The Planets Within

 

Tom Moore, in his work The Planets Within, writes on the Planetary Psychology of the Renaissance scholar Marsilio Ficino [1433-1499].

 

‘Know that you are another world in miniature and have in you Sol and Luna and even the stars.’

[Origen, Homiliae in Leviticum, 5, 2.]

 

‘We have an entire sky within us, our fiery strength and heavenly origin; Luna which symbolizes the continuous motion of the soul and body, Mars speed and Saturn slowness, the Sun God, Jupiter law, Mercury reason, and Venus humanity.’

[Marsilio Ficino, letter to Lorenzo the Magnificent.]

 

The night sky has always been a source of wonder. Its dark, black space hovers over us as a constant reminder of the mysteries that impregnate nature, while its brilliant ornaments, the stars and planets, especially the sun and moon, nourish a deep curiosity about other forms of life. Some nights the sky teems with stars, while at other times the darkness is unmitigated. Low-lying clouds may cast a misty barrier between us and that deep darkness; but when we can see the sky, and if we have studied its patterns, it turns up at night like a familiar face. We can either recognize this sky by its patterns, or conversely, knowing its habits we can find ourselves and establish our own position.

 

If all this is true of the sky we behold with our eyes at night, it is also true of a dark universe we can see within ourselves with an inner eye. In that other universe we find ourselves in the midst of an inner darkness where are contained all memories of the past and fantasies for the future. Like the night sky, that deep inner space is full of mysteries; yet its darkness and distances too are spotted with patterns, lights, and recognizable figures. It can become familiar, like a face, and from it we can find our position. It would seem that we stand between two infinitely vast universes: the cosmos of the outer world still chary of revealing its many secrets, and the microcosm of the inner world of the psyche, equally possessive of its mysteries.

 

These notions, of course, are by no means original, since people for millennia have been looking into the night sky as into a mirror. Identifying the lights and moving patterns felt within as planets and stars, they have fashioned an astrological portrait of the Psyche... [1]

 

As Ficino expresses it, the planets issue forth “rays” of spirit peculiar to each of them, and these rays are absorbed by objects in the world, either natural objects or man-made artifacts. Every single thing with which we come in contact, then, exposes us to one or another planetary influence. We absorb and take on the spirit of that planet, as we go about ordinary living, perhaps unconscious of the varieties of spirit.

 

Ficino refers to spirit as the food of the soul; through spirit, soul is continuously being created and nourished. As he says, this all may happen naturally (unconsciously), or by art, that is, by conscious intention. This is not to say that we can simply fashion our psychological life at will; the process is more indirect than that, but we can develop an awareness of soul, a psychological attitude, by which we can cooperate and indirectly influence the character of our psychological life. We can nourish the soul and live psychotherapeutically by having our psychological life reflect the heavens. That is what Ficino means by becoming as celestial as possible. We can have depth and variety, movement and form, in our inner world. We can have planets within, with all of their benefits of spirit, like the planets of the outer cosmos.

 

We arrive here at the crux of Ficinian astrological psychology. This is no superstitious playing with birth charts and sun signs,... More importantly, through an astrological consciousness we may recognize the polycentric nature of the psyche and become aware of the impact of even minor objects and events on the spiritual life of the soul. The planets, signs, houses, and aspects of technical astrology are only a means for imagining the multiple facets of the psyche.

 

Applying Ficino’s insights to modern life, these technical aspects may or may not be used. One may turn to art, to dreams, to alchemy, to religion, or to psychology itself for paradigms of the soul and the imaginative discernment of spirits. The essential point is to make connections between everyday experience and the deeper life of the soul.

 

In order to make these connections, it is necessary to cultivate that neglected but essential faculty - imagination. Imagination allows of a vision that penetrates the surface of things and grasps those factors that have significance for the psyche. In imagination events appear not only in their particularity or at the level of idea and concept; they are also seen to contain certain images of importance to the soul. Ficino recognized the importance of what we call imagination, but in his theory of knowledge he uses different terms to describe this faculty. [2]

 

The question remains, how do we get ourselves in tune so that our lives have resonance and harmony of the Pythagorean type?

Ficino gives us a few ideas how we might go about tempering the soul:

 

‘Whoever imitates by devotion, study, life and habits celestial benefits, activities, or order, in so far as he is more like the heavens he will receive more abundant gifts. But people unnaturally dissimilar to the heavens and discordant [discordes] are secretly miserable, though publicly they may not appear unhappy.’

 

Each of these kinds of “imitation” deserve some attention, since it is through them that the planets are constellated.

 

“Devotion” once again raises the issue of religion. Obviously, it is not necessary to worship the planetary deities as did the Greeks and Romans; yet they do call for a certain amount of dedication and absorption. The traditional way of speaking of these gods is for an individual to say that he is “in Mercury” or “in Venus.” The idea is that the mood and atmosphere accompanying the archetypal posture of the god take hold of the person, commanding his attention and coloring all his perceptions. One does not simply waken Mercury in one’s soul by writing some doggerel or playing at dream interpretation. It is Mercury who wakens the soul, urging one on toward understanding and insight. The gods are not out in the sky but neither are they merely poetic terms for personal experiences. Ego senses the shadow of the larger embrace of the god, though the god is a psychological reality. A person can, then, truly take a religious attitude toward these movements of the psyche, acknowledging their influence and power, and drawing their spirit into the fabric of life. As Jung said in his definition of religion, religious sensibility involves giving attention to the contents of psychic life, whether they be known as spirits, gods, demons, or unconscious fantasies.

 

A second way of tempering the soul is through study, a simple technique almost too obvious to be taken seriously. Yet, it appears quite certain that Ficino blended in his mind and practice forms of education and therapy. As he wrote, “it is a special discipline to understand properly which spirit, force, or powers these planets symbolize.” Then he goes on to warn against “adoring” the stars; rather we are to “imitate them and through imitation capture them.” In a limited sense, study of the planets would be in reading about these seven deities, knowing what they represent and which spheres of life they influence. In a more general sense, one way to temper one’s life is to become familiar with imagery, through reading in mythology and religious traditions, giving some attention to poetry, fiction, and the other arts, noticing the imagery of dreams and waking fantasies. The goal is to get to know the imagistic expressions of soul. In our society we think it terrible if a person cannot read, spell, and perform basic mathematical procedures; but even our adult population is illiterate when it comes to imagery. Yet images crowd our consciousness day and night, provide religion and art with most of its content, and determine our values and understanding of our world.

 

‘But you may make a finer image in yourself. Since you understand that nothing is more ordered than heaven...’ [3]

 

While imagination is the sine qua non of psychological living, a second step consists in imaginative awareness of oneself. We are not all alike, and at different times in our personal history one factor or another may be predominate... for healthy living, a person has to know who and what he is so as to know what particular things to avoid and what to pursue... Self-Knowledge begins with the discovery of one’s own ‘star’...[4]