Hatching From the Cocoon

This is the twenty-first part of my essay series “Inner Work with the Planets”. If you haven’t read the earlier parts yet, I suggest you start with part 1 to get the most out of this essay.

Last time, we wrapped up our practical work on the planetary ladder.

(Yes, you can pack away your toolbox now as we won’t need it anymore – unless you want to get creative with the planets on your own, that is.. 😉)

We also discussed a very useful technique for getting the most out of the Hermetic planets in your inner work, namely discursive meditation. If you have tried it yet (which I hope you have!), you will have noticed that discursive meditation isn’t a get-enlightened-quick scheme. Quite the contrary – it requires work.

But it’s very much worth this work, as you will note when you meditate on the planets, the relationships among them, on Hermeticism, and most importantly on what all this stuff can teach you about your life!

I’m mentioning this just in case – you know, for those of you who have pushed the meditation off for now, but will for sure give it a try. Definitely soon. Maybe tomorrow. 😉

Anyway. While the last essay has been rather practical, today we’re going to go all the way out to the other side – into the spiritual and non-material. First, though, I have to confess that I’ve written myself into a bit of a pickle.

You see, when I started out with this essay series, I didn’t want to scare you off right away by defining all the most relevant terms.

(That would have been rather boring, wouldn’t it?)

But now this comes back to bite me, and I’m afraid we will have to talk about a term or two before we proceed…

As you might remember, at some point well into the series I finally took mercy on you and explained what I mean when I talk about “you” (i.e. “you” for the purpose of this essay series. If I say “you” in an email to you, we both know whom I mean!).

Most importantly, I also distinguished between the parts of you which belong to your current incarnation, like your body, your habits and your personality, and the parts of you which are a bit longer-lived and will not die when you leave this life.

Back then, I took the easy way out and more or less left it at that – but not without hinting at the problem that some of the related terms can be used in different ways.

For example, is your “soul” an inherent part of this particular incarnation of yours, or is it (part or all) of your divine being? Is the spirit the same as the soul – and if not, what exactly do each of these terms mean? And so on.

The trouble is that people use these terms in different ways, and have always done so.

Generally, in any discussions, a significant amount of people simply assumes that others use any term just like they themselves do (a surefire way to get into heated arguments and inextricable misunderstandings).

And even if somebody is aware that others attach a different meaning to certain terms, they usually insist there is only one right and correct meaning – theirs of course, and thus everybody should adhere to their definition (another surefire way to get into heated arguments and inextricable misunderstandings).

So back then, I simply avoided the issue (and any potential arguments and misunderstandings) altogether by not defining exactly what I mean by “soul” or by “personality”… 😉

(Or by defining “vice” or “virtue”, for that matter – but the vices and virtues are something we’ll get back to next time, so let’s put them aside for now.)

But then another challenge with all these definitions is that no matter how many words one makes around it, people will inevitably understand words individually. This issue is a bit harder to overcome, too:

Your concept of “soul”, for example, won’t be the same as mine, even if we throw definitions and explanations at each other until we’re both blue in the face.

So overall, this semantics thingy is quite dicey, especially if you and me want to stay on good terms! 😀

Thus I’ve had the good sense to avoid this pitfall altogether by not defining certain terms at all. Instead, so far I’ve mostly generally described the concepts behind how I use them – and I think that so far, we’ve gotten through quite fine, haven’t we?

There is another issue with the terminology, though, and it is directly tied to the Hermetica and their very colourful history…

To illustrate the problem, let’s take one of the treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum as practical example. Say, CH X, also called “The Key”.

The Key covers some ground which is of great interest to us. Among other things, it answers some of the great questions of humanity from a Hermetic perspective:

Where do we come from?

Where do we go to?

And how can we get from here to there?

The Key’s answer to these questions is as simple as it is beautiful:

Above and outside of everything is The One – the Creator of everything that is. HE simply is, always and timeless. And as such, he is The Good, The True and The Beautiful.

