Interpreting the astrological psychology of
Marsilio Ficino, Thomas Moore in his book The Planets Within states that the
soul is nourished by images because images are the source of spirit.
Astrological and hermetic images of the nature of planets and zodiac signs are
one of the key sources of cultivating magical imagination in the West. The
classical images of planets as agents of the spirit are a striking expression
of the ancient understanding of the psyche as a reflection of the macrocosm.
However, for the psyche to truly be this, it is necessary to possess a
well-trained and strong imagination, because without an orderly imagination,
there is no orderly psyche, and only as orderly can it reflect the orderliness
of the cosmos. Namely, each of the planetary spirits/gods, in Gnosticism
referred to as archons, of which there are seven, matching the number of
planets known in antiquity, including the Sun and the Moon, has endowed man
with a part of its nature. Hence, human beings, in their nature and character,
represent a mixture of planetary qualities. In this sense, the planets are
within us. In an ideal state, the harmony that prevails among the planets in
the cosmos naturally reflects in the microcosm, but the experience of life on
Earth disrupts this natural macro-microcosmic harmony. Our inner planets
intertwine, collide, conflict, disrupting the harmony, which results in human
misery, unhappiness, illness, or madness.
Manly
Palmer Hall, in his book The Secret Teachings of All Ages, described planetary
spirits as a spectrum extracted from the white light of the Supreme Deity. In
this sense, Hall states that the worship of planets is based on their
acceptance as cosmic embodiments of the seven creative attributes of God.
Thomas Moore emphasizes the ancient text Asclepius, which contains ideas that
form the basis of Marsilio Ficino's theory of magic. What sustains life in all
things, as asserted in Asclepius, is the breath or spiritus. According to
Ficino's theory, spiritus is the intermediary in the magical connection between
planetary daimons and the physical world or an individual's life within it. The
way this spiritus is transmitted from the planets to individuals is described
in Asclepius as a matter of creating images. Each image, says Thomas Moore,
embodied, for example, in a statue that represents the attributes of a
particular planetary deity, has the ability to gather, retain, and impart the
power of that deity to the person who uses the image. In this sense, Moore
concludes, images carry profound, archetypal power. The images Moore speaks of
are woven into the very foundations of the human mind. Not only are the planets
within us, but so is all of nature. In so-called primitive communities and
those of ancient times, we can find beliefs about the origin of the human soul,
i.e., the concept of conception involving spiritual forces, from which,
ultimately, the teaching of the Immaculate Conception of the Christian Virgin
Mary derives. For example, the Egyptian goddess Neith conceived from the wind.
At this point, I would like to draw readers'
attention to the representations of the nature and essences of the seven
traditional planets. The first among them, and also the oldest in a
mythological sense, and certainly the most distant from us physically, is
Saturn. By carefully observing many details in classical images, we can grasp
the basic elements of the representation of the nature of not only Saturn but
of each planet. Saturn, as Moore states, represents simple and hidden
knowledge, separated from all movement and united with divine things. To
perceive the mysteries in the depths of the soul, it is necessary to distance
oneself from usual activities and established thought patterns. According to
ancient tradition, the basic elements of Saturn's nature are weight, depth,
contemplation, and orientation towards the abstract, the spirit, the religious,
and the artistic, all immersed in a melancholic atmosphere of the spirit.
Thomas Moore highlights two natures of Saturn: puer and senex. Puer is Saturn
the revolutionary, the one who wields the sickle and castrates his father
Uranus, depriving him of authority. This is, one might say, the martial side of
Saturn, the energetic, youthful, revolutionary side, eager for power, which can
be seen, for example, in the tarot's major arcana The Emperor. Senex is, as
Moore says, the senile old king who jealously guards his authority, the monarch
of the golden past. It is this golden past that is the most intriguing feature
of Saturn's nature because it connects the temporal abyss that hides something
valuable, like a dragon guarding hidden gold.
In alchemy, Saturn represents the metal lead, the
initial material that, after undergoing a series of transformations, ultimately
produces gold. In this sense, Saturn is the father of gold, identified with the
Black Sun (Sol Niger), the alchemical stage of putrefaction, symbolized by the
raven. Saturn is the grave. His children are gravediggers, but also carpenters
and masons. They build but also bury. They till the land but also dig graves.
