The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 544, titled:
The Origin of the Chaldean Order and Planetary Days of the Week
With Chris Brennan
Episode originally released on August 16, 2026
Original episode URL:
—
Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
—
Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released September 19th, 2026
Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
—
CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m going to be talking about a specific ordering scheme of the planets that arose in the ancient world that’s known today as the Chaldean order, but in ancient times was referred to often as the order of the seven-zoned sphere. And I’m gonna talk about and make the argument – what I think is a unique argument – that this technique or this specific ordering scheme originated with astrologers working in Egypt in the second century BCE during the earliest strata of the Hellenistic astrological tradition. And I’m also going to talk about how this scheme eventually became the basis for associating the seven planets with the seven days of the week. And this actually becomes the reason why the names for the planets are still embedded in the days of the week in many especially European languages today.
All right. So first let me show a diagram that shows the order of the planets that I’m talking about so that you can visualize it right from the start. So here’s a diagram that shows what I’m calling the planetary order of the seven-zoned sphere. And this order of the planets, it begins with – it’s based on the speeds of the planets, which I’ll talk about later. And it starts with the Moon, which is the planet in ancient times that they knew was closest to the earth. And then the next planet in order is Mercury, moving away from the earth. Then Venus, then the Sun is assigned to the middle of the scheme right in the heart of this planetary order. Then the next planet is Mars. Then the next planet after that is Jupiter, and finally the next planet after that is Saturn.
So this is what I’m going to be calling the planetary order of the seven-zoned sphere, or what was otherwise called in most modern discussions for hundreds of years, it’s become called the Chaldean order. But what’s important to know about that is there’s only one really late source from the fifth century named Macrobius who was writing in Latin late in the Roman Empire, and he’s the one that referred to this system when he mentioned it as the system of the Chaldeans. And so as a result of this, many historians and astrologers for hundreds of years mistakenly assumed that this order of the planets came from the ancient Babylonian or Mesopotamian astrologers. But then over the course of the past century or so after a bunch of cuneiform horoscopes and other texts have been discovered, it’s become clear that at least as far as the current evidence is concerned, the ancient Mesopotamian astrologers didn’t have this specific planetary order, so it doesn’t actually seem to have come from them. And in fact, when you read Macrobius’s text again in that light, you realize that by the time of Macrobius in the fifth century CE, the term “Chaldean” had become just a generic term for all astrologers in general. So in fact, when you read it in that light, what Macrobius actually likely means is that this planetary order was “the system of the astrologers.”
So that’s one point, and then the next point then as a result of that is that the origins of this specific planetary order are actually very mysterious. And a lot of the historical discussions about it these days, even in academic historical texts, sometimes either gloss over it or are not clear really, and nobody has a definitive conclusion exactly about where this came from. And there’s been oftentimes sort of like an assumption that some astronomers must have proposed this order sometime around the second or third century BCE, and then after that point for some reason the astrologers adopted it and then just used it everywhere.
However, what I would like to propose today is that the inverse may have happened, and actually what I’ll be showing is that the earliest sources for this planetary order and for this doctrine were in the texts of Nechepso and Petosiris from the second century BCE. And I’ll be arguing that they actually may have outlined this planetary order as part of a conceptual construct that is similar to what we know of as the Thema mundi, which was also a conceptual construct that the same group of texts introduced in order to explain and rationalize the scheme for the planetary domiciles or for establishing which planets ruled certain signs of the zodiac. And then similarly, there was a second scheme that I pointed out in a paper in 2012 – the planetary joys scheme, which is focused on the houses. And that is a similar conceptual construct that was used to determine what the significations of the houses were in addition to a few other things.
So I believe, and what I’d like to argue today, is that there’s a third conceptual construct underlying Hellenistic astrology that was introduced very early in its formative stages, and it is this concept of the seven-zoned sphere. And what’s interesting about it is that they started deriving a lot of things from it, including some of the significations of the planets, I’d like to show, are derived from their relative positions in the seven-zoned sphere and in the planetary order of it. They also derived a system of assigning planets to the decans that came from the seven-zoned sphere. It’s the common system of decans that was adopted in the Middle Ages and became part of the five essential dignities. And then even the planetary days of the week ultimately derive from this concept of planetary days and planetary hours, which ultimately derives from this specific planetary order on a repeating cycle, which I’ll get into in more detail later on.
So yeah, I got a big topic today, got a big lecture. I wanna present most of my research, and this will essentially take the form of sort of a research paper that primarily historical and of interest to historians, but it should be of interest to astrologers as well because it helps to explain and outline where a major piece of doctrine came from and helps us to understand part of our history better, which I think is really important, and where certain techniques and concepts come from.
So I’m recording this today on – I wanna get the date – on Thursday, July 23rd, 2026. I started at about 2:16 PM here in Denver, Colorado, with Scorpio rising. And yeah. I got a lot to cover, so let’s get into it.
Okay, so the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians had very long astronomical traditions that stretch back to at least 2000 BCE with records going all the way that far back. And in the Mesopotamian tradition, they actually developed an advanced mathematical astronomy, and the ability to predict where the planets would be far into the future and far into the past, especially based on centuries of empirical observations where they identified different planetary repetitions, and they were able to use those repetitions basically in order to make predictions about planetary movements in the future and the past. And this is something I covered a little bit in the recent episode on the Babylonian goal year periods just like, a month ago – I think last month.
So the thing, though, about the Mesopotamians is that they didn’t develop geometric models of the cosmos like the Greeks later would, although Greek astronomy didn’t develop until much later. It didn’t start getting more complex until much later, until, like, the fourth century BCE or so. So on the one hand, you have the Mesopotamians that are developing these planetary models for tracking things in the future and the past, and then also the Egyptians have their own astronomical traditions that are especially surrounding the 36 decans and paying attention to the rising or the culminating of those decans for different astronomical and timekeeping and eventually astrological purposes. But both of these traditions did eventually develop some standard groupings or orderings of the planets according to different rationales, and they wrote these down in texts, although sometimes these groupings seem to have had symbolic or mythological significance rather than what we would think of as, like, a standard cosmological significant in terms of how later on we will become more focused on establishing the order of the planets relative to earth.
So for example, let me show a diagram that shows the planetary order that seems to have become the standard one in ancient Egypt prior to the Hellenistic period. So let’s say prior to 300 BCE. A lot of the ancient texts will tend to order the planets in this way, which the order will go Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Mercury, and then Venus. So as you can see, this isn’t necessary following an order that would be more familiar to us in terms of the later specific ordering of, like, the Chaldean order or the planetary order of the seven-zoned sphere that we saw earlier. But it did for some reason and for different internal reasons become what seems to be the standard order in ancient Egypt.
So over in Mesopotamia, however, by pretty late in their tradition, a planetary order that seems to come up a lot by about the beginning of the Hellenistic era – so let’s say by around 300 BCE – is this order, which starts with Jupiter and then Venus and then Mercury and then Mars and then Saturn. So what’s interesting about this planetary order is this is obviously the planetary order that would eventually in the Hellenistic tradition become associated with the distinction between benefic and malefic planets, or basically planets that have more positive significations which are here on the left, which are Jupiter and Venus, and then the planets that would have more negative significations, such as Mars and Saturn. And then in the very middle, you get Mercury, which is interesting because Mercury always plays a vacillating role in Hellenistic astrology where it can go either way. So this is one of the reasons why we know that the Mesopotamians had developed the concept of benefic and malefics before the Hellenistic period, and that this is something conceptually that they handed off to the Hellenistic tradition.
All right, so that’s what’s going on in those, like, really long traditions that, again, lasted for, like, 1,500 years at least until we get up to the point that we’re talking about where Greek mathematical astronomy doesn’t really fully start to come together until about the fourth century BCE, which is the time period roughly around the philosophers Plato and Aristotle and the astronomer-philospher Eudoxus. So around the fourth century BCE, or let’s say roughly 350 BCE to give, like, an exact date.
So one of the things that’s important around this period and that you can see them talking about in their texts is that the Greeks conceptualized the cosmos as circular. And they put the earth at the center of the cosmos, and it was surrounded by these concentric spheres which the planets and the fixed stars were on, essentially, or connected to. However, they ran into some challenges. Some challenges arose as they were trying to establish the sequence of the planets relative to earth. And this is a process that we really see getting going around this time period of like, Plato and Aristotle and Eudoxus. So part of the starting point is that they could see that the Moon would sometimes move in front of other planets or other stars and occult or hide them. And as a result of that, they knew that the Moon was the closest visible body or planetary body or celestial body to us. And the fixed stars were also established as being the furthest away, were established as being farther away than the other planets and the luminaries in the solar system. So then it just became a matter of working out the remainder of the planets, basically, besides that, or the remainder of the known visible planets.
So they ended up eventually settling on a model where they focused on the speeds of the planets, especially the tropical periods, which is the time that it takes a planet to return back to a specific degree in a certain sign of the zodiac. So for example, the period of Saturn was established as 30 years. The period of Jupiter was established as 12 years. And the period of Mars was roughly established as being about two years; Mars is kind of tricky due to its long retrograde cycles. But where they ran into issues was there were complications figuring out the Sun and Venus and Mercury because all three of those have roughly the same tropical or zodiacal period of one year, or they were believed to have the same tropical period roughly, speed-wise, of one year. So as a result of that, if all three of those inner planets have a one-year period, then it’s not really clear how to sort the three of them. And sometimes you may have to reach for other explanations in order to do that sorting, especially at a relatively early stage in the development of astronomy in the Greek-speaking world.
So in the Timaeus, around let’s say 360 BCE towards the end of Plato’s career, Plato used the following planetary order which became very important. And this is that planetary order which starts with the Moon and then the next is the Sun, and then Venus and then Mercury and then Mars and then Jupiter and finally Saturn. So this is the planetary order that gets established in Plato. And this is important, because Plato was extremely influential, especially his text, the Timaeus, which was a cosmological origin story or myth about the creation of the cosmos and how it was set up. And that text was incredibly influential for all sorts of later philosophies and religions and even scientific works. So as a result of that, Plato’s order was actually followed for quite a long time after it was introduced around 360 BCE. So that means we know that this planetary order was still being used as the core one by some of the major philosophical schools by the late third century BCE or by as late as 206 BCE, as I said.
So even some astronomical texts – for example, there’s this astronomical papyrus known as the Ars Eudoxus, which is still using this planetary order around the time it’s written in Egypt somewhere around the year 190 BCE. So I can’t stress enough, like, how widespread this specific planetary order was. And even occasionally later when some of the later planetary orders like the seven-zoned sphere supplanted it, you’ll still sometimes see later Platonic enthusiasts or philosophers mentioning that planetary order because they recognize it as the planetary order that Plato outlines in the Timaeus.
Okay, so at this point, though, things get kind of interesting in terms of world events, because what happens is Alexander the Great takes an army of Macedonians and Greeks out of Europe in the middle of the fourth century BCE, and he conquers both Egypt as well as Mesopotamia before dying and leaving his generals to carve up the different parts of his empire. And what happened is that when Alexander went through Egypt, he ended up founding the city of Alexandria in the year 331 BCE. And after he died and after the subsequent wars that took place between his generals, one of his generals named Ptolemy took control of Egypt and eventually set himself up and his family up – he set himself up as the king or the pharaoh of Egypt. And Ptolemy I ended up ruling Egypt from about 305 to 282 BCE. And then after him came his son, Ptolemy II, who ruled from 284 until 246 BCE. And why this is important is that the two of them created the Library of Alexandria, basically, and Alexandria as a result of that, it became not only the biggest library in the world, but it also became a central hub for scientific research, basically, in the ancient world, including things related to astronomy, eventually astrology, geography, mathematics – like, all sorts of different sciences and things were flourishing partially because the kings or the patrons at that point were helping to support, to state fund, the library and essentially the research facilities there.
So what’s important about that for our purposes is around this time, Egyptian priests had been in the process of translating texts on Mesopotamian astrology into the Egyptian language, and they’d probably been doing that for at least a couple hundred years or so. I think there’s a mundane text that dates to the fourth or fifth century BCE that’s been translated from Mesopotamian sources into Egyptian. And it’s really one of the things that ties together both Mesopotamia and Egypt or makes them similar is that it was the priests who were the ones that were focused on astrology, and being literate and being highly educated was part of their priestly duties and priestly skills. And then partially for scientific but partially for religious reasons, the priests were the ones that became highly trained in astronomy and then eventually astrology.
So the Egyptian priests are, like, translating this stuff from Mesopotamian astrology into Egyptian. Then the Greeks take over and set up Alexandria. The Egyptian priests are still engaged in this practice of practicing astronomy and astrology in the temples. But then during this era after Alexander dies, this is the beginning of the Hellenistic era from roughly let’s say the third and second and first centuries BCE. And during this time, there’s this huge, cultural mixing pot, especially in Alexandria, of Mesopotamians and Egyptians and Greeks that are starting to blend and synthesize their different philosophical and scientific and astronomical and astrological systems together.
All right, so next in order – around 200 BCE, we get a really important development where there was this famous polymath named Eratosthenes who was – he became the head of the Library of Alexandria, and he introduced a new planetary order. And let me show you a diagram that shows this specific planetary order.
So in the planetary order of Eratosthenes, it goes Moon, then Sun, then Mercury, then Venus, then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. So what’s important here basically is that he’s taken the planetary order of Plato and he’s inverted the positions of Mercury and Venus so that now Mercury follows after the Sun, and then Venus follows later rather than the reverse order as Plato had it.
So this is important, because Eratosthenes was – he was a really notable scientist. He’s the guy that is the first known person to calculate the earth’s circumference relatively accurately. And he was a polymath, so he also wrote other works on philosophy, on mathematics, on geography, poetry, music, and even astronomy. So one of the ways that, because astronomy’s becoming more advanced at this, he or other scholars working around him at the time may have taken into account additional factors in order to try to sort the inner planets. And one of those probably was sorting it based on the maximum elongation from the Sun, which is that they were able to establish that Mercury never gets more than they believed about 28 degrees from the Sun, whereas Venus was established as not getting more than 48 degrees from the Sun before they turn retrograde or direct. So as a result of that closeness of Mercury to the Sun versus Venus moving a little bit further away, it sort of stood to reason that Mercury must be the next planet in order after the Sun rather than Venus, and that becomes part of the motivation for flipping their planetary order.
So he also may have taken the synodic period into account, which is the relationship between the Sun and the planet and how often they form conjunctions, especially complete, like, a full conjunction cycle. And Mercury had a much faster synodic period where it catches up to and conjoins the Sun approximately every 116 days, whereas Venus takes about 584 days. So that becomes an additional factor then for making this subtle but still important reordering of the planets. And you have to realize that if Eratosthenes is doing this around 200 BCE, because he died in 194 BCE, there’s been, like, 150 years at this point of philosophers and scientists using the planetary order of Plato. So to make this change is, it’s like, small on paper, but it’s a big jump at this point to flip the positions of Mercury and Venus.
So this may have been, as a result of that, set up kind of like, an important precedent in terms of perhaps making more radical changes later on. And we can see then that the astronomical models were kind of in a state of flux due to different things like this and different factors and arguments that were being taken into account, and due to the rapid progression in some ways of certain scientific understandings with things like even Eratosthenes measuring the circumference of the earth roughly. So this ended up setting the stage for a major new development when it comes to planetary orders.