(I’m using “he” here for simplicity’s sake, bth. It should be obvious that this Creator is beyond any gender, any pronouns, and beyond anything language or our puny human minds can capture!)

Everything originates from this Divine being. HE imagines everything into being, and the first of HIS creations is the world of matter.

This world, i.e. the one we inhabit, is subject to change and transformation. Thus it is still Beautiful (as the image of the Creator), but it’s not Good anymore.

The world, in turn, creates humans – or rather, it’s creates the physical and energetic vessels which we call “human”, and which our divine souls inhabit.

These souls (or divine sparks) are part of the Divine. As such, they cannot directly inhabit a physical body – their divine “fire” would burn this body of matter.

For this reason, our divine souls have to wrap themselves into our “personalities” when they incarnate as human beings.

Or, in other terms which should be familiar to you by now: During their descent through the planetary spheres, down into incarnation, the souls stuff their pockets with the planetary coins which will determine their personalities during their human lives.

As humans, we are thus third in row: First and topmost is the divine Creator, the Source of everything. Second is Creation, the world of matter. And third are us humans – mirror images of the Creator in some important ways, and down here on earth to create ourselves in the material realm. And the further things are away from the Divine, the more polluted they are.

Creation is subject to change (and thus not Good anymore), but it is still immortal (not timeless!) and thus Beautiful. By contrast, humans are both mortal and subject to change. As such, we are neither Beautiful nor Good, at least not in the sense of absolute, divine Beauty and absolute, divine Goodness.

So what can our divine souls do in order to get back to the Creator, the Source of all that is?

Well, according to The Key (and to Hermeticism in general), we can work our way back up, of course. First out of material incarnation, then through the realm of the planets, then the fixed stars… and then beyond.

While this sounds easy in theory, it can be a veritable challenge. Down here on earth, our souls are not just stuck inside a personality inside a material body and have to adhere to the rules of the physical world, we’re also challenged by the fact that we’re not longer purely good.

Thus, in order to work our way back up, we need to become “good” again – as close to the Divine as we can.

Luckily for us, we all have a lot of chances to achieve this.

These chances come in the form of loads of lifetimes to be lived. Depending on how we conduct ourselves during such a lifetime, we’ll either raise ourselves up a wee bit more towards Goodness and Truth, or we’ll sink down a bit towards the opposite.

(There is some more info about reincarnation in CH X, but more about this in a second.)

Thus while The Key explains all this background in order to answer the three essential questions listed above, its main concern is on the third question: How can we get back to the Divine?

Now, all of this sounds rather reasonable, plausible, and fits what we have learned about Hermeticism so far. But where, then, is the issue with treatise CH X and its history?

Well, that’s quite simple. You see, The Key contains two short but striking passages:

In the first passage (CH X, 8), Hermes Trismegistus explains to his pupil Tat that souls who continue to stay in Evil are being pulled back into incarnation as an animal (from which, presumably, they have to work their way back up again into human incarnation and from there further towards Goodness and the Divine).

In the seocnd passage (CH X, 19), Hermes Trismegistus explains to his pupil Tat that souls that souls who continue to stay in Evil are not being pulled back into incarnation as an animal, and instead stay in human incarnations (since the Divine doesn’t want our souls to suffer the embarassment of being born as a skunk, for example).

Now, mind you, these are both passages within one and the same treatise, and the whole text is only a few pages long to begin with (in modern print). The chances that these two very contradictory passages where deliberately put in their by one original author are slim to nonexistent.

(Unless said author intended to twist their readers’ mind into a brezel. You never know!)

Thus CH X is a prime showcase of the convoluted history of the Hermetica: Over the centuries and milennia, these texts were copied, adapted, added to, rewritten, transmitted, translated, and copied yet again – over and over. Sometimes more accurately, and sometimes with more liberties being taken. 😉

After all this fiddling and changing, the best we can do is make some educated guesses about how the original texts might have looked like – and even those guesses are on shaky ground. We simply can’t be sure what the original texts contained (and by whom they were written).

And the real sources, i.e. the sources of these ideas, might be even older than the first versions of the written texts transmitted to us, shrouded in the clouds of history.

