If readers believe this, they should have no problems with the rest of the book.
The name of my home-town in Florida comes from its railway station. In the early years of this century a rail tycoon decided to open up the east coast of the new state of Florida. He was a man of vision. He was also a follower of the Planetary mysteries. The railway went from Jacksonville in the north of the state down south to what is now known as Miami. The major rail stations were named after each of the successive Planets from Saturn to Luna. When I was born in 1944 only one town still had its planetary name; Jupiter.
This rich visionary provided for the development of the fastest growing state in the union. His investment brought millions upon millions of dollars to the area. He was thought of as an eccentric for his naming of the stations. However, all welcomed the results, except perhaps the indigenous Seminole Indian population. This is an example of the power, even in our times, of the Planets to influence human thought.
Whether the connection with Jupiter, Florida, and my study of the Planets was predestined, or a product of my cultural upbringing, is a question worth considering. However, I won’t bother. My consideration is on the question of the symbolism of the Planets and their history as symbols of the psychological states of human beings.
When someone is called Saturnine, Jovial, Martial, Sunny, Venereal, Mercurial, or a Lunatic, they are referred to by their Planetary psychological attributes. These attributes are directly traceable to the earliest written records. It was the Venereal desire of Paris, influenced by the promise of Venus, which precipitated the Trojan War. This character defect, or excess, on the part of Paris, due to the enormity of the consequences, is the Archetype of the same characteristic found in the common adulterer. Likewise it was the excess of Martial vigour that caused the death of Patroclus and the re-entry of the Mercurial Achilles into the battle.
This part of the work investigates the history and doctrine of the Planetary analogy with Self Knowledge, and its very early influence on the Western Tradition. It starts in most ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and especially Greece. The influence then flows through the Mystery Religions and cults, to the competitors of early Christianity. Judaism and Islam are not without a mystical reverence for the Planets and the journey through them to the heavens. The Planetary structure of the heavens and the descent and ascent of the soul are fertile symbols permeating the Tradition from the earliest times. Indeed, the Planetary system is probably the earliest conceptual framework of philosophical mysticism. Plato states that the investigation of the heavens engendered the first study of man’s higher faculties.[1] He believed that god created man upright, able to see heaven, so that he above all animals would have and exercise reason.[2]
We think of the world of matter differently than ourselves. We are made of matter, which is more or less inert, where, as humans, we also have life, (which we share with all other animals), and morals. It is that mixture which makes Humanity. So there are two parts of the trinity, Matter and Morals, what about the third? While all humanity shares the first two parts, some transcend this state into another realm of reality, the realm of the Mystical.
This then makes up our trinity, the Material, the Moral and the Mystical universe. We shall see how the astrology of the ancients is separated into two parts with astronomy being the current limit of serious study. Now while astronomy, the ‘naming of the stars’, can and does deal with the material aspects of the heavens, it has no bearing on moral or mystical questions. I will revert to the wider meaning of astrology, the ‘reasoning about the stars’, which includes Astronomy, of course, but only in the section on the Material.
The moral questions that assail humankind can find an analogy in the heavens. The same and the different are both at the heart of the subject. The fixed stars are like the events in life we cannot change such as birth, death and the intervening period of sustaining life. Whereas the wandering changeable planets are more like our passions, changeable and sometimes improving life, yet sometimes hindering it. As mere humans we cannot change the inevitable but we can change our passions, either enhance or restrict them. We will examine this analogy in some depth, the same and the different, the one and the many, the material and the moral.
If one were to couple the material, fixed physical world, with the fixed stars, and also the changeable passions with the planets as moral, where do we find the analogy with the mystical? In the vast dark between, or beyond, the stars we have the needed analogy with the mystical, the background to all, the field upon which the action of the universe is displayed.[3]
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