Sometime in the second century BCE, a new planetary order emerged. And what it did is it modified the planetary order of Eratosthenes, and it moved the Sun to the very center of the cosmos and to the center of the order of the planets. So here is that planetary order where it starts with the Moon, and then Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. So they’re all arranged in this order according to their speeds, basically – their planetary speeds. And this is kind of more evident when you map it out like this vertically, which I think, even though I’ve been doing it left to right for the sake of just making the argument clear, I think that ordering is meant to be viewed with this sense of verticality for reasons that I’ll talk about later. But roughly you have the earth at the bottom or the center of the cosmos. Then based on the orbital periods of the planets, especially based on the tropical periods of returning back to a single degree of the zodiac, you have the Moon, then Mercury upwards, then Venus, then the Sun, then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and then finally the fixed stars.
All right, so this planetary order is extremely important because after the second century BCE, it is quickly and widely adopted by virtually all sources from that point forward. Like, there’s just this shift in the second century, and then all of a sudden from the first century BCE forward, everybody is talking about and everybody is using this specific planetary order. So for example, Cicero mentions it in two of his works, one of them De re publica in 51 BCE or thereabouts, and then he also mentions it in his critique of astrology in his book On Divination in 44 BCE, which was written around BCE. And I believe when he mentions it here, I think it’s Cicero himself mentioning it as a digression. And sometimes people think that he’s pulling that paragraph from an earlier source, from an earlier philosopher, but I think that’s actually Cicero himself speaking at that point in 44 BCE.
Elsewhere, the Antikythera mechanism – the shipwreck that the Antikythera mechanism was on is thought to have happened somewhere around, like, 60 BCE, I think based on coins that were contained on the ship. So we know that that planetary order was actually built into the Antikythera mechanism sometime before that shipwreck around 60 BCE. And I did a whole episode on the Antikythera mechanism, so you can go watch that for more on the history and some of the details surrounding that.
There was a astronomical text by an astronomer named Geminus that’s thought to have been written sometime in the first century BCE. It’s usually dated to sometime between 90 and 35 BCE or so. And Geminus really explicitly outlines this planetary order in that text.
Next there is an author who is known to have written on astronomy and poetry named Alexander of Ephesus, and he gives the planetary order, basically, and this is later quoted by Theon of Smyrna. But Theon is thought to have, and is likely to have, confused Alexander of Ephesus with an earlier author named Alexander of Aetolia, who was one of the early heads of the Library of Alexandria. And that’s one of the things I think that early historians that were trying to reconstruct the history of this planetary order would sometimes stumble across is references there where an ancient source like Theon who’s writing much later is accidentally mixing up two sources because of some of the collected doxographies or encyclopedias, basically, that he’s drawing on. But I think this author, Alexander, and I think I may read a quote from him in a minute, mentions it. Probably he’s thought to have lived somewhere around 50 BCE.
Next, Vetruvius mentions this planetary order in his word De Architectura somewhere around 25 BCE.
So basically, it’s just like, everybody’s suddenly mentioning this order, and then it continues to explode and expand from the first century BCE forward where everybody’s talking about it and everybody’s using it.
So here’s a couple – I’ll read a couple of quotes of people, some of those first century authors that are mentioning this planetary order just so you can get a sense of them. So the first one is Alexander of Ephesus, who’s being quoted by Theon of Smyrna here. And he says – it’s in poetry, so the poetry’s not gonna fully come off in this reading, but it will just a little bit. He says,
“High aloft, one above another, each was allotted a higher circle:
Nearest to the earth is the divine Moon;
Second, in turn, is Stilbon [the Gleamer]” – or the twinkling one – “of Hermes, carver of the tortoise-shell lyre;
And next to him is Phosphorus [the Light-Bringer], the most brilliant of Cytherea;” which is the poetic name for Venus.
“Fourth, above them, the Sun himself is carried by his horses;
Fifth, in turn, is Pyrois [the Fiery one] of murderous Thracian Ares;” which is Mars.
“Sixth stands Phaethon [the Radiant one], the glorious star of Zeus;” which is Jupiter.
“Seventh, in turn, rises Phainon [the Shining one],” which is Cronus, or Saturn, “close to the [fixed] stars.
All of them, in concord with the notes of a seven-toned lyre, pour forth a harmony, each with its own interval from another.”
And so he mentions this connection with music and the harmony of the spheres towards the very end there, which we’ll come back to a little bit later.
Okay, so elsewhere, the astrologer Geminus who is thought to have written sometime in the first BCE an introduction to astronomy. And there’s the passage where he talks about this, which I’ll read again just to show you how the non-astrological texts were talking about it. All right, so Geminus – and this is from the translation of Evans and Berggren. So he says,
“Highest of all is the sphere called the sphere of the fixed stars, including the representations of all the zodiacal constellations. One must not suppose that all the stars lie on one surface, but rather that some are higher, some lower; but because vision extends to equal distances, the difference of height is unperceived. Beneath the sphere of the fixed stars lies Phainon (“the Shining One”), called the star of Kronos; this one passes through the zodiac circle in very nearly 30 years, or through one sign in two years and six months. Beneath Phainon, and lower than it, moves Phaethon (“The Radiant One”), called the star of Zeus; it passes through the zodiac circle in 12 years, or through one sign in a year. Below it lies Pyroeis (“The Fiery One”), the star of Ares” – this is Mars – “it goes through the zodiac circle in two years and six months, or through a sign in two and a half months. The next space is held by the Sun, which passes through the zodiac circle in a year, or through a sign in very nearly one month. Below it lies Phosphoros (“The Light-Bringer”), the star of Aphrodite; this one moves very nearly at the same speed as the Sun. Below it lies Stilbon (“The Twinkling One”), the star of Hermes, which also moves through the same speed as the Sun. And lower than all moves the Moon, which passes through the zodiac circle in 27 and one-third days, or through a sign in two-and-a-quarter days, very nearly.”
All right, so I wanted to read that just to show you how they’re conceptualizing it in terms of both distances and being, like, Saturn for example being the furthest and slowest planet, but also in terms of timing it based on zodiacal speeds and speeds through a single sign of the zodiac or how long it takes to go through all 12 signs of the zodiac as part of the reference point here for why this planetary order was established. Although you can also see here in the text that he notes that the speed of the Sun and Venus and Mercury are roughly thought to be the same. And that’s the thing that was, like, kind of tripping things up and causing those variations or those three different variations over, let’s say like, a 200-year period between the time of Plato around 350 BCE versus the middle of the second century BCE where we have this different planetary order that’s introduced, as well as the middle or intermediate version by Eratosthenes around 200 BCE.
Okay, so in the astrological texts from the second century BCE forward, this planetary order is usually mentioned in the context of a mysterious concept known as the heptazonos, which means the seven-zoned sphere. So it’s referred to, for example, by Paulus of Alexandria as the seven-zoned sphere in his Introduction to Astrology which was written in the fourth century; in chapter 21 of that text he outlines the seven-zoned sphere. And the Greek word is heptazonos, which means “having seven zones” or “seven-belted” is a more literal translation of zonos, which means “belt.” And heptazonos is an adjective, but it’s always modifying an implied noun, and the implied noun is “sphere” because of the Greek belief of the spherical nature of the cosmos.
All right, so here’s my argument. I think that the seven-zoned sphere was a conceptual construct that was introduced by the astrologers in the middle of the second century BCE sometime let’s say roughly around 150 or 140 or 130 BCE approximately. And I’m gonna go into the nature of that as a conceptual construct a little bit more later. But something I wanna point out that I feel like doesn’t get emphasized enough in the discussions by historians on this topic is that our earliest secure reference to this concept, to both the seven-zoned sphere itself, but also to this specific planetary order which places the Sun in the middle of the cosmos, our first secure reference to it is by Thrasyllus who died in the year 36 CE. And Thrasyllus says explicitly that it was discussed by Nechepso and Petosiris. And the Nechepso and Petosiris texts have been pretty securely dated to in their earlier strata having been written around probably the 140s or the 130s BCE, according to, for example, Stephan Heilen who’s building on scholarship that happened especially by German scholars earlier in the century that were coming to similar conclusions about the Nechepso-Petosiris texts being written around the middle of the second century BCE. So we have, unfortunately, a summary of Thrasyllus’s astrological texts that survives, but in this summary, it says at one point, “He” – that is to say Thrasyllus – “treats the seven-zoned sphere in accordance with, as he himself says, the teachings of Petosiris and Nechepso.” And this is from the translation by Levente Laszlo of the HOROI Project at HOROIproject.com. And then this testimonia is confirmed by a secondary source, which is the author – the Roman writer – Pliny the Elder who’s writing later on in the first century CE. And at one point, Pliny cites the Nechepso and Petosiris texts for a discussion about the distances of the planets from earth. And he cites a model where the Sun is at the center of the seven spheres while the Moon is the closest planet to us and Saturn is the furthest one away.
And so this is really important, because these are – when you sort through this, and I’ve been working on this for a couple of years now – when you sort through all of the false attributions or uncertain attributions that are questionable or other things like that, this reference actually is the strongest and earliest reference that we know of that this order of planets was being discussed in this very important foundational astrological text sometime around 150 BCE.
So there’s only one other possible reference to this planetary order earlier than Nechepso and Petosiris, and it’s one that’s attributed to Archimedes, to the famous mathematician and engineering genius who died around 212 BCE. And the issue, though, is this reference comes from two writers who are writing hundreds and hundreds of years after Archimedes, which is Hippolytus of Rome around 200 CE, a Christian writer, and then Macrobius, who’s writing around the fifth century CE, whereas, as I said, Archimedes died around 212 BCE, so many hundreds of years earlier. But the problem with this is that it’s not clear that this attribution to Archimedes is accurate or is true, because they’re writing centuries later and because neither of those two authors was actually drawing on a text of Archimedes directly. But instead, historians think that they were actually – that they got this reference from an intermediary text, which is a lost text by a Platonic philosopher that dates to sometime around the first or second century CE or basically sometime before Hippolytus, who was writing around 200 CE. And what makes it suspicious is that this middle Platonic text merged the seven-zoned sphere’s planetary order with some distance calculations lifted from Pythagorean music ratios, which is kind of out of character a little bit compared to Archimedes’ typically works.
So the other thing that makes it suspicious is that it would be a little weird if Archimedes was doing this new planetary order that places the Sun in the center of the cosmos when his other contemporaries are still using the older, Platonic order of the planets from Plato and Aristotle that had become so dominant over the previous century, basically, leading up to that point. So it’s like, we have good reason to be suspicious and that this supposed attribution of this planetary order being mentioned by Archimedes may not actually be true.
So given these points, and I know at one point, like, Alexander Jones, for example, cites that text, but he sort of cites it noncommittally, saying we can’t really say for sure if this is a legitimate attribution to Archimedes. And so from my perspective, because that attribution is unsecure and because every other indication we have is that this specific planetary order didn’t really become popularized until the second century BCE a bit after Archimedes lived, like, a generation – two or three generations after Archimedes died, given these points, I don’t think we can take for granted that the actual historical figure of Archimedes definitely had adopted this planetary order. And if we cannot do that securely, then that takes us back the Nechepso and Petosiris texts as being the only securely dateable sources that we know for sure were talking about this model and talking about this specific planetary order. And if that’s true, I think then it’s reasonable actually and more reasonable than you might think to advance to hypothesis or the proposition that their texts may have actually been the ones that introduced this planetary order. And there’s ways to, I think, additionally validate that that I’ll get into here in just a bit. But even just historical sources-wise, realizing that they are the earlier reliably dated sources for this doctrine and for this planetary order I don’t think has been widely recognized enough, and the significance of that has not been taken into account enough in some of the current historical discussions. Although, you know, to be fair, it’s because of the ambiguity of some of the different possibly false ascriptions that are floating around, not just with Archimedes, but also the issue with Alexander of Ephesus and some of the things there as well, but also due to the loss of so many source texts from the Hellenistic period where it’s really hard to be clear about a lot of things just because we don’t have a lot of texts from this era.
So I think these previous references to people like Archimedes or other things like that confused the issue enough for previous generations of scholars that it left enough uncertainty that, as far as I know, nobody’s fully ventured as hard of an argument that this planetary order originated with the Nechepso and Petosiris texts and the set of Hermetic works surrounding them that I’m advancing or that I’m presenting here. Or if it was made, it was sort of done more softly or indirectly than it could have, whereas I think we have a lot better reason to think that it may have originated there than it might seem at first. And one of the reasons why I think that is because in the passage where Pliny is discussing this, he adds that Nechepso and Petosiris discussed the sizes and distances of the planetary spheres and gave specific numbers or specific mathematical numbers involved. So here’s the quote from Pliny; it says,
“The Egyptian calculation, which was disclosed by Petosiris and Nechepsos, includes that a single degree of the lunar circle – which is, as is said, the smallest – extends a little bit more than 30,000 stades, that of Kronos’s circle – which is the greatest – extends its double, and that of the Sun’s circle – which we have said to be the mean – the average of these sizes.”
So I think the Pliny manuscript tradition is either messed up here, or Pliny himself is probably misunderstanding some of the numbers involved, which was something that commonly happens when texts are being, like, translated from Greek into Latin and certain number ratios involved aren’t fully understood, because his distances are a little bit weird. But I’m not gonna get sidetracked on that; but I will note that part of the important thing is that each of the planets is placed at harmonic distances with the Sun being the mean or the middle point between the Moon and Saturn, and more importantly, the Pliny passage implies that this order of the planets was not just simply introduced as an ordering of the planets, but it was actually introduced as some sort of full-fledged, spatial, cosmological model or discussion that was taking place in the Nechepso and Petosiris texts. And if this is true, then it actually makes it more likely that it represents some sort of new or some sort of unique innovation or argument or contribution that was being introduced at this time. And I think that’s the really important point and the realization that I came to, and that ups the likelihood of this being something that was being newly introduced into those texts, because it’s not just that they’re mentioning this new planetary order. But for some reason, they’re outlining actual distances between the planets in the solar system or in the cosmos and setting up different harmonic ratios, and as a result of that, it has the effect of introducing what seems like a full-fledged cosmological model rather than just a simple reordering of the planets.
All right, so let’s talk about the order of the seven-zoned sphere as a conceptual construct. And one of the things that’s tricky about this is that the Nechepso and Petosiris texts themselves, I’ve argued in my book, were probably drawing on two earlier texts. There was one specific text ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus that introduced the dodecatropos and I believe introduced the planetary joys scheme, which is the basis of some of the significations of the 12 houses basically. And then there was a text after that on it was ascribed to Asclepius that outlined the octotropos, of the eight-turning system, which is a scheme for assigning certain significations to the first eight houses and for modifying the dodecatropos, or the 12-turning of Hermes. And then the Nechepso and Petosiris texts were written after these two other foundational texts, and one of the things that’s tricky is that in these texts, we have the introduction of these two other conceptual constructs, probably in the original Hermes text, which is the doctrine of the Thema mundi, which is the rationale for assigning the planets to the signs of the zodiac, and then secondarily the doctrine of the planetary joys, which is a scheme, as I said, for assigning planets to the houses. And let me show those two diagrams really quickly, just so we’re all on the same page about what I’m talking about.