As for The Key, I find it highly likely that these two passages originally stemmed from two different texts, and at some point, for whatever reason, somebody combined these two different texts into the one treatise which we now know as CH X “The Key” (but didn’t adapt the passages on reincarnation to match – again for reasons we don’t know).

On the other hand, it could just as well have been the case that the original document used to be congruent in itself, and one of these short passages about reincarnation was distorted into its opposite during one of the many transfers or translations.

We simply don’t know for sure – and thus have to make the best we can with what we have.

So does this mean Hermeticism promoted reincarnation into the animal kingdom if people failed at the human state? Maybe, and maybe not.

It might also mean Hermeticism consisted of different currents or schools, or that the old Hermeticists each had their own opinions and theories, and were never an organized bunch with one well defined common doctrine to begin with…

But why am I telling you all this? Well, as I said, I wrote myself into a pickle of sorts with my terminology.

Just as the history of the Hermetica is a veritable challenge to sort out, and just as their content is sometimes contradictory or inconsistent, so is their terminology.

Some of this is simply a matter of translation. Words can be translated in different ways, and thus each translation will use slightly different terms for certain things.

Some of it is a matter of fashions and current trends. Just like other areas of life, scholars and researchers have their own current beliefs, and these beliefs change over time. Any translation is also an interpretation of sorts, and will thus reflect the beliefs and assumptions of the translator.

And underlying these common issues, of course, is the fact that the Hermetica have constantly been fiddled with over centuries, and that not all of the texts have been transferred to us by the same means, with the (presumably) same kinds of changes and adaptations (thankfully, as this variety of changes makes it at least a bit easier to guess about the original content and terminology!).

Since I can’t read ancient Greek nor Copitc nor whatnot else, I’m stuck working with the translations of the Hermetica, just like most other people are – with the obvious issue that terminology is being used somewhat flexibly, both between translators, and between different Hermetic texts.

For exmaple, the translation I most love to work with is a German one, done by the late Maria Magdalena Miller. In her translation of CH X (The Key), she uses the term “spirit” for what I have called our “soul” in this essay series – and the term “soul” for what I have called “personality”.

None of this is a biggie, at least to me. It’s just terms, and as long as we’re clear on how they are used, I don’t mind if different people use different terms for the same things.

But of course, it can make reading and understanding these texts a challenge – and if you should decide to go straight to the source yourself and read the Hermetica, you should be aware of this pitfall.

On the other hand, I firmly belief that if Hermeticism is worth preserving, than it’s worth preserving as a living tradition. And “living” doesn’t imply unchanged, or unchangeably – quite the contrary, as CH X itself tells us: According to The Key, the particular characteristic of the living world of matter is its changeability…

And since (at least in my view) Hermeticism is very much worth preserving, then let’s preserve it as a living tradition, shall we? 🙂

It’s in this spirit that I have taken to liberty to use terms like “personality” which might ring with most modern readers, even though they would have been completely alien and nondescript to the old Hermeticists…

In the remainder of this essay, I will lay out some more ways to work with the planets. In particular, these are techniques specifically aimed at working with the planets in their capacity as actual beings in a Hermetic tradition.

(Heads up: The remainder of this essay is for those of my readers who don’t shy away from spiritual stuff, and especially from spiritual stuff which touches on polytheism. If you’re not comfortable going there, no worries – you can simply skip the second half of this essay, come back again in two weeks, and join us for a fun exploration which connects the Hermetic ideas of the planets with… but we’ll talk about this next time. 😉 )

Still with me? Awesome!

So, about preserving these Hermetic ideas as a living system… There are several practical things you could do in order to establish a connection to the planetary beings, and to make use of their influences in your life.

Note that the following practical techniques are leading away from purely “inner work”. While inner work focuses on the inside (duh!), i.e. on yourself and your own issues, now we’re turning outwards – towards the planetary entities.

You might remember from earlier essays that for the old Hermeticists (or really for people back then in general), the planetary spirits where real, living beings – deities in their own right.

