angelic hierarchy to the Chain of Being to the Muses.

Anyways... not to get all didactic, but I thought a planetary thread was in order as well because it will help when we start digging around in the decans. There are folks on AT that know WAY more about pactical astrology than I do, and I'm hoping theyll join in to add to the soup and correct my mistakes...

Well, since you brought it up.

I understand that Pluto was never really a planet. But what about Uranus and Neptune?

AW

Always Wondering said:

Well, since you brought it up.

I understand that Pluto was never really a planet. But what about Uranus and Neptune?

AW

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Scion is speaking of ptolemaic models and at the time of Ptolemy - the planets were listed as far as the eye could see......they couldn't see neptune, uranus and pluto....

from Wiki:
Neptune was discovered on September 23, 1846,[1] Neptune was the first planet found by mathematical prediction rather than regular observation. Unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led astronomers to deduce the gravitational perturbation of an unknown planet. Neptune was found within a degree of the predicted position.

Uranus was found about a 100 years earlier.

franniee said:

from Wiki:
Neptune was discovered on September 23, 1846,[1] Neptune was the first planet found by mathematical prediction rather than regular observation. Unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led astronomers to deduce the gravitational perturbation of an unknown planet. Neptune was found within a degree of the predicted position.

Uranus was found about a 100 years earlier.

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Which one does Crowley call "Herschel"?

Just FYI, this is the same order also as the "heavens" in Dante's Paradiso. And the Mantenga (Non-)Tarot.

In the upper levels, things get a little shifty. On the Tree of Life, sphere 10 is Earth, then the list of planets, ending with sphere 2 as "Fixed Stars" and sphere 1 as "Prime Mover." Since Dante starts with the moon as the lowest, it adds "Empyrean" as the 10th (highest) sphere.

If we go by the seven days of the week, the order is a little different. (Book T page 173):

Sunday - Sun
Monday - Moon
Tuesday - Mars (god Tiw, god of ?)
Wednesday - Mercury (Woden or Odin, god of wisdom)
Thursday - Jupiter (Thor, thunder god)
Friday - Venus (Freya?, goddess of love)
Saturday - Saturn
(Some of these obviously make more sense in Romance languages . . .)

Here lie my random thoughts on the order of the planets.

Oh, Scion, thanks for the cool illustration. Planets associated with muses and musical scales. Very interesting!

Tyr/Tiw is a god of war. Actually he starts out as a supreme Anglo-Saxon deity and then gets demoted bit in later mythology. But the connection is war/Mars.

The Ptolemaic order of the planets is the standard model right up throgh the (ahem) "Enlightenment"... and for occult material remains the standard model. The planetary heptameron is a powerful thread in western thought. With the introduction of Hellenized astrology to India and it's subsequent passage into the Middle East via trade routes. the model is a dominant one in the history of the world. It's impact upon everything from music theory to folk medicine to optics to Catholic theology is tremendous. For many many centuries, literally every work of art, every school of science, every model of the cosmos took it as a given.

franniee said:

from Wiki:
Neptune was discovered on September 23, 1846,[1] Neptune was the first planet found by mathematical prediction rather than regular observation. Unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led astronomers to deduce the gravitational perturbation of an unknown planet. Neptune was found within a degree of the predicted position.

Uranus was found about a 100 years earlier.

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Fascinating. I just never got that astronomers were discovering planets before they were able to see them.

So Scion is talking about the roots of the roots of astrology? So generally, about the time Book T was written these planets were "new" to astrology and weren't used by Golden Dawn, or just in Book T?

rachelcat said:

Which one does Crowley call "Herschel"?

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I believe it is Sir William Herschel - the astronomer who discovered Uranus in 1781.

Always Wondering said:

So Scion is talking about the roots of the roots of astrology? So generally, about the time Book T was written these planets were "new" to astrology and weren't used by Golden Dawn, or just in Book T?

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Well he has to begin at the beginning. He is speaking of the ancient greeks and how they named the days of the week after the 7 personal planets and how they put the planets in order....they did it by the speed of their orbits... little did they know, back then, that the planets revolved around the sun. That wouldn't be discoverd until Copernicus in the early 1500's.

They did not see the modern planets: uranus, neptune and pluto. They can actually see Uranus with the naked eye but no one apparently took note of it. These planets take many years to orbit the sun.... 84, 165 and 248 respectively.

The Golden Dawn was formed as far as I know in the late 19th century - uranus and neptune were discovered by then. Pluto was discovered later... around 1930. Waite died in '42, Crowley died in '47 so they knew of pluto.....

Let Scion finish the rest because he knows the Golden Dawn and book of thoth and I have only a cursory knowledge of them.

I was talking about traditional astrology, i.e. REAL astrology pre-Theosophy and the Alan Leo butchering of the late 19th century. But more importantly, the astrology I was talking about is the astrology which the Golden Dawn was using... the astrology that threads through the entire Western Magical tradition: seven planets, predictive, magickally based.

Astrology as it's figured in Book T doesn't incorporate the "new" planets. In fact, none of the magickal systems incorporated by the Golden Dawn used the "new" planets... and traditional astrology pretty much died with Lilly. So after a century of lying fallow it was resurrected and repopularized in a theosophist version (mis)conceived by Alan Leo.

Now, Crowley did (sort of) incorporate the new planets... which isn't surprising because he was zealous about incorporating advances in science ("We place no reliance On Virgin or Pigeon; our method is Science, our aim is Religion") even when it's wrongheaded (witness his strange introduction to the Goetia which derailed ceremonial magick for most of the 20th century because of popular misreading). BUt for all intents and purposes, the Thoth is a straight Book T deck (excepting Aiwass' "Tzaddi is not the Star" business.. but I'm leaving that for the Thoth forum). I've never bought the use of the new planets in astrology they always seem false (to me). But more importantly in the context of the Golden Dawn: they aren't part of the system. Saturn IS the last planet with reason... and his symbolism is indicative of that.

If you're interested at all in looking at traditional astrology I highly recommend a book by John Frawley called The Real Astrology which is a little OTT, but hilarious and weirdly inspiring. The goal of traditional astrology is not to keep astrology mired in the 17th century and before, but rather to sidestep the mushy, new age feel-good dross that Leo made possible with his (legally and financially inspired) redefinition of the tradition.

Does that make sense?

X

Scion

Scion said:

Does that make sense?

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Yeah, sort of

Saturn IS the last planet with reason... and his symbolism is indicative of that.

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What do you mean by that? That the other three are not reasonable? Or have no reason of being used? Or...?