So this is the Thema mundi, which is the mythical birth chart for the birth of the cosmos, which has Cancer rising, the Ascendant is in Cancer, and then all the planets are assigned from the sign basically of the summer solstice starting with the Moon, and then the Sun – the Moon to Cancer and the rising sign, the Sun to Leo, Mercury to Virgo, Venus to Libra, Mars to Scorpio, Jupiter to Sagittarius, and Saturn to Capricorn. And one of the things about this specific order of the planets in this scheme that’s gonna jump out to you right now after our discussion earlier is the exact same planetary order that Eratosthenes outlined earlier around 200 BCE. So basically, sometime just probably a few decades after Eratosthenes outlined this planetary order scheme around 200 BCE in Alexandria, somebody – some person or some group of people – used that planetary order scheme and applied it to the signs of the zodiac in order to get this scheme for assigning the planets to the signs of the zodiac through the Thema mundi. And then that, of course, becomes the basis for the domiciles scheme or the full set of planetary domiciles where you draw a line, basically, between Cancer and Leo, and then you split the zodiac and the planets into two mirror halves where you have a solar half of the zodiac on the right, and you have a lunar half of the zodiac on the left. And then each of the other five traditional or visible planets is assigned to one sign on either side of the luminaries – or two signs, I should say – flanking out based on their speed and distance from the Sun. So Mercury gets Gemini and Virgo. Venus gets Libra and Taurus. Mars gets Aries and Scorpio. Jupiter gets Sagittarius and Pisces. And Saturn gets Capricorn and Aquarius. So this scheme then becomes the rationale by extension for the nature of the planetary aspects. If you draw aspects from the luminaries, the sextile goes to Venus, the lesser benefic. The square goes to Mars. The trine goes to Jupiter, and the opposition goes to Saturn.
So this is one of the conceptual constructs that’s introduced as part of this Hermetic school at this time around 150 BCE, which is the texts associated with Hermes, Asclepius, Nechepso and Petosiris. In the Hermes text, the Hermes text, as I demonstrated in a paper back in 2012, was the first text that we know of because Thrasyllus, again, in the early first century CE, Thrasyllus cites the Hermes text. It was an actual text on the 12 houses that was attributed to Hermes. And this text is the first text that we know of that used the names of the different houses, what became the names of the houses, the standard names of the houses in the Hellenistic tradition, which is placed on this planetary joys scheme that was widely reported by all later Hellenistic and Roman astrologers. And this scheme assigns Mercury to the first house, which was called the helm, the Moon to the 3rd house, which is known as the place of goddess, Venus to the 5th house, which is the place of good fortune, Mars to the 6th house, which is the place of bad fortune, and then the Sun to the 9th house, which is called the place of god. Jupiter to the 11th house, which is called the place of good spirit. And finally Saturn to the 12th house, which is the place of bad spirit. And this scheme – there’s a lot of things that are derived from this, but the doctrine of sect is implicit in this scheme because all of the nighttime planets are in the bottom half of the chart, and all of the daytime planets are in the top half of the chart, which is really obvious. Let me circle those. There we go. Nighttime planets in the bottom half of the chart; daytime planets in the top half of the chart. And then Mercury, of course, which always goes in between, is in the first house. And in whole sign houses, which the Hermes text was using, Mercury can be at the Ascendant, and part of the first house is above the horizon and part of the first house is below the horizon. So Mercury is at the meeting point between the two.
There’s a bunch of ways in which all of these diagrams intersect in different ways, though. One of them is that when you draw aspect lines from the two luminaries to Mercury, so from the Sun in the 9th house to Mercury, you get a trine aspect – 120 degrees or the equivalent number of signs – and if you draw a aspect from the Moon to Mercury, you get a sextile. So from that, we get – we can see implicit this notion that the daytime planets are associated with trines and the nighttime planets are associated with sextiles. And what is bizarre about that is the authors, Antiochus and Porphyry point out that the same association between daytime planets and trines and nighttime planets and sextiles shows up in the exaltation scheme, because in the exaltation scheme, Antiochus and Porphyry point out that each of the daytime planets is configured to one of their signs by trine, and each of the nighttime planets when they’re in their exaltation is configured to one of their domiciles by sextile. So, for example, the Sun, when it’s exalted in Aries, is configured to Leo by trine. Saturn, which is exalted in Libra, is configured to Aquarius by trine. And finally Jupiter, which is exalted in Cancer, is configured to its domicile of Pisces by trine.
So you know, you could try to argue, like, maybe that’s just a coincidence. But then when you apply it to the nighttime planets, it actually works out, but with sextiles. So the Moon is exalted in Taurus, which is configured to Cancer by sextile – its only domicile. Venus is exalted in Pisces, which is configured to Taurus by sextile. And finally, Mars is exalted in Capricorn, which is configured to Scorpio by sextile.
So that’s really bizarre, and that’s one of the crossovers between the diagrams that I pointed out is that same doctrine which Porphyry and Antiochus – and Antiochus is probably dating to the first century BCE or maybe first century CE; he’s one of our earliest authors who only draws on and only cites Nechepso and Petosiris – they explicitly point out this correlation between the exaltations and the domiciles. But then I was the one that noticed that that same doctrine, basically, shows up implicit in the planetary joys scheme with the Sun configured to Mercury in the first house by trine and the Moon configured to Mercury and the first house by sextile. And that is not a coincidence, my friends; that is some sort of deliberate, technical and theoretical construct that’s been constructed here and is being set up in such a way that it’s causing – it’s fully integrated. That the different cosmological or conceptual constructs or diagrams are overlapping and integrated with each other as part of a broader system that was introduced, basically, by this collection of Hermetic texts or this Hermetic school sometime around the middle of the second century BCE.
So that is just the tip of the iceberg, and I’ve actually shown elsewhere in my book, Hellenistic Astrology, and in my paper in 2012 on the planetary joys scheme that a bunch of other stuff is derived from these different diagrams and conceptual constructs. So for example, in the planetary joys scheme, I was able to show how it represents the triplicity rulers grouped around the four angular houses, or angular triads, I should say, which was originally something that Robert Schmidt noted, but I took it a step further and pointed out in that paper in 2012 how this actually embeds and becomes the source for assigning the four elements of Greek philosophy to the triplicities in the zodiac, basically. Because implicit in this is the notion that the planets at the bottom of the planetary joys scheme, especially the Moon and Venus, are associated with the element of earth, and they are opposite to the two planets at the top of the planetary joys scheme, which are the Sun and Jupiter, which are associated with the element of fire. And then on the left, we have Mercury and Saturn associated with the angular triad or the group of three houses, which is the 2nd, 1st, and 12th house, and with Mercury having its joy in the first house and Saturn in the 12th house, they get associated with the element of air, which is rising up at the rising sign towards fire. And over on the other side, we have Mars, which has its joy in the 6th house, which is part of the declining angular triad series of the 8th, 7th, and 6th houses. And this angular triad gets associated with the element of water, which then when you – once you establish that each of these groupings of planets also become the primary rulers of certain signs of the zodiac through the triplicity rulership scheme, it then imports those elemental significations over into the zodiac. And this is the reason why the fire signs – or let’s say the triplicity that’s ruled by the Sun and Jupiter primarily, which is like, Aries, Leo, Sagittarius – this is the reason why those become associated with fire signs or with the element of fire. Or why the triplicity of Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn are associated or become associated with the element of earth, because of the Moon and Venus being connected with those at the bottom of this diagram. Or Mercury and Saturn become the ruler of the triplicity associated with Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius, which becomes associated with the element of Air. And then Mars is one of the triplicity rulers that’s associated with the triplicity of Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces, which becomes associated with water. So that was a really exciting discovery back in 2012. And I meant to say that this episode originally I was gonna go into all of this more in this episode, but instead I decided to isolate one piece of it, which is the seven-zoned sphere piece, because I realized I needed to do that as a precursor. What else? There was even another – there’s even other connections with the exaltations where, for example, a while ago Robert Schmidt had pointed out that when you superimpose the exaltations on the Thema mundi, each of the planets ends up aspecting the rising sign through one of the major recognized aspects in Hellenistic astrology. So for example, with Cancer rising, Jupiter is exalted in Cancer, so it’s in the first house. The Moon is exalted in Taurus, which is the 11th house, which is configured to the Ascendant through a sextile. The Sun is exalted in Aries, so it’s configured to the first house by a square. Venus is exalted in Pisces in the 9th, so it’s configured to the rising sign by a trine. Mars is exalted in Capricorn, which is configured by opposition. Saturn is exalted in Libra, which is configured by square. And Mercury is configured through a sextile from its exaltation in Virgo. And what’s interesting is then this also overlaps with the doctrine of good and bad houses, where there evolved this doctrine in the Hellenistic tradition any of the 12 houses configured to the rising sign are given largely good significations or positive ones that are supportive of life, whereas any of the planets in signs that don’t aspect the Ascendant are given negative significations. So this is why especially the 6th, 8th, and 12th houses have negative associations in Hellenistic astrology because of their lack of configuration to the rising sign. And interestingly, none of the planets in their exaltations are in one of those bad houses when you superimpose them on the Thema mundi.
So if that wasn’t enough, a few years ago, my friend Benjamin Dykes pointed out another overlap between the exaltations and the planetary joys scheme to me where he noted that the distribution of planets in the exaltation scheme is the same as the distribution of planets in the planetary joys scheme. So what I mean by that is… Let’s take a look at this diagram for those watching the video version, and this is like, a highly visual lecture because I’ve got so many diagrams. So if you’re listening to the audio version, I’ll do my best, but I’d recommend watching the video version to truly follow everything that’s happening here. And that’s one of the reasons why I decided to present this as a lecture first instead of like, writing a paper, because the visual component in understanding this is so crucial to understand all the interconnections between the different conceptual constructs.
All right, so what Ben noticed is basically just that if you take the exaltations in the signs that they’re given and then you turn it so that essentially the Moon is on the rising sign, is on the left, you end with the same distribution of planets that’s in the planetary joys scheme. So for example, with Taurus rising, you have the Moon in the first house, and then upwards we have the Sun in the 12th house and Venus in the 11th house. So it’s three planets right in a row there. And similarly, in the planetary joys scheme, you have Mercury in the first house, then Saturn in the 12th, and then Jupiter in the 3rd. So three planets right in a row in three consecutive signs. Then you skip a sign; you skip Aquarius and the 10th house, and you go to – in the exaltations you find Mars in Capricorn in the 9th house. And when you look at the planetary joys scheme, there is a planet that has its joy in the 9th house, which is the Sun in the place of god. Then going clockwise, you skip two signs or two houses, and in the exaltations, you find Saturn in Libra in let’s say the 6th house, and then you find Mercury in Virgo in the 5th house. And similarly, in the planetary joys scheme, you find Mars in the 6th house, and you find Venus in the 5th house, so there’s planets grouped there in order. And then finally you skip one sign – you skip the 4th house – and in the exaltations, you find Jupiter in Cancer in the 3rd, and in the joys scheme you find the Moon in the 3rd house which is the place of goddess. So it basically ends up recreating – the planetary joys scheme ends up recreating the same sequencing or clustering of planets from the exaltations in the planetary joys scheme. And this was pointed out by Ben; I believe Ben was the first person to point this out a few years ago. And one of the things I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been putting all of this together over the past few years, one of the important turning points was realizing that the exaltations came first in the astrological tradition. Because this is something in my book I was a little unclear about because there’s an unclear application of the exaltations in the Babylonian horoscopes. But over the past few years in reading all the evidence, I realized the exaltation signs really did originate in the Mesopotamian tradition going back as far as 1000 BCE where they’re talked about in the MUL.APIN, for example. And interestingly, one of the things I pointed out in the Mesopotamian astrology episode last year is that they had a quasi-tropical rationale for the exaltations, which really surprised me. But one of the things that’s important here that I’ve been working on is when you realize then that, like in my book, I was skeptical of that because I knew already some of the interconnections between the exaltations and other doctrines. And I thought it would be, like, far-fetched or it would be way complicated for them to have inherited – the Hellenistic astrologers to have inherited – the exaltations and then built this elaborate system around them. But in fact, I actually now think that that’s part of what happened, and you can kind of see that happening here, for example, by the way that the planetary joys scheme is partially predicated on projecting the distribution of the exaltations onto the 12 houses in the planetary joys.
So like I said, originally over the past couple of months, I was preparing a big episode where I’ve been trying to sit down and put all the different diagrams and conceptual constructs together and see how they work together to try to reconstruct and see if there’s more overlaps that can be found and to try to reconstruct what the original texts looked like by backforming some of the philosophy and the conceptual constructs that they were using. And originally, that’s what this episode was gonna be was me putting together the diagrams and showing all the interconnections and also talking about the different foundational texts and what can be reconstructed and what we can know about them based on what doctrines later astrologers report were contained in those essentially, like, three or four foundational texts from the second century BCE by Hermes, Asclepius, and Nechepso and Petosiris. But I realized that as part of that, I was gonna be mentioning the order of the seven-zoned sphere and how that was a conceptual construct, so I decided to just break out the smaller piece of the seven-zoned sphere piece into its own separate episode, which I’m doing today, so that I could get this established firmly. And then what I’m gonna do is do the larger episode about the interconnections between the different conceptual constructs which I just gave a taste of just now in a later episode that’s more full that I’m really excited about and I’m working on right now. And hopefully, you know, if all things go okay next month during eclipse season in August, I’ll be able to record.
But my point here and without going into all of that too much further, my point is that the industriousness of this group of astrologers that was working sometime around the middle of the second century BCE in creating at least two other schematic diagrams like this to create or to explain this new astrological system is one of the things that actually makes the case even more compelling that the order of the seven-zoned sphere was, in fact, another one of those conceptual constructs. And that’s one of the core pieces that I’m trying to argue and outline today, and it’s one of the reasons why I wanted to make this its own episode and kind of belabor the point, because it’s actually really important for the history of astrology and also the history of astronomy because of the dominance of that cosmological model that was introduced at that time. But up until now, I don’t think the order of the seven-zoned sphere has been recognized as the conceptual construct that it is in the way that the Thema mundi definitely has or more recently the planetary joys scheme has. But I think that this is one of the reasons why historians in some the discussions surrounding this are sometimes kind of, like, bewildered about where this system came from or where this specific ordering of planets came from and why it quickly became so popular in the ancient world. And what I’m arguing is that I think that these three diagrams now, which is the Thema mundi, the planetary joys scheme, and the order of the seven-zoned sphere together with the earlier concept of exaltations that was inherited from the Mesopotamian tradition and integrated, I think these three or four diagrams represent a system that was introduced by either a singular author or by a group of people that was part of some sort of Hermetic school around the middle of the second century BCE. And that it was outlined – this system was outlined – over the course of a series of three or four texts that were each individually attributed to Hermes, then to Ascelpius, then to Nechepso, and then to Petosiris. So there’s a lot that needs to be said and unpacked about the relationship between those texts – like, how we know that they existed, what the dating was, what they contained, and other things like that that I’m not gonna get into today and I’ll save for that future episode that I’m working on. But the important piece is recognizing fully that the seven-zoned sphere was one of those conceptual constructs.