And while in some ways, they rule over us in our current incarnations, in other ways us humans (or rather, our divine sparks) are their equals. In a certain way, we’re even superior to the planetary deities, as we can incorporate both the material and the Divine at the same time, and can thus be creators just like the Divine Creator is.

(And then there is also the fact CH X stresses, namely that our souls are part of the Divine soul!)

The planetary deities being for real means we can also get in touch with them. Granted, inviting Venus over for tea would be a bit cumbersome, and I doubt you could convince Saturn to join you for a fun day out (although Mercury might be up for a rollercoaster ride if you ask nicely! 😉 ).

But just as we can talk to other deities e.g. through prayer, we can also get in touch and communicate with the planetary deities.

One way to do so is through what is commonly called planetary worship. In simple terms, you’d spend a few minutes each day sitting down with the planet which rules each day, and talk to them.

(This would be Monday – the Moon; Tuesday- Mars; Wednesday – Mercury; Thursday – Jupiter; Friday – Venus; Saturday – Saturn; Sunday – the Sun.)

So each day, at a time convenient to you, you sit down, and light a candle and some incense.

If you want to be picture-perfect, you can use a candle in a colour which matches the respective planet, and some incense which is particularly pleasing to him or her – just like you’d serve their favourite sort of tea and cookies to a dear friend.

(But just like a dear friend, the planets will happily sit down with you to chat if you don’t have their favourite tea and cookies, i.e. coloured candle and incense! Here, as so often, the perfect is the enemy of the good enough – and just sitting down and talking to them even without a candle or incense, just doing it at all, is a lot better than not doing it because you can’t do it perfectly.

If you want to go there and choose fitting incense and candle colours, though, there are different systems of correspondences for each planet. Christopher Warnock has helpfully published lists by several old astrologers, e.g. William Lilly – pick the planet you’re interested in from the sidebar.)

So you light your candle and incense, sit down and focus on the respective planet, and then recite this planet’s Orphic Hymn.

(The Taylor translation is quite nice: Moon; Mercury; Venus; Sun; Mars; Jupiter; Saturn.)

The Orphic Hymns, as the name suggests, are hymns to various Greek deities, supposedly written by Orpheus. And the hymns to the planetary deities work exceedingly well for establishing contact with them.

After reciting the hymn to the planet, take a few minutes for a conversation. Yes, I know – it’s highly unlikely that you’ll hear the actual voice of the planet. This doesn’t matter, though. Just talk to them a bit, and also make it a point to listen.

You might get no answer at all (or none you can discern). You might feel something, bodily or emotionally. You might have an idea popping into your head, during this session or later. You might see an image. Or have a dream later, or notice some weird coincidences.

Even if seemingly nothing happens, you have established a relationship to the planet.

Do this each day, for one planet per day. Over time, you will notice how your connection to the planets grows, and how they become more accessible to you in various ways. You might also notice that some of them are willing to work with you – either in your inner work, or in practical issues, e.g. by giving you a helping hand here or there.

The second thing you could do, if you are so inclined, is planetary charity.

In practical terms, it works almost the same as planetary worship: Sit down, light a candle and some incsense if possible, recite the Orphic hymn to the respective planet, and then talk to them (and don’t forget to listen either!). For planetary charity, it’s also good to not just do it on the day of the planet, but if at all possible also in their respective planetary hour.

(You can find the planetary hours for your own location here.)

But the point of planetary charity is also to give something to the planet in question – specifically, to a charitable cause which is of importance to the respective planet.

For example, a women’s shelter for Venus. A military veteran’s charity for Mars. A charity which supports reading abilites for Mercury, and one supporting the elderly for Saturn. And so on.

Ideally, you’ll donate an amount which is a multiple of the respective planet’s number. And you’ll do this on X consecutive weeks – with X again being the respective number of the planet.

The numbers themselves are easy enough to remember, as they increase in top down order: Saturn: 3; Jupiter: 4; Mars: 5; Sun: 6; Venus: 7; Mercury: 8; Moon: 9.

