Astro School: Lesson 2. Planets in Astrology
- The Role of Planets in Astrological Interpretations
- Brief Interpretations of the Personal Planets
- Brief Interpretations of the Social and Higher Planets
- Studying the Planets
The Role of Planets in Astrological Interpretations
Looking at the starry sky, our ancestors had noticed that although the majority of stars retain the same configurations year after year, some celestial bodies manage to move against the backdrop of the stars, changing their speed and sometimes even the direction of their movement, as if they had a will of their own. They called those self-willed celestial bodies planets (from a Greek word meaning "wanderer").
And who in the sky can have a will of their own? Of course the gods. So the planets received the names of the gods: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. As humanity matured and its knowledge of the world expanded, three more planets were added: Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
Two other celestial bodies are very prominent in the sky - the luminaries, the Sun and the Moon. If we follow the principle "as above so below", the prominent bodies like these should correspond to something really important in the terrestrial life - and the Sun and the Moon do play a special role in astrology. However, in astrological interpretations they are very often interpreted as planets.
All in all, we have ten planets. They play the main role in any astrological interpretation. When teaching astrology, they often say that if life is a play then planets are the actors in that play. Planets show where the action is, they are the energetic centres of the world. When looking at a horoscope, we shall pay a lot of attention to where the planets are.
However, we should not be too mechanistic in our understanding of astrology. We should not think that the planets of the Solar System are sending to us some rays, and this is how astrology works. Don't forget that astrology is actually an applied philosophy. There are some higher ideas or principles of the whole Being, or the Macrocosm, that are as if projected into the lower levels of the World, the microcosms of different scales. Solar System is actually one of the microcosms, and the physical Sun is only one manifestation of the higher principle of the Sun. Its other manifestations are the metal gold, the king as the head of the country, the consciousness in the human being, the father in the family and so on.
This idea might be difficult to grasp in the beginning, but with time, as you will learn more of astrology and will begin to gradually see the world from the astrological viewpoint, it might become your second nature.
When studying planets, we'll need to create in our mind a multi-dimensional portrait of some entity that can be represented in real life by people, events, moods, kinds of weather, attitudes, emotions and so on. To have a good knowledge of the planets, you will need to spend with them some time, and not only reading about them but also thinking what else they could be and how could they manifest themselves in this or that situation. In the end of this lesson, I am going to give you a kind of homework - a few mental exercises that will help you in developing your understanding of the planets.
In this lesson, I will give you only brief interpretations of all the planets, in order not to overwhelm you. But later we shall devote at least one full lesson to every planet.