All right. And here is what that conceptual construct looks when it’s sort of mapped out, which is that you have – for those watching the video version – you have the earth in the middle of the cosmos, and then you have the sphere of the Moon that’s enveloping as the first sphere outside of the earth. Then you have Mercury as the next sphere or next circle around the earth. Then Venus, then the Sun, then Mars, then Jupiter, and then Saturn. And finally on the very outside of that, you have the sphere of the fixed stars. And here we’re using the symbol, actually, that the ancient Egyptians used in hieroglyphs for the symbol for the star, which is like, a five-pointed star. And I meant to say this diagram and all the diagrams I’m using today were illustrated by my illustrator that I’ve been working with, which is Paige Allison. So I’ve been wanting to give a shoutout to her for all of the amazing design work to help me convey these concepts today. And so that’s what that’s looks like in terms of when we’re talking about the seven-zoned sphere, this is conceptually what the full thing looks like. It’s not just an ordering of the planets which places the Sun in the center, but it’s this full cosmological model, basically, that gives some verticality basically in terms of the planetary spheres. And the sphere of the fixed stars, of course, is also the sphere of the zodiac. So one of the things you can do, actually, is these different models start interacting and being combined in different ways, and the sphere of the fixed stars, of course, would be separated into the 12 different segments of the zodiac, which is like, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, et cetera. And when you do that, what you end up with is a model of the cosmos where the planets are not just arranged according to their distances and their speed and their either closeness or distance from earth, but then the planets are also arranged according to the sign of the zodiac that they’re in as well. And functionally, what you end up with graphically, the way it ends up being displayed, is actually very similar to the way it’s displayed on the face of the Antikythera mechanism where you have the seven planets arranged starting with the faster planets towards the inner part of the circle and the slower planets towards the outer. But then they’re also arranged in different signs of the zodiac, and I think with the way the Antikythera mechanism was designed, it had Cancer rising, if I’m understanding correctly the reconstruction. And I think it was, like, Cancer for some reason is displayed on the right side so that’s inverted based on maybe mechanical considerations or something like that, but that functionally it still ends up looking essentially how the astrologers would have looked at it or would have looked at the Thema mundi. And this is actually what the Thema mundi looks like when you map it out onto that where you have the Moon in Cancer, the Sun in Leo, Mercury in Virgo, Venus in Libra, Mars in Scorpio, Jupiter in Sagittarius, and Saturn in Capricorn. So part of my point here is that the Thema mundi and the domicile scheme essentially, which let me pull that up. The Thema mundi and the domicile scheme gives a ordering and a rationale of the planets based on their positions in the zodiac and their perceived associations with certain signs of the zodiac and other things like that. But the movement through the zodiac has a right or left kind of movement where planets typically go counterclockwise; they move counterclockwise through the order of the zodiac, and sometimes they go retrograde and they start moving clockwise backwards through the signs of the zodiac. And the astrologers themselves in their introductory texts made distinctions between aspects that were on the left versus aspects on the right that was connected with this movement. So part of what I’ve been exploring – and I’ll probably explore more in the next episode – that I think was part of the implicit conceptual motivation here is that the domicile scheme and the zodiac itself has an implicit left and right movement of the planets along the ecliptic. But then the order of the seven-zoned sphere has a verticality, and it has an upwards and downwards movement when it comes to how the planets are arranged. And later the way that this ends up showing up later is it ends up impacting philosophical doctrines about the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres that shows up very strongly in Hermetic philosophical texts from the first century BCE forward. And I’ll circle back to that point, but I just wanted to make the point that part of the conceptual motivation here is like, left versus right, and up versus down.
Okay, so I’m getting caught up on the conceptual construct part of this, because that’s the part that I’m really excited about and interested in right now. But I’m gonna keep things moving so as to not get stuck here. And one of the points I wanted to make about this rearrangement of the planetary order that happened at this time in the second century, that the order of the seven-zoned sphere represents, is remember ever since Plato, essentially, the zodiacal periods of the planets of Mercury and Venus and the Sun were all established to be approximately one year and functionally the same. But in Plato’s order, the Sun was assigned first, and then Venus and then Mercury. And then Eratosthenes reoriented it a little bit by switching the position of Venus and Mercury. But I think that the decision to depart from the previous Platonic order, the order of Plato, or the order of Eratosthenes and to make this big jump by taking the Sun and placing it right in the center of the cosmos and as the centerpoint in the diagram or in the conceptual construct, I think that this was likely motivated by specific philosophical, religious, or symbolic conceptualizations that became popular in the Hellenistic era that were focused on the Sun and with the Sun’s central role in connection with the soul and the mind and the heart, both in terms of an individual, but also by extension in terms of the cosmos as well.
So this conceptualization of the Sun and the heart was particularly prominent in the Stoic philosophical school at this time, and it would also become very prominent in Hermetic philosophical works over the course of the next few centuries where they were both making this analogy between the Sun and the heart of an individual human in a sort of anatomical sense, but also in a deeper, philosophical or spiritual sense as well. And one of the important things about this is that earlier in Plato, like in the earlier Platonic and Hippocratic models, they had centralized the seat of reasoning in the head of a human. But then the Stoics from about 300 BCE forward, especially after the first – after Zeno, but once you get to like, the second and third generation of Stoics, they ended up moving what they called the “commanding center” or the “hegemonicon,” and they moved it from the head and they instead started conceptualizing it as being in the region of the heart of the human in the central region, basically, of our bodies. And this commanding center was the place where the executive control function of the soul was thought to reside. And this included the seat of perception, of impulse, of ascent, which was very important for the Stoics, but it was also the central place for reason and reasoning function, basically, in humans as well. And the Stoics started believing that the commanding center resided in the heart, and the second head of the Stoic school, Cleanthes, who lived from about 330 to 230 BCE give or take, he was the second head of the Stoic school and he explicitly argued that the commanding center of the entire cosmos or the entire universe was the Sun itself, since they believed that the entire cosmos itself was a living, breathing, sentient being, and that there was a – they had ideas of, like, cosmic sympathy and things like that. But they made analogies between the cosmos itself being a living animal or living entity – a living being – and having a heart, essentially, which was the Sun, and then humans being a living being and having in our heart, which is the central organ of the body, that being the seat of reason and our commanding center and everything like that.
So it’s very suggestive that this trend towards focusing on the heart was happening in what was one of the most important and dominant philosophical schools, which is the Stoic philosophical school in the third century BCE, basically, leading all the way up until around 200 BCE when Chrysippus dies, and this is immediately preceding this reorganization of the cosmos and the planetary ordering itself, which ended up placing the Sun at the center of the cosmos just a few decades later, with the earliest source being Nechepso and Petosiris potentially around 150 BCE. So there may have already been philosophical motivations for moving in this direction and changing the planetary order to match the philosophical doctrines that had emerged at that time.
So similarly, we see other parallels with the Hermetic philosophical texts, which are philosophical texts that usually are dated to the first and second and third century CE in Egypt that were outlining, like, a collection of texts that were outlining different philosophical principles through a different cast of characters that included Hermes and Asclepius and different people like that. And usually these philosophical texts are thought to be later – like I said, first century CE forward. However, one of the points – I’ve been rereading all of them recently and getting into that as an access point for understanding Hellenistic astrology and seeing how important it is – one of the things I think the scholars of ancient Hermeticism don’t recognize enough is that the technical Hermetica, which is the technical astrological texts associated with Hermeticism, actually date back further. They date back to the middle of the second century BCE with this collection, like I said, of three or four astrological texts that were these foundational astrological texts that were ascribed to Hermes, and Asclepius, and Nechepso and Petosiris. And these are texts that are coming out of the same philosophical and conceptual sort of milieu as the later Hermetic texts. So one of the things that’s important is that actually pushes back the philosophical Hermetica about two centuries earlier on some level than what most scholars realize or compared to some of the philosophical texts that survive from, like, the first or second or third century CE. And but one of the things that’s important about that is I think they’re taking into account some similar principles that we can see traces of in the later Hermetic philosophical texts, that those principles are already being taken into account by this group of Hermetic astrological texts from the second century BCE, and it may be because they’re arising out of this interesting blend of on the one hand, taking some Greek philosophical and cosmological things into account, such as Platonism and Plato’s idea of the Timaeus and the universe being a living animal and notions of, like, harmony of the spheres and different things like that, and the spherical nature of the cosmos. But then the Hermetic texts are also possibly potentially being influenced by the Egyptian priesthood at the same time. And a lot of work has been done in the past 20 or 30 years that have been pushing things more in the direction of recognizing that there is a legitimate Egyptian philosophical and mythic or metaphysical ideas that are coming through in some parts of the Corpus Hermeticum as well as, I think, in the technical Hermetica associated with astrology.
So one of the things I think that’s really important that comes through really quickly and one of the most important later Hermetic texts, which is known as The Asclepius, which largely only survives in a Latin translation, but we have fragments of the Greek version of this text as well as a Coptic translation, a Coptic Egyptian translation of it. But one of the things that’s really important in this text, one of the conceptual or philosophical premises that shows up strongly there but also in some other Hermetic philosophical texts is this notion that there’s three levels of reality. And the three levels are that there’s one level which represents god, basically, and then there’s a second level that represents the cosmos, and then there’s a third level which represents man, basically, or humankind or individual humans. And the supreme principle in Hermeticism is this transcendent god known as Nous or connecting with the notion of Nous, which in Greek means “mind” or “intellect” or “consciousness” is a more recent translation that some scholars are translating it as, like David Litwa, for example. So what’s important about th is is the Hermetica authors, especially in The Asclepius, are taking for granted that god or this Nous or divine mind or intellect is this – that it’s transcendent. That it’s living outside of the physical or sensible world, and that it is an intellect that is thinking unto itself, which is kind of similar to some of the Platonic as well as Aristotelian doctrines of, like, an unmoved mover.
All right, so there’s this transcendent god, and then there’s a second god in Hermeticism, which is the Demiurge or the craftsman god, which is the sensible cosmos itself. And within the physical cosmos, the Sun is seen as an image or as the embodiment of the principle of Nous, which is “mind” or “intellect” or “consciousness.” And in the astrological texts, that’s exactly what astrologers like Valens give the Sun as its primary signification is they associate it with the mind and the intellect as well as with god itself.
So then finally, that’s the second level in Hermeticism is, like, the sensible cosmos as a visible, tangible god. And then finally, the third level is individual humans, which are seen as a microcosm or as an image of the bigger cosmos itself. And within each of us, there’s thought to be a divine spark of Nous, of mind or consciousness, which acts as a central organizing principle although it’s encased in matter and functionally in our physical bodies, basically. So and while a lot of this may sound Platonic in nature, and may be motivated by Platonic considerations derived from the Timaeus and things like that, it may also reflect some elements of native Egyptian religion as well that are being translated into Greek or are being synthesized together with Greek philosophical speculations with the Egyptian god Amun being a primordial hidden or transcendent god in the Egyptian religion, and then Amun being synchronized with Ra, the Sun god, which then is viewed as, like, the physical or sensible embodiment of the hidden or transcending god. And then finally in Egyptian cosmology, the pharaoh was often acting as the intermediary between the sky and the earth. And this idea’s been developed recently by Christian H. Bull in his book, The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus, where he’s trying to show and make some arguments about the way in which some elements of traditional Egyptian religion may have been – may be coming through in certain ways in the Corpus Hermeticum or in the Hermetic philosophical texts essentially. And I find that really interesting and really compelling.
So I wanted to quote – I have a long quote to give you some idea of this where at one point in his Natural History, Pliny the Elder in the first century CE has this discussion about the Sun being in the center of the cosmos. And I think it’s evocative of some of the ideas – even though it’s, like, the first century CE, we know that Pliny’s drawing on earlier authors, including Nechepso and Petosiris. And I think it’s indicative of some of the more mystical interpretations of this planetary order that places the Sun in the center of the cosmos, so I wanted to read it. And this is from James Evans’ translation from his book on the history of ancient astronomy. So it says,
“In the middle of the planets moves the Sun, whose magnitude and power are the greatest, and who is ruler not only of the seasons and of the lands, but even of the stars themselves and of the heaven. Taking into account all that he affects, we must believe him to be the soul, or more precisely the mind, of the whole world, and the supreme ruling principle and divinity of nature. He furnishes the world with light and removes darkness, he obscures and illuminates the rest of the stars, he regulates in accord with nature’s precedent the changes of the seasons and the continuous rebirth of the year, he dissipates the gloom of heaven and even calms the stormclouds of the mind of man, he lends his light to the rest of the stars also; he is glorious and preeminent, all seeing and even all hearing.”
So that is one quote, and even though obviously Pliny’s living in the first century CE, so he’s living in a time when this planetary order had already been well-established, it’s still evocative of some of the deeper mystical and philosophical and religious ideas that this planetary order evoked and also taking into account some of those specific philosophical keywords about the SUn being, like, the mind of the world or the Nous or the consciousness and the organizing principle in some way.
So similarly, here’s a quote from some of the Hermetic fragments. So from Hermetic fragment six in the Stobaeus fragments, there’s a text that’s from Hermes to Ammon. And it says,
“The Sun is situated in the middle, wearing the cosmos like a wreath. And he functions as a storehouse, distributing the elements to the cosmos, giving a share of his own power to all things, and binding them together. For he is the dispenser of the life-giving breath (the pneuma), and the ruler of the stars.”
All right, I wanna read just a few more quotes from different – this time from the Corpus Hermeticum related to the Sun just to really drive this point home. So this quote is from Corpus Hermeticum 16, and it says,
“The intelligible cosmos, then, depends on god, and the sensible cosmos on the intelligible; but the Sun, through the intelligible and the sensible cosmos, receives from god the influx of the good, that is, the demiurgic energy. And around the Sun are the eight spheres that depend from it: the sphere of the fixed stars, the six of the planets, and the one that surrounds the earth.”
Elsewhere in Corpus Hermeticum 10, here’s a quote. It says,
“For the Sun is situated in the midst of the universe, wearing it like a crown. It is the clear and visible image of the invisible god. And if the invisible god is the creator of all things, the Sun is the visible demiurge of all things; it is he who creates them, who nourished them, and who governs them.”
And then finally the last Hermetic quote. This is from Stobaeus excerpt 21 where he says,
“The supreme monarch, who is Mind (or Nous) itself, having forged the universe, handed over the reins of the visible world to the Sun. He established the Sun as the supreme ruler of the heavens, so that the intelligent order of the spheres might be maintained without fail, and the laws of fate administered by his light.”
All right, so I wanted to read those quotes, and of course a lot of the later philosophical texts that we have may be coming from an era centuries later when the seven-zoned sphere and that cosmological model had already been firmly established. But nonetheless, we can establish that in the Stoic school that this shift towards treating the Sun as the heart of the cosmos was already starting to take place probably before the emergence of the model of the seven-zoned sphere. And some of these notions in the philosophical Hermetica about the Sun playing this very important philosophical and spiritual and metaphysical role as the central Nous or central mind and intellect and consciousness of the universe probably do go back to some of the ideas that some of the Hermetic astrological authors writing in the second century BCE were also taking for granted, and therefore would have acted as motivating factors for creating or using and promoting a cosmological model of the solar system and of the cosmos that placed the Sun at the very center.