So, for example, for the Sun, you could donate a multiple of 6, on 6 consecutive Sundays, to a charity which takes care of horses (as horses are an animal associated with the Sun).

(More information on planetary charity can again be found on Christopher Warnock’s site.)

As for when to use planetary charity, you could do it if you have a specific concern and would like to request the assistance of the planet which rules over these kinds of things. You could also do it to remedy certain issues you might have with a specific planet in your life. Or, generally, to improve your relationship to any of the planets.

Planetary charity is best done for one planet at a time – don’t overdo it! Some of the effects take time to manifest.

And you might also want to use some form of divination to determine if planetary charity to a specific planet is a good idea for you at a certain time.

These two options, regular planetary worship and occasional specific planetary charity, can be very well combined, too.

They are also very accessible: If you can pray and donate, you can do planetary worship and charity.

The next two options for working more closely with the planets are somewhat more advanced. For this reason, and because I’ve already blown up my word limit for this essay, I will only touch on them very briefly today. 😉

The first of these more advanced options of Hermetic inner work is a spritual ascent through the planetary spheres.

Unfortunately, as I laid out earlier, how the old Hermeticists might have done this hasn’t been transmitted to us. But even though their knowledge and techniques have been lost, this option is still available to us. After all, rituals and techniques can be (re-)discovered – or newly invented, can’t they?

Some mystery schools and spiritual teachers have done just that. I.e. if this is something which is of interest to you, you might want to browse the available options.

(Since I can’t vouch for any of them in particular, I’m not putting any links here.)

Alternatively, you could wait for a little while longer until I publish my own version of such a ritual series. 😉 As of now, they are in the testing stage, but I plan to get them published within the next few months.

If you might be interested, I will most definitely announce their publication here on the site, and also via my email list – sign up for “Essays and other stuff” if you want to be informed when they will be available.

The second more advanced option of Hermetic spirituality isn’t directly concerned with the planets, but rather with your own guardian genius or guardian angel.

According to Hermetic tradition, your guardian genius is a spirit (or “daemon” – not to be confused with the Christian notion of “demon”!) who has been assigned to you upon your birth.

Incidentally, it’s not just your personal planetary coins which are being determined by your astrological birth chart. Your birth chart, i.e. the placements and relations of the planets at the time and place of your birth, and the planet ruling your birth chart, also determine which daemon is assigned to you as your guardian genius in any incarnation.

Also incidentally, CH X “The Key” explains that there is a “community of souls” in the universe, in that the souls of higher beings take care of the souls of “lesser” beings, i.e. of those further away from the Creator. And it also happens to mention that the souls of those humans who have reached “the beginning of immortality”, i.e. who have left human incarnations behind, first become spirits or daemons.

So who knows, if you keep at this Hermetic planetary work, you might one day become somebody else’s guardian genius… 😉

But for now, we’re still here, and according to Hermetic thinking, there is a guardian genius assigned to us – and he or she is happy to support us, provided we want their help in the first place. So the first logical step is to establish contact with your own guardian genius.

There are various ways to achieve this connecttion, some of them in ritual form, some of them not. If this is of interest to you, a good starting point would be the Orphic Hymn to the Daemon, which can be recited to help establish some contact with your guardian genius. Just like planetary worship, this is something which can be done daily, if you feel so inclined.

(Of course, it would also work to simply sit down regularly to talk to them and listen for what they have to tell you. But that would be way less mysterious and fascinating! 😉 )

So. (Massages hands and stretches shoulders.) We’ve covered a lot of ground today, and I hope some of this has been useful or inspirational to you (or even better: both!)

Next time, we’ll do something fun and connect the Hermetic idea of the planets with something else – something you’ve most definitely heard of before.

And the essay after the next is (already – how time flies! 🙂 ) going to be last one in this series about “Inner Work with the Hermetic Planets”…

I’ll see you again in two weeks, on Sunday November 16h. And until then, I’m looking forward to your comments, questions and thoughts below! 🙂

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Image: Håkon Grimstad on Unsplash