Thus, we can draw a parallel between Saturn and another major arcana of the
tarot, Death. This also illuminates another connection between Saturn and Mars,
as the sequence Puer / the Emperor arcana / the zodiac sign Aries, points to
gold (the Golden Fleece), guarded by the Saturnian dragon. On the other hand,
alchemical Saturn is closely related to decay and Death. As Fulcanelli
explains, Saturn is symbolically the representative of the first earthly metal,
the parent of all others, but at the same time, he is their only natural
solvent. Fulcanelli elucidates the mythological fact with an alchemical
argument that each dissolved metal combines with the solvent and loses its
characteristics. Hence, it is accurate to consider that the solvent
"eats" the metal, and thus the old man Saturn devours his progeny.
The
aforementioned ideas align with Ficino's teaching, which posits that a melancholic
temperament facilitates the liberation of the soul from external events and is
one of the conditions that favor divination! Divination, oracles, and prophets
are Apollo's children, embodying solar nature. Thus, the depth of depression
and melancholy, if it does not exhaust a person, leads to solar brilliance and
the gifts of the Sun—clear vision, far-sighted vision, seeing in the light of
truth, perceiving phenomena and things as they truly are. Isn't that akin to
gold? Saturn, therefore, is the cause of melancholy, but also the one who
dispels it. Falling into melancholy, akin to descending into Hades, is a kind
of gathering, closing, retreating from the periphery to the center, all under
Saturn's rays. Furthermore, as Moore explains, in Ficino's theory of knowledge,
Saturnine consciousness is closest to the highest part of the soul, the
function most removed from the material world. This is not the spirituality of
the Sun nor the rationality of Mercury, but the function of deep contemplation.
Ficino also pointed out the common trait of Saturn and Mercury, which is an
inclination and talent for science and literature, while being completely
opposite to Venus. Venus gives life, Saturn takes it away, yet we cannot
overlook Saturn's association with old age. Old age is also dryness, but it is
also longevity, which is why Ficino emphasized that to achieve a long life,
people made a Saturn talisman from sapphire during Saturn's hour, when he was
ascendant and in a favorable position in the sky. The talisman depicted an old
man sitting on a high chair or on a dragon, with his head covered by a dark
cloth and his hands raised above his head, holding a sickle or a fish wrapped
in a dark-colored covering. Dark colors, the sickle, the fish, the dragon—all are
attributes of the chthonic powers of the Great Mother, and let us recall that
Kabbalists associate the sephira Binah, the "great maternal sea,"
with the planet Saturn.
Giordano Bruno depicted each planet with seven phantasmagoric images. Contemplation on these images stimulates imagination and memory, thereby enabling a person to understand the nature of the influence or spirit of a particular planet symbolically expressed through these images. A similar principle applies to tarot cards. For example, Bruno's first depiction of Saturn shows a man with a deer's head riding a dragon. On his right hand, he holds an owl devouring a snake. We can look up the meanings of these representations in various dictionaries of symbols and reflect on them, but more than that, we can use this depiction when invoking the influence of Saturn's spirit. Furthermore, by using the system of analogies, we can arrange entire segments of our experience or knowledge in the corridors of memory according to the similarities of those experiences/knowledge with the given images. Thus, in the first image of Saturn, we can place a whole series of phenomena and events we wish to remember that have associative similarities with the motifs of the image. This is, among other things, a methodology of the art of memory, which is very important in occultism. This entire composition points to one aspect of Saturn's spirit.
Another aspect of that spirit is depicted by a man on a camel holding a sickle in his right hand and a fish in his left. The third image of Saturn shows a dark man wearing a black ceremonial robe, raising his palms upwards. The fourth image depicts a dark man with camel feet sitting on a winged dragon, holding a cypress branch in his right hand. In the fifth image, we see a dark figure dressed in black, with a basilisk coiling its claws around its tail in the right hand. The sixth image shows an old and lame man leaning on a staff, sitting on a high throne placed on a cart pulled by a mule and a donkey. Finally, in the seventh image, there is a charioteer whose chariot is drawn by two deer. In one hand, he holds a fish, and in the other, a sickle. Based on the depictions described by Giordano Bruno and Ficino's descriptions, we can gain a visually rich and clear picture of the classical hermetic representations of Saturn's astromagical influences. Similarly, we can do this for each planet individually. Aren't these planetary imaginative images also the basis for some form of tarot? Haven't some of these images found their way into the tarot cards themselves?