All right. So one of the things I wanted to talk about a little bit is the Pythagorean connection, because some of the later sources attribute this planetary order to the Pythagoreans, although this doesn’t really match with what we know of earlier Pythagorean cosmological models. And so, for example, there was a cosmological model by Philolaus of Croton in the fifth century BCE who was a Pythagorean, and it had the planets revolving around a central fire or hearth that was not the Sun. And needless to say, that model doesn’t fit the planetary order that we’re talking about here, and in fact there’s a scholar named Walter Burkert who wrote a whole book titled Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, and he gives one of the best and most comprehensive treatments of this topic of the planetary order that I’ve seen in modern times, aside from some of the German scholars that were writing in the early 20th century who were specialists in ancient astrology. But Burkert in trying to research and find the supposed Pythagorean connection or, like, earlier sources to this doctrine, he basically can’t find them, and he ends up concluding that there isn’t any evidence that the Pythagoreans used this specific planetary order that placed the Sun in the center of the cosmos prior to some of the other references that we start seeing from the second century BCE forward, including the reference to Archimedes, who I think he mistakenly takes for granted just based on what Macrobius and Hippolytus said that that may actually come from Archimedes. But he basically says aside from that, we can’t find any earlier Pythagorean sources connected with this so that he doesn’t believe that it’s Pythagorean at all. And for myself, I suspect that the Pythagorean connection may have arose because in the planetary distances model that Pliny in the first century cites Nechepso for, there are musical ratios that are embedded in the distances between the planets, especially the ratio between the Moon to the Sun, and then the Sun to Saturn, as well as the ratio of the Moon to Saturn. That there are some sort of, like, harmonic and musical implications and undertones to the relative distances that it gives there. And I’m not gonna dwell on that too much here, because that would be, like, a whole episode on harmonics and ancient musical ratios. But suffice it to say that I think that the Nechepso text itself may have been inspired by and may have been the one that was including some of these musical ratios as part of its cosmological model. I mean, that’s obvious from the Pliny quote, basically. But it may be that the astrologers were integrating some of these things into that; that may have been one of the selling points of why they found that cosmological model compelling. But instead of that arising from Pythagoreans, necessarily, it may have arisen from this group of astrologers in the second century BCE. And of course, they would have been inspired by earlier ideas like we see in Plato’s Timaeus and these notions that were then present in Greek philosophy about the planets going around the spheres and each singing a note and there being a sort of, like, harmony of the spheres that arises from those doctrines. And here the move to put the Sun in the center of the cosmos and to set up its ratios relative to the Moon and Saturn as well as the other planets may have been an attempt to actually create a sort of, like, harmony of the spheres model through the construct of the seven-zoned sphere.
One of the most compelling pieces about viewing the use of the seven-zoned sphere as a conceptual construct like the Thema mundi is that you can see the early astrologers using the seven-zoned sphere model to derive significations and symbolic meanings for the planets. So this becomes really clear in a bunch of different texts, but especially the early texts like Antiochus and Porphyry. But first, I wanted to read this extended quote that Paulus of Alexandria has in the fourth century CE where he outlines specifically what the seven-zoned sphere model looks like and how it’s described, because once you actually read and understand that and think about the diagram involved, you start understanding why the rest of the astrologers are deriving significations from it in the way that they are.
Okay, so Paulus says,
“And the order of the seven-zoned sphere is as follows: The star of Saturn was allotted the first and highest zone, which is exceedingly cold and situated in frost. Jupiter was allotted the second, being temperate, nourishing, and life-giving. The star of Mars was allotted the third and fiery zone, which happens to be destructive. The Sun obtained the fourth and centermost zone of the aether, being fiery and life-giving. Venus, having been allotted the fifth and serene zone, is established as the cause of seed and generation. The star of Mercury was allotted the sixth and common zone, which is moist. And the most powerful Moon, obtaining the seventh zone, which is likewise moist and closest to the earth, and receiving the emanations of the stars, whose zones are higher than hers, produces the increase and decrease of all things, pointing out the irregularity of human life through her own image.”
So this is from Paulus’ Introduction, chapter 21.
So it’s like, when you think about that, think of this diagram of the seven-zoned sphere with the earth at the center and then you have each planet – Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn – but then you have certain planets that are in between other spheres. Like, for example, Jupiter is in the sphere in between Saturn and Mars. And that actually partially produces some of what Jupiter means. Or Mars has its sphere right next to the Sun, and that produces some of what it means. Or the Moon has its sphere right next to the earth, and that partially produces what it means. And I’m about to demonstrate that here with some of the quotes, but my point is that some of the astrologers, once this cosmological model was created, they started using it to generate significations of the planets or in order to justify what may have been already in some instances preexisting significations that they inherited from the earlier especially Mesopotamian astrological tradition.
Okay. So for example, this is from – again – from Pliny from the first century CE from Natural History II, chapter eight or section eight. It says,
“But the star of Saturn is of a cold and freezing nature, and much below it is the circle of Jupiter, which therefore revolves with a swifter motion in 12 years; and the third is the star of Mars, which some call Hercules, burning with fire because of its proximity to the Sun, and it completes its revolution in about two years; and therefore, because Jupiter is interposed between the two, it is tempered by both the excessive heat of the latter (of Mars) and the freezing cold of Saturn, and thus it is rendered salutary.”
So this is a doctrine that we see show up in different astrologers, especially in Ptolemy, that Jupiter because it is in between the cold sphere of Saturn and the extremely hot sphere of Mars, that Jupiter is in the middle in between the two, and as a result of that, it becomes temperate. And then as Ptolemy explains, temperateness is itself considered to be positive or benefic, whereas the extremes of hot and cold, which Mars and Saturn represent, are conceptualized as malefic. And that becomes his basic definition for benefic and malefic. But it turns out he’s deriving it from this conceptualization. And what’s interesting is that, it’s like, I talked about a little bit in my book, because for a long time, I thought Ptolemy… It was clear that Ptolemy was taking this more naturalistic model to its utmost extreme. And he was, I think, more than any other astrologer of his time period trying to present astrology as scientific and trying to rationalize it in terms of some of the prevailing scientific concepts of his day. And I could tell that he was taking it further than some of the other astrologers were, but that he was clearly not making all of it up. He was clearly drawing on an earlier tradition, and I actually cited that passage from Pliny in my book in order to show that this tradition and how Ptolemy treats the planets was not completely new. But what I’ve realized now is that Ptolemy was drawing on the conceptual model of the seven-zoned sphere, and the way that it was actually probably introduced already in the second century BCE as a conceptual construct from which the significations of the planets were being derived, and which some of the significations of the planets were established.
So I have a few other quotes just to show you how there’s all sorts of other sources that have this doctrine. So for example, this is not in the context of the seven-zoned sphere, but in Dorotheus, there’s a fragment of Dorotheus that survives on conjunctions. And it says, “if Saturn conjoins Mars, he fashions a mild character, for indeed the impetus one (Mars), being hot, always brings an unthinking and unreasoning swiftness into his impulses, but the other (Saturn) is slow; and when both are blended together, the mortal in the middle in between them will be excellent.”
Elsewhere I have a quote from Macrobius, again from the fifth century, where he says, “Saturn, because it is the furthest from the Sun, is by nature cold; Mars, on the other hand, because of its proximity to the Sun, is burning hot. Jupiter, which runs its course between the two, partakes of both and is temperate and salutary.”
So with a lot of these later authors, I thought that they were just being influenced by Ptolemy, basically, because Ptolemy has this similar conceptualization when he explains the planets. And I thought the later authors after the second century were being influenced by Ptolemy, but it turns out all of them are actually just being influenced by this cosmological model and this astrological doctrine that’s basically introduced in the second century BCE in some of the foundational texts of Hellenistic astrology, especially by Nechepso and Petosiris.
So elsewhere, even authors that don’t explain things as systematically as this relative to the seven-zoned sphere, they also seem to be drawing on similar models or conceptualizations. Like, for example, Vettius Valens, when he talks about Saturn at the beginning of the Anthology, he describes Saturn as “chilling” and “bringing on coldness.” Or Jupiter he lists as being “fruitful, active, and temperate.” Mars he defines as being fiery and burning. So it’s like, some of these conceptualizations were there even when authors are, like, treating the planets individually later on. And finally, the clincher for this for me was rereading with this understanding of the seven-zoned sphere as a conceptual construct that they’re deriving significations from, when I reread Antiochus of Athens and – which we have a summary of his text – and then we have Porphyry’s Introduction, which basically takes and has a fuller version of the same chapter on the significations of the planets from Antiochus that he’s deriving from Antiochus. So if you read chapter 45 of Porphyry’s Introduction where he gives the significations of the planets, you can see that he derives planetary meanings directly from this physical architecture of the seven-zoned sphere, and that it’s not a random list of associations, but instead, it’s kind of like a structural blueprint that is demonstrating an implicit understanding of this, like, “as above, so below” microcosm-macrocosm construct, because it keeps contrasting the significations of the cosmos and the planets as a whole and what they signify in the world with what they signify inside the individual in a physiological sense, in terms of the human body.
So for example, when he talks about the Moon in Porphyry, he talks about it occupying the lowest sphere closest to earth. And so it acts as a boundary as a funnel which receives emanations from all of the planets and then transmits them down to the mortal realm. And in terms of significations, it actually signifies because it’s the closest planet to earth our physical body, our general health, as well as the maternal figure who acts as sort of like, the bodily vessel of our generation in some sense in an ancient context.
Elsewhere, he talks about the Sun occupying the middle sphere. And it acts as the heart of the cosmos, essentially. So in terms of significations, he gives the biological heart of a human, the perceptive soul, the vital life force or pneuma, and authoritative figures in general. Then Venus, because it’s situated near to the Sun in the sphere below it, he basically says that Venus is illuminated by the radiance of the Sun, and so therefore the significations that are ascribed to Venus are things like beauty, cheerfulness, and all things that shine.
Mercury occupies or operates in hidden proximity to the Sun, frequently going in and out from under the Sun’s beams. And as a result of frequently rising and setting under the Sun’s beams, he associates it with the inner workings of the “motions of the soul,” which include things like reason and intellect, but also commerce and calculation. And essentially, Mercury ends up being associated with both speaking and communication, but also hearing and listening at the same time, because there’s this function of Mercury of passing and being the gateway from the Sun outwards and essentially from the Nous outwards.
Elsewhere when Antiochus/Porphyry are talking about Mars, they always talk about it being situated in the sphere just above the Sun. And I think part of the conceptualization is that because fire and heat rises, the Sun was thought to be, like, heating up the sphere of Mars. And the proximity of Mars to the Sun’s heat gives Mars this acute, fiery quality. So for example, in terms of internal significations, Mars is said to signify – especially in addition because of its redness – the hottest blood within us, as well as things like wrath and speed and sudden or acute passions. And then by contrast, Saturn, which occupies the seventh or the highest planetary sphere, is the furthest and the slowest and the coldest therefore visible planet, being the furthest from the Sun. And therefore in terms of its significations, it’s thought to represent the literal boundary between the visible solar system and that that translates metaphorically to themes of finality, to chronic, lasting affairs or sicknesses, foundations, the elderly or old people, as well as ideas of restriction.
So in this way, in the Porphyry texts, there’s these dual notions where on the one hand, the human body is built as a miniature replica of the cosmos itself and of the seven-zoned sphere. And that’s why Porphyry includes both the connections between the planets and things within our physical body, including different body parts of different organs like the heart and its association with the Sun. But then he also includes external things in the world in general and what the planets signify in the external cosmos. And so the physical structure of the solar system, then, is not just an astronomical reality, but it’s also kind of a divine blueprint that organizes both human anatomy as well as human destiny.
All right, so all of that being said, I think there’s three selling points that would have made this system appealing and led to its widespread adoption, not just by astrologers but also beyond that. So the first point is the symbolic elegance of this system. And I think that at a time when astronomers, especially Greek astronomers and philosophers, were still obsessed with this notion of saving the phenomena and trying to create these perfectly circular orbits of the planets that arose from the time of Plato and Aristotle and all of those philosophers, here was a system that was perfectly balanced and symmetrical in terms of the way that it divided the planets and put the Sun in the center, the Moon at the lowest portion in the cosmos, Saturn at the most distant, and created this distinction between essentially the inner planets and the outer planets. So that’s one selling point.
Selling point two is it created harmonic ratios between the planets and especially between the Moon, the Sun, and Saturn, which I think would have tied in with earlier notions regarding the harmony of the spheres, which were already mentioned in Plato.
Point three, in addition to its elegance, the fact that this system was introduced under the guise of the Nechepso and Petosiris texts may have given it the presumption of being an ancient Egyptian system or being some sort of ancient Egyptian wisdom, because that’s how those texts presented themselves as we can tell by later astrologers such as Vettius Valens, for example, who really regarded Nechepso as an Egyptian pharaoh who lived at some distant point in the past during some sort of perceived golden age in the history of astrology. So whatever way the Nechepso and Petosiris texts presented themselves, and unfortunately they don’t survive in their entirety; we only have fragments and quotations of these texts by later astrologers. But they presented themselves under this guise of – especially the Nechepso text – of being ancient Egyptian wisdom. And so as a result of that, the cosmological model that they may have introduced or attempted to popularize basically may have taken off even more due to the perception that this was actually very old wisdom that was somehow being rediscovered or passed forward from Egypt, rather than what looks like the reality which is that essentially that this was a new cosmological system that was being introduced for the very first time in the second century BCE.
And in terms of the different possible vectors for how this system got popularized, how this cosmological model with the Sun at the center got popularized especially as even just an astronomical model, already in the first century BCE, we see the astrologer Geminus writing about it as I quoted earlier in this talk. And we know that he drew on both Hipparchus, the astronomer Hipparchus, as well as the Stoic philosopher and scientist Posidonius. And Geminus is usually thought to date to sometime between 90 to 35 BCE, according to his most recent translators into English, Evans and Berggren, and Alexander Jones gives about the same dates as well. So as a result of that, either of them could be candidates for the source from where Geminus himself got it from, although of course, Geminus is also drawing on some astrological sources. So it’s possible that he’s getting it from the astrologers, although that seems a little less likely because of how he takes it for granted as a cosmological system.
So when it comes to Hipparchus, as far as I know, it’s possible that Hipparchus had this cosmological model that placed the Sun in the center of the solar system, but we don’t know for sure. And Hipparchus dates from roughly 190 to 120 BCE. And there is a recent article by a scholar named Victor Gysembergh about Hipparchus where he argues that Hipparchus may have been drawing on the texts of Nechepso and Petosiris. Especially there’s a piece where Hipparchus cites “the ancients” for using essentially the tropical zodiac where basically, like, Hipparchus is doing a commentary on Eratus and on Eudoxus, and in this commentary for some reason, Hipparchus starts saying that most of the ancients used functionally the tropical zodiac. And it’s kind of odd in terms of why he’s saying that, because it’s clear that that’s not necessarily the case for the most part. However, it would make sense if Hipparchus is reading the text of Nechepso and, like everybody else, he thinks that it’s actually an ancient text from ancient Egypt, and therefore sort of takes it at face value and therefore thinks that the use of the tropical zodiac goes back much further than it may actually go back if Nechepso was using it. And I think this works out because I think this piece of Victor’s argument makes sense because it aligns with a statement that Ptolemy makes when Ptolemy is introducing in the Tetrabiblos and defending his decision to use the tropical zodiac, because he makes this reference to the compilers also using the tropical zodiac. And elsewhere, that tends to be Ptolemy and Valens’s keyword for when he’s referring to Nechepso and Petosiris is that Valens especially will frequently refer to Nechepso as “the compiler.” And once Ptolemy has a reference to Nechepso that relates to the calculation of the Lot of Fortune, and there he calls Nechepso “the compiler” as well. So I think that means that Ptolemy is drawing on Nechepso and thinks that the early foundational authors of Nechepso and Petosiris were using the tropical zodiac, and I think this is why Hipparchus thinks that as well, or at least why Hipparchus thinks that the tropical zodiac had a much more ancient pedigree than it might.
I think this can also be further confirmed by Hephaestio of Thebes saying that Hipparchus gave a set of zodiacal assignments to the different parts of the world that matched those of the “ancient Egyptians,” which presumably are Nechepso and Petosiris. So that argument’s a little bit more complicated, so I won’t get into it here. But it’s tricky, because with Hipparchus, his timeline is so close to Nechepso and Petosiris when we think that they were active or published that he would have been, like, reading the texts relatively close to or not far after they would have been published where, for example, a recent translator of Hipparchus’s main surviving work, a scholar named Eric Glover, thinks that Hipparchus was in Alexandria between 160 to 148 BCE, but then he left and wrote most of his works on the Island of Rhodes between 142 and 120 BCE. So what’s interesting is, like, Nechepso and Petosiris, Stephan Heilen was noting the use of a certain type of poetic Greek expression, basically, that could help to narrow down their timeframe to the 140s or the 130s in terms of when he thinks the core of that original composition was created. So we’re talking, like, 130s, 140s for Nechepso and Petosiris, although one of the things that complicates things a little bit is if they were drawing on earlier texts attributed to Hermes and Asclepius already, then those texts would have been written slightly before that at some point that we can’t date. But it would presumably still be within sometime in the second century BCE. But to make a long story short, Hipparchus is possible, but we don’t know, as far as I’m aware, if he used that model with the Sun in the center of the solar system or center of the cosmos.
The next possible candidate is Posidonius, who is likely to have had it, but we don’t know for sure if he used it because again, his works don’t survive, so all we have is a bunch of fragments and things from later authors. But Posidonius is thought to have lived from around 130 to about 51 BCE. And so therefore, it is much more likely that he would have had that system and would have taken it into account. And the thing that’s interesting about Posidonius is that he was a Stoic philosopher, but he was also interested in astrology. And he also was interested in, like, scientific observations and the connections between the Moon and the tides and different things like that. So he is, you know, it’s a little tricky, because in, like, a hundred years ago, scholars kind of went a little crazy attributing to Posidonius lots of different doctrines and things that they attempted to trace back to him, but that, you know, we just don’t know. So it’s a little risky saying Posidonius had this system if that can’t be proven for sure. But certainly he is a possible vector for how it could have been spread, especially given that we know that Cicero had it just – is talking about it just a decade later basically around 40 BCE a decade after Posidonius dies, and that Cicero was a student of Posidonius at one point or sat in on lectures from him.
And then finally, the third major vector for this was the sudden explosion and proliferation of Hellenistic astrology as a system, which basically by the middle of the first century BCE just has clearly exploded in the ancient world and is everywhere. And all of a sudden, we start seeing surviving horoscopes and birth charts that survive from that time period. And we start seeing a lot of this huge uptick suddenly in discussions about natal astrology especially happening in Roman sources, including Cicero but also a bunch of other authors.
So the popularization and the spread of this new system of astrology or this new form of astrology from the second century BCE forward, the system basically that was introduced in the set of Hermetic texts connected with Asclepius, Hermes, and Nechepso and Petosiris, that system by a century later had really taken off. And that’s one of the reasons like, the introduction of that system, that’s one of the reasons why you don’t start seeing astrology sort of explode in the Greco-Roman world in popularity until about that time period of the first century BCE forward. But the popularization of that system and of astrology through that system, of Hellenistic astrology, would have been one of the major things that would have popularized the planetary order of the seven-zoned sphere, as well as just the general cosmological model that placed the Sun at the center of the cosmos. And I guess, you know, one of my points is that while on some level that was, like, a scientific system for its time or became or was viewed as an astronomical, cosmological model, it may have been partially motivated by philosophical and religious and mystical notions which were one of the things that helped nudged it in the direction of placing the Sun in the center of the cosmos. And I mean, just to really drive home that point, the fact that this system of the order of the seven-zoned sphere and this cosmological model becomes popularized from the mid-first century BCE forward at the same time that Hellenistic astrology is becoming popularized, that’s one of the additional clues that really helps to prove or to make persuasive the argument that this system was actually introduced by the astrologers in the first place.
All right, and one of the things that’s really interesting about the order of the seven-zoned sphere is that this planetary order would become extremely influential in philosophical, religious, and mystical texts from the first century BCE forward. And especially as a result of this doctrine of the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres, which would play a crucial role in ancient Hermeticism, Gnosticism, middle and neo-Platonism, and even later in the Jewish Kabbalah and the Tree of Life that would develop at some point later on, this order of the seven-zoned sphere gets integrated into that. And we can see this right away in Book One of the Corpus Hermeticum in the Poimandres where there’s this notion that when the soul descends down into birth, basically, just before birth, it descends through each of the planetary spheres and it picks up qualities from each of the planets. And then you’re born with those qualities, basically, as part of your – not just your destiny, but also your physical and psychological and other makeup to some extent. And then when you die, your soul ascends through the planetary spheres and gives back some of those qualities to each of the planets.
So this is like, a hugely important and widespread doctrine from the first century BCE forward that becomes ubiquitous in the ancient world. And what’s really important about what I’m introducing here and this discovery that the astrological texts may have introduced that doctrine is to understand that this notion of the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres may have been one of those doctrines that was introduced by this set of Hermetic texts at the same time in the second century BCE, because it was part of their philosophical and religious and metaphysical doctrines about the nature of the cosmos and the nature of incarnation and other things like that. And while typically, scholars tend to date the Corpus Hermeticum which contains these notions of the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres to the first century CE and later, it means that this doctrine actually probably goes back to the second century BCE.
So I’m actually about to record an episode in a couple of days from now with a scholar named M. David Litwa, who is an expert on ancient Gnosticism and Hermeticism. So we’ll talk in that episode more about this doctrine of the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres and the important philosophical and religious and mystical implications it had in the ancient world, as well as how widespread it is. So I’ll save more discussion about that for that episode.
Okay, so once the order of the seven-zoned sphere was created as a conceptual construct, astrologers started projecting it onto other things. And you see it show up in a bunch of different places in the astrological system and tradition in Hellenistic astrology. So, for example, one of the ways is that it was used to generate a system of rulerships for the decans – a new system of rulerships that was applied to the decans. And this first appears in the author Teucer of Babylon, who is kind of hard to date but we usually we think he dates to around the first century BCE and that he was a source for later astrologers, potentially including Vettius Valens as well as Rhetorius of Egypt. And I think he also shows up in Porphyry as well.
So let me share a diagram that shows that system of decan rulership. Okay, so here’s the diagram that shows the order of the seven-zoned sphere projected onto the 36 decans where the decans became subdivisions of 10 degrees of each of the 30 degrees of the signs of the zodiac. And they used what’s usually referred to as the descending Chaldean order or the descending order of the seven-zoned sphere in order to assign them. And usually, the way that this is thought to go is that it starts with, like, Mars basically as the first decan of Aries, and then it goes downwards in the order of the seven-zoned sphere next to the Sun, which becomes the ruler of the middle decan of Aries, next to Venus, which becomes the third decan of Aries. Then the first decan of Aries is assigned to Mercury, and then finally, the Moon is the last planet, which is assigned to the middle decan of Taurus. And then the order of the seven-zoned sphere starts over again at Saturn, which becomes the ruler of the third decan of Taurus. Then Jupiter becomes the ruler of the first decan of Gemini. Then Mars becomes the ruler of the middle decan of Gemini, and then the Sun is the third decan and so on and so forth.
So one of the patterns that I noticed that probably would have made this really appealing is even though we usually think that this order starts simply by pegging Mars to the first decan of Aries as the ruler of the sign of Aries, since Mars is the ruler of that sign, one of the patterns that I noticed that I think would have been compelling to whoever came up with this, whatever early astrological author came up with this, is in the Thema mundi in some of the later sources, especially from the Asclepius text onwards that give an actual degree for the rising sign of the Thema mundi, they say that the Ascendant was 15 degrees of Cancer. And this would have put the rising degree in the Thema mundi in the decan associated with Mercury here according to this scheme. And I find that interesting, of course, because Mercury is associated with the first house in the planetary joys scheme. But then if you look at what the degree of the other three angles would be, they all get connected weirdly with the exaltations.
So for example, if you go 90 degrees upwards to what would be, like, the equal house Midheaven, you find the Sun ruling the middle decan of Aries. And Aries also happens to be the sign of the exaltation of the Sun. Or if you go to the degree of the Descendant, which would be at 15 degrees of Capricorn, you just happen to find Mars ruling the middle decan of Capricorn. And Capricorn itself is said to be the sign of the exaltation of Mars. And if that wasn’t weird enough, if you go down to the IC which would be at 15 degrees of Libra, you find the middle decan of Libra is ruled by Saturn. And Libra, of course, is said to be the sign of the exaltation of Saturn. So I don’t know if that is a accident or if that is deliberate, but it’s a little bit striking and it’s a little bit compelling relative to the way that it ties into two of the other conceptual constructs that we’ve looked at today, which is, like, the exaltations, the Thema mundi, and the planetary joys scheme. And it may be another little piece of evidence of how they’re trying to like, integrate these different conceptual constructs in some way. And it’s a little tricky, because we don’t know if these decan assignments, because they go back to Teucer of Babylon seems to be one of our earliest sources for them, we don’t know if he came up with them, for example, in which case it’s like an astrologer from the first century BCE who’s, like, a century after Nechepso and Petosiris taking the idea of the seven-zoned sphere and then applying it to the decans is one scenario. Or alternatively, the other scenario is this was something that was introduced early on in, like, the foundational texts of Nechepso and Petosiris, and then some later astrologers adopted and used it and other later astrologers didn’t use it for whatever reason. I think part of the reason there would have been a motivation to create that alternative decan system is because originally in the Egyptian tradition preceding Hellenistic astrology, the decans were based on certain fixed stars and certain asterisms, or clusters of fixed stars. But then when Hellenistic astrology started using the 12 sign zodiac and especially in the Nechepso and Petosiris text, if Ptolemy is right that the compiler, which is his keyword or the “compilers” is his keyword for Nechepso and Petosiris, if he’s right that those texts were functionally using the tropical zodiac, then there would have immediately been a disconnect from the Egyptian decans even though the decans play such an important role in traditional Egyptian astronomy and astrology up to that point, as well as a important cosmological role in terms of the Corpus Hermeticum where they get mentioned from time to time as significant things.
So as a result of that, that could have been a motivation for either some early astrologer or potentially some foundational astrologer of this system to want to create a new system of rulership for the decans that would be something they felt could be used with the tropical zodiac and still would be symbolically or conceptually interesting and tied in with some of the other conceptual constructs that they were using. So that’s tricky and becomes more speculative and we have a hard time retracing that. But those are some of the thoughts that I have about that, and that’s one application of the order of the seven-zoned sphere to what became a really significant part of the astrological tradition later on. Although the decans are used – it’s like, that system of decans, that’s one of the things that’s weird is that they’re used really sporadically by certain authors, certain Hellenistic astrologers, but they’re not used by others. Like, Valens and Ptolemy, for example, don’t seem to use that system of decan rulerships. And it’s possible, though, that that’s because some astrologers might have still known that the decans were originally associated with the fixed stars, and so they may have seen that later system as somewhat contrived or something like that. I don’t really know. But it’s kind of spotty which Hellenistic astrologers use that decan system. But then I think eventually Rhetorius is using it and that ends up influencing the medieval tradition so that it then becomes standard as one of the five essential dignities in medieval astrology eventually.
All right, so that’s one application of the order of the seven-zoned sphere. Another application is by the time of Paulus of Alexandria in the fourth century CE, the order of the seven-zoned sphere gets applied to create a system of what’s called monomoiria, which is rulers for each single degree of the zodiac. And they basically do the same thing by applying the seven-zoned sphere or the Chaldean order to the individual degrees to create a system of rulerships. Although it’s interesting, because even here in Paulus, he presents two different, like, traditions of monomoiria, and one of them is based on the seven-zoned sphere order, and the other is based on the triplicities. So there was some competition there, and I don’t know how widespread or at one point the system that used the seven-zoned sphere of monomoiria originated. I’m not sure at what point it was introduced.
Okay, elsewhere, the first century BC author Critodemus used the seven-zoned sphere in a time lord system, in an actual timing technique, as reported by Vettius Valens in chapter 26 of book four of the Anthology. And he outlines this system and how it’s connected with the planetary order of the seven-zoned sphere, and Critodemus is tricky. He’s a little hard to date, but he’s usually dated to the first century BCE because he’s already mentioned by I believe by Pliny in sometime in the middle of the first century CE. So as a result of that, he must have been writing earlier, which places him probably around the first century BCE.
And finally last but not least, the order of the seven-zoned sphere was also used as a basis in order to create a system of planetary days and planetary hours. And this becomes, actually, the source for how the planets got assigned to the seven days of the week, which still persists to this day. So let me show some diagrams to show you what I’m talking about. So for example, here’s a standard diagram that shows the planetary days of the week and the days that are associated with certain planets. And it creates this, like, heptagram or this seven-pointed star for each of the planets. And so basically, one of the ways that you can do it is you can start with let’s say Sunday up at the top of the diagram, and Sunday – you know, we still in our language we still have some of these planetary names embedded in the name of the day of the week. And in some European languages, it’s more clear than other. Like in French, it’s a lot more clear than it is in English. But we still have a couple of the days – like, Sunday, for example, is literally the day of the Sun. And Monday, for example, is literally the day of the Moon. Or Saturday, for example, is the day of Saturn. To continue with the rest, so Saturday – let’s say Monday, and then Tuesday is the day of Mars. Wednesday is the day of Mercury. Thursday is the day of Jupiter. And Friday is the day of Venus. I’m not gonna do the whole, like, usual linguistic breakdown of how all of those actually connect all the planets. But it’s interesting, and the way that this works, basically, is you can use this diagram with the seven-pointed star, and here’s a version of it that Paige Allison made for me that has arrows so that you can do it. And what you do if you start from a certain day – like, let’s say you start from Saturday – and then you work your way clockwise around the diagram and you skip two positions in order to get to the next day. So if you start with Saturday, for example, up at the top – the day of Saturn – then you go clockwise and you skip Jupiter and Mars and you land on the Sun. And that’s the planetary ruler for Sunday, which is the Sun. Then from there, you skip to – you skip Venus and Mercury and you land on the Moon. And that’s Monday, which is the planetary day of the Moon. Then from Monday, you skip two and you skip Saturn and Jupiter and you land on Mars, which is the day of Tuesday – is the ruler of Tuesday. And I think, like, Cassius Dio outlines this already in the second century. So even though this became a later mnemonic for calculating these, it actually had some roots in some of the ancient and traditional texts. And interestingly, Cassius Dio ascribes this system to the Egyptians, which you know, for us we know that that probably means Nechepso and Petosiris, who were the ancient Egyptians par excellence.
But this system of planetary days is connected to a more complicated system of planetary hours. And this is a diagram that Paige made for me based on a diagram made by Christopher Warnock and Nigel Jackson. So they were the ones, I think, that originally came up with this format for showing the planetary days and the planetary hours as a visual way of calculating things and understanding how the planetary days and planetary hours interlock visually. I’m not gonna count through and go through all of this. I think I’m gonna do a separate episode at some point, perhaps with like, Ryhan Butler who has a really excellent video out there on planetary days and hours already on his YouTube channel, which you should check out and I’ve been meaning to talk to him for a while about doing an episode with me for The Astrology Podcast and perhaps it’s time. So if you wanna see me do that episode on planetary days and hours, let me know in the YouTube comments.
But here’s a separate table that also lists the planetary days and planetary hours, and the way that it works, basically, is that the first hour of each day starting with sunrise is ruled by the planet that rules that day. And then it counts – each hour counts downwards in the order of the seven-zoned sphere or in what’s otherwise known as descending Chaldean order. So for example, on Sunday, the first hour of the day is ruled by the Sun. Then the second hour of the day is ruled by Venus. Then the next one’s Mercury, then the Moon, then Saturn, then Jupiter, then Mars, then the Sun, and so on and so forth. And the cycle just keeps repeating.
So one of the things that was interesting is that my friend Patrick Watson in an old article he wrote on house division where he’s trying to reconcile whole sign and quadrant houses, he points out that one of the cool things about Placidus in particular as a form of quadrant house division is that it technically gets tied in with the planetary hours and planetary days scheme, because if you use Placidus houses in the way that it’s tied in with, like, seasonal hours, you can actually project the planetary hours onto the chart. And what you end up with is something like this. So Patrick made this for me; he’s recently integrated the planetary hours as a visual component. He’s integrating it into his new astrological program that’s called Nechepso. And when you do that, basically, what Patrick has pointed out and shown is that the first planetary hour of the day, basically, the ruler of the day is the hour that rises above the Ascendant. So I was born, for example, on a Thursday, which is Jupiter day. And then the position of the Sun in the planetary hours relative to quadrant houses ends up becoming the ruler of the hour. And I was born with my Sun at nine degrees of Scorpio with my Sun in the planetary hour of Mars. So it’s just an alternative way of visualizing the planetary days and planetary hours and how they can look when you project them onto a chart.
All right, but to make a long story short, the order of the seven-zoned sphere ends up becoming the motivation for the creation of the planetary days of the week as well as the planetary hours, which become hugely influential over the course of the past 2,000 years. And some scholars recently have attempted to argue that the planetary associations with the days of the week are a Roman product that originated in Italy during the last first century BCE or so, and there’s a paper by two scholars named Ilaria Bultrighini and Sacha Stern from 2021 titled “The Seven Day Week in the Roman Empire.” And while I think that these two scholars are brilliant and I’d recommend checking out that paper, because it’s really interesting and well-documented, I think I have to respectfully disagree and outline an alternative origin story instead, because one because I think this system – the order of the seven-zoned sphere – was already introduced in the second century BCE. And there’s already astrologers writing in Greek from the first century BCE that are drawing on this system and using the system of planetary days and hours and therefore I think it may actually go back to the second century BCE and possibly to the foundational texts of Nechepso and Petosiris that introduced them seven-zoned sphere to begin with as I’ve argued.
So already in 1912, the famous scholar of ancient astrology, Franz Boll, argued that the planetary days and hours may have been introduced by Nechepso and Petosiris based on a reference in the first century Roman author Juvenal as well as another statement by the historian Cassius Dio who said that this system originated with “the Egyptians.” And I wanted to read these quotes from them. The first one from Cassius Dio where he’s going through his history of the Roman emperors, and he has this digression where he explains the planetary days. And he says, “The practice of dedicating the days to the seven stars called planets was established by the Egyptians, but it is now present among all people, having begun not long ago, so to speak. The ancient Greeks, at any rate, knew nothing of it, as it seems to me. But since it is now highly customary for all other people and especially for the Romans themselves, and is already in a way an ancestral tradition for them, I wish to speak briefly about it, and how and in what manner it has been so arranged.”
So that’s from Cassius Dio who’s writing in the late second or early third century CE. But he’s very aware that the earlier Greeks didn’t use this system, that it’s relatively recent, but that it came from the ancient Egyptians. And like with some of the other things that we’ve talked about today, like possibly Hipparchus and certainly Ptolemy talking about the tropical zodiac and saying that it was used by other ancient authors or ancient compilers, I think this is another one of those instances where he’s saying this because it may have been outlined in the Egyptian or quasi presumably Egyptian astrological texts of Nechepso and Petosiris that were presented as literal texts by an Egyptian pharaoh and an Egyptian priest.
So elsewhere to give the quote from the second author that Boll cited, which is the Roman poet Juvenal, where he has kind of like this misogynistic passage where he’s talking about Roman women, and he starts talking about – like, I quoted part of this in my book because it’s one of our earliest references to probably women practicing astrology in the Greco-Roman world – where he says,
“Remember also to avoid encountering that woman in whose hands you see well-worn ephemerides, clutched like greasy amber beads. She no longer consults anyone, but now is consulted herself. When her husband sets out for military camp or home, she will not go with him, held back by the calculations of Thrasyllus. When she pleases to take a carriage ride to the very first milestone, the hour is pulled from a book; if the rubbed corner of her eye itches, she demands her eye-salve only after inspecting her nativity; Though she may lie sick in bed, no hour seems more appropriate for taking food than the one Petosiris has given.”
So I think this is really important because partially because the Petosiris text, we have some fragments of it that survive that do cover electional astrology. And there’s some later astrologers such as I think it’s Julian of Laodicea who are drawing on some fragments of Petosiris that were on electional astrology that were telling you basically good and bad times to take actions, which became one of the major branches of Hellenistic astrology. But one of the things that comes up is that the planetary days and hours do get mentioned in some of the texts associated with electional astrology in the Hellenistic tradition. And I think that Boll’s inference from this, and although it’s not conclusive here when they’re talking about Petosiris in connection with a specific hour, because that could just be referring to like, picking a good hour for the Ascendant or what have you. What I find interesting and what I think some of the recent scholarship isn’t taking into account is that there are references to using the planetary days and hours in some early astrological texts. And specifically the electional astrology fragments associated with an author named Serapio in almost every single one of those fragments, he mentions paying attention to the planetary ruler of the day and the planetary ruler of the hour as part of his electional astrology. And then similarly, the early author Critodemus who again I said can probably be dated to the first century BCE pretty reliably because he’s already mentioned by Pliny in the first century CE, at one point in a summary of Critodemus’s work, it has a reference to paying attention to the planetary ruler of the day within the context of natal astrology and in the context of a chapter where he gave, like, indications for a violent death, basically. He mentions the ruler of the day at one point as one of the things to pay attention to.
All right, so in terms of historical sources, the first reference we know to planetary days and hours that’s pretty secure is by the Latin poet Tibullus who was writing around the year 27 BCE. And that’s usually given as, like, a foundational, strong dating point that we know that it was being used by that point – that the concept of planetary days existed. And in terms of astrological texts, Vettius Valens is our earliest known astrological source that fully outlines how to calculate planetary days and planetary hours. And Valens was living in Egypt and Antioch in the middle of the second century CE, which is pretty late. But he was drawing on sources from earlier, from at least the first century CE, but he was also drawing on the texts of Nechepso and Petosiris. So he’s drawing on a strata of the tradition that goes back potentially to the second century BCE in Egypt. And there’s a discrepancy in Valens I’m not gonna get into where he starts the first hour of the day at sunset, which aligns his calculations with some of the older, Babylonian and Greek civic calendars and creates a bit of an issue for the, like, alternative tradition of planetary days and hours that starts the day at sunrise that I’m not really fully sure how to reconcile or what that implies about the tradition and the origins of this technique, but it’s possible that that indicates some earlier strata where the planetary hours could have been used in different ways. I’m not really sure. But let’s keep it moving and not dwell on that; maybe I’ll explore that more in a separate episode.
The planetary days are also mentioned in inscriptions in Pompeii, so we know that they existed before 79 CE when that city was destroyed. And in some of the different texts, like, Paulus and in the Pompeii inscriptions, they’re very explicitly called “the days of the gods” in terms of assigning the planetary gods to each of the days. And in the astrological tradition, though, something that’s important that needs to be recognized and I don’t think has been fully recognized by some of the recent scholarship is that the astrologers themselves had a standardized set of words that they used to refer to the planetary days and hours in terms of interpretation. And in, like, for example, Robert Schmidt translates very literally the terms where the planetary ruler of the day was referred to as the planet “going about,” whereas the ruler of the hour was referred to as the planet “executing.” Or alternatively, Levente Laszlo has recently translated these two terms as the planet supervising versus the planet administering. So the planet supervising is the ruler of the day, and the planet administering is the ruler of the hour. And alternatively, you could say the planet that’s presiding and then there’s the planet that’s managing. There’s different interpretations, basically, depending on the sense that you want to convey.
But what’s important for our purposes is that these technical terms are used in some early astrological texts where, for example, in almost all of the fragments of the electional texts of Serapio, the star going about and the planet executing are mentioned as planets that you have to pay attention to in the context of electional astrology. And you can find this in some of the Serapio excerpts, for example, in CCAG one, pages 99 through 100. And what’s important about that is Serapio is usually regarded as a very early author, especially because of the exotic nature of some of his techniques that are associated with him, as well as his use of early sometimes poetic language is more representative or reminiscent of the earlier phase of the tradition rather than later. So the first mention of Serapio for sure is by Anonymous of 379, who places him before Ptolemy. And since Ptolemy lived in the second century CE, this would place Serapio either in the first century CE or earlier. And David Pingree, for example, dated Serapio to the first century BCE or the first century CE just based on his early use of terminology and techniques. So that’s a really important element in terms of an early astrologer mentioning this.
And then similarly, like I said, at one point in one of the fragments of Critodemus where there’s a summary that survives in CCAG eight part four, page 201, line 24, there’s a summary of Critodemus’s chapter on indications that a native will have a violent death based on birth chart placements. And at one point, he mentions the planetary ruler of the day, and he uses that specific technical term of the planet going about, and its placement in a chart in order to refer to this. And this is super important, because while the dating of Serapio is a little bit more ambiguous aside from just knowing that he dated before Ptolemy to the first century BCE or CE, the dating of Critodemus is more solidly the first century BCE because he’s already mentioned in Pliny in the first century. So as a result of this usage, we know that some astrologers were using the planetary ruler of the day writing in Greek by the first century BCE. So as a result of that, I think that this makes a compelling case that the planetary days of the week that we still use today at the very least, they derive from this symbolic system of the planetary order of the seven-zoned sphere that was introduced in the second century BCE at least by the time of the texts of Nechepso and Petosiris, and perhaps within those texts themselves if not within that school of texts that included the Hermes text and the Asclepius text and the Petosiris text. And potentially then if Critodemus and Serapio are both already using this system, then somebody basically already had introduced it by the first century BCE, and therefore it’s very possible that the system of planetary days and hours truly does go back to this foundational text by Nechepso and Petosiris or some of the Hermetic authors that are associated with them.
So this is also potentially plausible because we know that the text of Petosiris, one of the texts associated with him, covered the length of life technique. And in that text, it had a tendency to emphasize quadrant houses for the purpose of calculating the length of life technique and some of the planets that were required in that such as the predominator. And this is probably the reason why a lot of the later astrologers like Ptolemy and Valens tend to introduce their different forms of degree-based house division only once they start talking about the length of life technique. That always ends up being the chapter, then, when they introduce that specific technique. And I think that’s because, as I talked about in my book in the chapter on house division, I think that’s because at this point in probably the Petosiris text, it starts using language that the different authors thought was suggestive of some form of degree-based house division, whether that’s quadrant houses, which is the direction that Valens took it, or whether that’s some form of equal house division, which seems to have been the direction that Ptolemy took it. So the only thing – and I mention that just because as I showed earlier with the diagram from Patrick, the planetary hours can be connected with a sort of a form of quadrant house division because it takes into account the degree of the Ascendant and the degree of the Midheaven.
So the only counterargument against this is that we don’t have much evidence of the use of planetary days and hours in other early electional astrologers, especially such as Dorotheus of Sidon or Hephaestio of Thebes as far as I know, or even in the fragments of electional astrology, even though they’re very small, that are associated with Petosiris even though we do know there are some electional rules that Petosiris outlined. So we have this question of, like, we can see this already – the use of planetary days and hours by astrologers around the first century BCE, which is like, Critodemus in a natal context and Serapio in a electional context. But then we don’t really see planetary days and hours show up again as far as I know until like, the time of Valens in the second century CE. But clearly, Valens is drawing on an earlier tradition that preceded him.
So this is the part where, even though I feel more confident about the first half of this argument earlier today, that the planetary order of the seven-zoned sphere was part of a conceptual construct that was introduced at least by the time of the Nechepso and Petosiris texts if not slightly earlier by some of the other Hermetic authors, this issue about the planetary hours and days is a little trickier due to a lack of documentation. But the one piece that is unique that I think I can put forward is saying that it was already in use by astrologers who were writing in Greek in the first century BCE, and therefore I think it goes back a little earlier in the astrological sources than some of the current scholarship is suggesting recently. And therefore, it could actually go back to some of the authors of the second century BCE, such as Nechepso and Petosiris. But hopefully this is something that will be clarified more as scholars become more aware of this issue, and especially as additional texts are discovered, either through archeological or through other means. But we’ll have to see for the future, but I hope this clarifies some things just knowing that it was used a little bit more early than just Valens. Because I think that’s the assumption that’s been made a little bit is that Valens is our first astrological author to mention the planetary hours and days, but in reality, no, he’s not. The first authors are Critodemus and Serapio.
All right, so that was a long sort of section and digression about planetary days and hours, and I contemplated at the last minute cutting that out and just doing a whole separate episode on that. But I thought it was so important and integral because that is the most impressive way in which the order of the seven-zoned sphere is still with us to this very day in the names of the days of the week that I felt like including it here for narrative purposes, as well as because, as I said, it may go back to Nechepso and Petosiris.
But let’s bring it back to the order of the seven-zoned sphere in order to begin to wrap up and round out this episode. All right, to bring things around full circle, in the second century CE, the astrologer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy used the order of the seven-zoned sphere or the planetary order of the seven-zoned sphere as a central feature both in his astrological as well as his astronomical works. His astrological work was the Tetrobiblos, and his astronomical work was especially the text known as the Almagest or Syntaxis. And what’s interesting is that one, because of Ptolemy’s adoption of this planetary model that placed the Sun in the center of the cosmos, Ptolemy’s astronomical synthesis was so effective and so successful as an advancement in terms of the astronomical calculations of its time that it ended up becoming the dominant astronomical model for the next more than thousand years, basically, all the way through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. And as a result of Ptolemy’s adoption of the seven-zoned sphere model, it basically persists all the way through to the Renaissance. And one of the interesting things, though, about Ptolemy is when you read his discussion of this is in the Almagest, Ptolemy actually says that the “more ancient mathematicians” or astronomers placed the Sun in the middle of the cosmos while the more recent ones, he said, placed it after the Moon. And this is a really interesting comment. So let me read the full passage from the Almagest here. He says – because he’s talking about the planetary order and, like, the rationale for putting the Sun in the center. And he says,
“But concerning the spheres of Venus and Mercury, we see them arranged beneath the Sun by the more ancient authorities, but by some of the later authorities even above it, not least because the Sun has never been seen to be darkened by them. To us, however, such a thing seems to be uncertain… Rather, the arrangement of the more ancient authorities would seem to be the more reasonable, because placing the Sun in the middle is much more in accordance with nature, acting as a boundary between those planets that can distance themselves completely from it and those that do not do so completely, but rather move around it.”
So he’s giving his own, like, astronomical rationale of why he thinks that placing the Sun in the center of the cosmos makes more sense astronomically and the division that it creates between like, the outer planets of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn versus the inner planets, which are more obviously, like, tied to or sort of like, chained to the movement of the Sun. But the interesting part is that he says that he thinks that the more ancient authors are the ones that use the order of the seven-zoned sphere with the Sun in the middle, and he thinks it’s only the more recent authorities that are putting the Sun right after the Moon basically. But we realize now after doing the entire historical overview is that it’s actually the opposite, where the older authors like Plato are the ones that are putting the Sun right after the Moon, and then going to, like, you know, Venus and then Mercury and so on and so forth. And it’s the more recent authors starting in the second century BCE with Nechepso and Petosiris who place the Sun in the center of the solar system. So the question is why is Ptolemy saying that the Sun in the center of the solar system is the older model? And the reason for this is because the model was first introduced in the texts of Nechepso and Petosiris and that circle of Hermetic authors in the second century BCE, and because of that and because they were presented as ancient Egyptian wisdom, Ptolemy himself thinks that that’s the older and more ancient system – the system that they’re advocating that puts the Sun in the center of the cosmos. And he assumes that those are actually legitimate, ancient Egyptian texts that predate Plato and Aristotle and Hipparchus, who are the other Greek authors that he’s aware of. So that’s what’s actually really interesting is, again, this is another one of those issues where – and when he says, like, the more ancient authorities, it’s actually really reminiscent of in the Tetrabiblos when he opens up the chapter on the length of life, he makes a sort of obscure reference to Petosiris where he says, he refers to “the ancient one” at the beginning of his treatment. And he says something like just as the ancient one says that you shouldn’t do a bunch of delineations for a birth chart without doing the length of life calculation first, because you don’t know if a person’s gonna live to see those events. And he refers to Petosiris as “the ancient one,” which we know from cross-reference to other texts that he’s talking about Petosiris because Petosiris became one of the primary ancient authorities associated with length of life technique due to some early text ascribed to him on that topic. And I think he’s using similar language here where he refers to the “more ancient authorities” using a related term, basically, that is also that means like, more ancient or older.
So I think this is the same issue we run into with Hipparchus where Hipparchus makes this weird reference saying that the tropical zodiac is the more ancient one, that the more ancient authorities use, but it’s because he’s drawing on this series of texts that presented themselves somehow successfully. Like, somehow they were really successful in presenting themselves as ancient Egyptian doctrines. You know, perhaps because some of the people connected with them were perhaps connected with the Egyptian priesthood in terms of whoever these Hermetic authors were. But that’s sort of an aside that I’ll get into in another episode. But whatever it is, the Nechepso and Petosiris texts presented themselves so successfully as ancient Egyptian texts from an actual, like, pharaoh and an actual priest and even authors potentially that were living only a few decades later like Hipparchus may have actually taken that seriously as, like, ancient texts, and who somebody like Ptolemy, who’s living like, three or four centuries later definitely took to be ancient texts that were older than the philosophers that he had access to, such as Plato and Aristotle and Eudoxus.
So but in reality, what we know now is ultimately what was happening is the older order was the one introduced by Plato, and then sometime in the second century, the Nechepso and Petosiris texts introduces this new planetary order, and it just takes off and everybody adopts it very, very quickly. And then Ptolemy codifies that model and eventually it becomes the model that’s passed off and used for the cosmos through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance all the way to the time of Copernicus.
And the endpoint of this story, to bring it all around many centuries later is that eventually Ptolemy’s adoption of this cosmological model allowed that system to preserve and flourish to some extent, to whatever extent his astronomical calculations were accurate. However, eventually the overthrow of Ptolemy’s astronomical and cosmological system and the planetary order that he integrated into it would be one of the things that would eventually lead to the decline of astrology during the late Renaissance and the Enlightenment, particularly when Copernicus proposed the heliocentric model in 1543 where the earth and the other planets revolve around a stationary Sun. So one of the great ironies then after the Copernican revolution is that ironically the very thing that the astrologer-astronomers surrounding the Nechepso and Petosiris texts sought to establish in the second century BCE was true, in terms of the primacy of the Sun in the cosmos, and that the Sun really is the central heart of our solar system. But ultimately, it was just in a way that was very different than what they had imagined. So and there’s something in a way that’s, like, very poetic about that and very ironic. And one of the great ironies of that is, you know, somebody earlier in the Hellenistic era, Aristarchus, had introduced a heliocentric hypothesis in the third century BCE I think sometime around, like, 270 or something like that BCE. And ironically, one of his only other proponents and followers who adopted and advocated that hypothesis was an astrologer who was living around the middle of the second century BCE named Seleucas of Seleucia who was said to be a philosopher and scientist, but he was also said to be an astrologer. And he was, evidently, like a promoter of the heliocentric hypothesis. But unfortunately, you know, in terms of the long scientific tradition, that hypothesis, he would have been probably a contemporary with these other astrologers that were like, living and working in Egypt who decided to adopt for various reasons this alternative model of putting the Sun in the center of the planets in the order of the seven-zoned sphere, which ultimately was based on a geocentric hypothesis rather than a heliocentric one.
So in this way, though, the history of astronomy and astrology with the origins of the order of the seven-zoned sphere may be even more integrated than we ever even realized if it’s true that this system and this order of the seven-zoned sphere was first popularized – was first introduced, or at the very least, popularized – by this set of astrological texts surrounding Nechepso and Petosiris in the second century BCE.
All right, my friends. Let’s make some concluding remarks. Let me summarize my conclusions and then I’ll wrap this up for today. So I believe that the order of the seven-zoned sphere was introduced in the Nechepso and Petosiris text, and potentially in the circle of Hermetic texts that surrounded them in the second century BCE. I think that this means that they also likely introduced the planetary order that placed the Sun in the middle of the cosmos. So one lingering question is whether it was introduced for the first time in the Nechepso and Petosiris text itself, or if it was already a part of the doctrine of this Hermetic school surrounding them that included what I think are the two texts that preceded them that were attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and to Asclepius, which are the texts that introduced the doctrine of the dodecatropos and then the doctrine of the octotropos. I’ll cover that more in a subsequent episode. If they were not, if the Nechepso and Petosiris texts and the Hermetic texts surrounding them were not the ones that introduced it, then they still would have at least been very early adopters of this approach and their embracing and promotion of it would have been an extremely important factor in terms of its popularization. And it would have been one of the reasons why it took over so quickly and so dramatically in the ancient world, not just as an astronomical or scientific concept, but also as a philosophical and religious and mystical concept in some of the traditions like ancient Hermeticism, middle and neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, and also Jewish mysticism eventually as well, although I don’t know how early it really gets integrated into the Tree of Life because there’s debates about the dating of when that originates.
So additionally, the planetary days and hours are very importantly very clearly derived from the order of the seven-zoned sphere and these also may have originated from the astrological tradition surrounding Nechepso and Petosiris from the second century BCE forward. This point is a little bit more uncertain, though, due to a lack of documentation. But since we have early authors like Critodemus and Serapio who may date to the first century BCE using it already as part of their astrological texts and doctrines, it must have originated relatively early in the Hellenistic astrological tradition, the planetary hours and days, in the same way that the decan assignments also seemed to originate at least by around the first century BCE if the text of Teucer of Babylon can indeed be dated to that timeframe, as it typically is.
So ultimately, though, you know, these are just the best conclusions that can be made based on the current historical evidence, I feel. And we have to be open to the potential for other archeological or other evidence changing our views in the future, but at the present time, I feel like this argument can be pretty confidently made that the texts surrounding Nechepso and Petosiris likely introduced the order of the seven-zoned sphere. So you know, as I said, just to reiterate, even if they didn’t introduce it, which I think they did, their adoption of that helped to lend credence to it and to popularize it extremely far and wide. And the remnants of that system are still being used all over the world today by embedding what was fundamentally an astrological construct into the names for the seven days of the week. And in that way, that became one of the most enduring legacies of this concept that was probably introduced or at least popularized starting in the second century BCE.
All right, I think that’s it. So I wanted to give a special shoutout, special thanks to Paige Allison, as I said, for all of the diagrams that she made for this episode. I’ve just been, like, throwing diagrams at her for, like, a few weeks now in terms of ones that I needed, and she’s been extremely awesome in terms of making all of those in order to help me to convey some of these visual concepts during the course of this talk today. I also wanna give a special shoutout and thanks to all the patrons who support this research through my page on Patreon.com, because I spent, like, the past month or two working on this, and it was partially based on earlier research because I had worked out most of the planetary order stuff a couple of years ago. But the ability to, like, drop everything and focus on doing this research so I could pull this all together and then record this talk was literally made possible by the patrons that support me through my page on Patreon.com for The Astrology Podcast. So thanks to all of you for doing that and for supporting this work and research. It feels really important to me, and I feel a lot of gratitude that I am in the unique position that I can focus on this type of historical research at this time.
Patrons who signed up through my page on Patreon got early access to this episode, because I’m gonna release it, I think, within a day or two of making this recording, and I think it’s gonna be out for several weeks – for two or three weeks at least – before I release it to the public, because I’ve got, like, a couple of episodes at least – two or three episodes – that come before this. And I also have to spend a while editing this episode to put it together and get it ready. So patrons get early access to episodes like this, which is an important and great benefit of becoming a patron through my page on Patreon.com.
I may also release my episode outline for this episode to patrons. I’m trying to decide about that, because I would like to write a paper in order to present this argument and this discovery more formally. But it’s kind of tricky, because I also want to keep moving – on the one hand, there’s the issue with the interactions between the different foundational diagrams, like the Thema mundi and the joys and the seven-zoned sphere and needing to present that visually that might be kind of hard in a paper. And I also wanna keep moving, because there’s still more work to be done, and more things to be found, I feel like, in terms of seeing the different ways that these different conceptual constructs not just interact, but are integrated in really crucial ways. That there’s still more stuff that can be teased out in terms of some of those connections, and I’d like to keep moving forward with that rather than spending too much time on any one thing. Although it would be nice to publish a paper on this for citation purposes and also eventually one of the goals is to write a follow-up to my book on Hellenistic astrology where I go more into this as well as some of the philosophy surrounding Hellenistic astrology and how it interacted with some of the different philosophical and scientific schools of its age during the Hellenistic and Roman eras, basically. Because I think astrology and the role it plays in ancient philosophy has never been adequately realized in contemporary historical treatments of, like, the history of philosophy, the history of astronomy to some extent, and different things like that. And work like this, I hope in the long term, can help to make that role a little bit more well-known and well-recognized. So that’s something I’m working on.
And ironically, I realized just as I was putting this together and finalizing it last night that I’m probably gonna end up releasing this episode sometime around the Leo eclipse next month that’s gonna occur in the sign of Leo with Jupiter and I think that’s kind of interesting and ironic, given that part of my focus was identifying the original system where they changed the planetary order to put the Sun in the center of the cosmos, and where the Sun as the center was really like, the organizing principle and the motivating principle for the system in many ways. So there’s something kind of, like, fitting about that astrologically and electionally next month that wasn’t really originally my intention, but it’s just sort of the way that things will work out, and I find that really fascinating. So we’ll see what electional chart I end up using to actually release this next month, hopefully in August.
Let’s see. So I hope to write a paper. I hope to write a book about this. The podcast and its transcripts have kind of become my body of work at this point, and that has its pros and cons in terms of the citations and engaging with other sort of like academic literature on this topic, but it kind of is what it is because it’s also how I’m able to fund this work through doing video and audio podcasts which people are patrons of and that’s what allows me to do this research. So in some ways, I have to focus on the formats that make the most sense in that context, especially so I can keep producing additional research and making additional discoveries.
Like I said, originally, this was gonna be just, like, a piece in a larger Thema mundi episode. But then I realized that I couldn’t just introduce this and yada-yada-yada over the order of the seven-zoned sphere being an independent conceptual construct on its own, that I really needed to present this as its own thing, especially because it was somewhat unique and important to propose the idea that the astrologers were the ones that created or at least promoted this cosmological model starting in the second century BCE. But eventually, as I gave sort of a preview of earlier when I started, like, throwing out all the different diagrams, I would like to do an episode soon showing how the different conceptual constructs are integrated together, and also presenting – I’ve started to come to an understanding of how you can infer and figure out some of the philosophy that they were taking for granted through the way that they were integrating some of these conceptual constructs. And that’s something I’m extremely excited about and extremely excited to present hopefully very soon. So I’ll go into that in more detail then.
All right. I think that’s it, everybody. So thanks, everyone, for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. If you’ve listened all the way through, thanks for taking the time to hear me out and listen to my full treatment of this subject. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. If you’d like to see that follow-up episode on the planetary hours and days, let me know in the YouTube comments. If you’d like to see the episode on the other hand connecting the Thema mundi with other conceptual constructs and teasing out some of the additional things, also let me know in the YouTube comments. But otherwise, I think that’s it for this recording. So thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and I’ll see you again next time.
[END CREDITS]
If you’re a fan of the podcast and you wanna get access to bonus content, then become a patron through my page on Patreon where you can get early access to new episodes, attend live recordings and webinars, access the monthly electional astrology podcast, The Secret Astrology Podcast that’s only available to patrons, or you can even get your name listed in the credits. Find out more at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
Special thanks to the patrons on our Producers tier, including patrons Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, Sonny Bazbaz, Kwatsi Alibaruho, Annie Newman, Ginger Sadlier, Berlynn West, and Nicki Crawford.
If you’re really looking to take your studies of astrology to the next level, then consider signing up for my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology where I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, plus live webinars and Q&A sessions each month. And at the end of the course, you get a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me. Find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.
If you’re looking to get an astrological consultation, then check out the new consultations page on the podcast website where I have a list of astrologers I recommend for birth chart readings and other types of consultations. You can find that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.
The astrology software we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, and you can get a 15% discount on it by using the promo code ‘AP15’ at the website Alabe.com.
For Mac users, we recommend the program called Astro Gold for Mac OS, and you can use the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ to get a 15% discount at their website, which is AstroGold.io.