What Goes Up Must Come Down

This is the twelfth 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.

In the last essay, we (finally!) reached the level of the fixed stars. After all a long and arduous climb with lots of contemplating and thinking thrown in, we simply got to sit all the way up there for a while, and to enjoy the splendid view (unfortunately, nobody was around to serve drinks, but I think we had a reasonably good time anyway… 😉 ).

Today, we’re going to do the obvious thing: We’ll climb down again.

So let’s take one last look around and then turn our backs to all the shining stars and marvelous constellations, and enter the sphere of Saturn again. And while we shuffle back down through the outermost planet’s sphere, slowly and steadily, one well-measured step after the other, we have some time to talk – and to ask questions.

For example, you might be wondering why we should climb down again at all.

After all, if the goal of Hermeticism is to free ourselves eventually from the restraints of being human in this material world and of those of our current dual nature, and to become fully divine again… then why not just stay up there right away?

While this sounds tempting in theory, there is one small issue with it – namely the fact that right now, you’re very much alive in this material world, with your body sitting in an armchair, or in public transport, or wherever else you happen to read this essay.

Going all the way up beyond the planetary spheres in full would require you to let go of all attachments to this material world. Yep, this very much includes your body, your current life, and life on earth in general.

(I assume that for most of you, this isn’t exactly what you had planned for today. If this should sound appealing to you, though, I very strongly encourage you to reconsider and to get any help you might need in order to deal with this – and contrary to some of my other parentheses, I’m not kidding, but mean this very seriously.)

According to Hermetic thought, or at least to the way I understand the Hermetica, our life in dual nature has a purpose, and it’s very much worth living and enjoying in its own right. You’ll have all of eternity to get back up to the Divine again – but you’re here now, and there is a reason for this, and stuff for you to do.

One of the amazing things we as humans get to do down here on earth is to create – just as The Source creates everything that is, only on a smaller scale. This is a great, great gift, even though it can be easy to lose sight of it while we’re enmeshed in the challenges of everyday life.

But in order to create in the material world, and to exist here in a healthy way at all, we need to be well rooted down here.

You might have encountered a certain kind of “enlightened” people before: The type with their heads all up in the clouds, but who are lacking any road grip. They have oriented themselves so much towards the Divine that they forget to establish a solid base here in the material – and it’s not called “dual nature” for nothing!

Thus it’s one of our divine duties to be well-established here in the material world, and well-connected to it, in order to be able to create here as we are supposed to create, as a mirror image of the Divine, and in love with nature.

While considering all this, we have slowly and diligently made our way through the sphere of Saturn, and are now approaching Jupiter: bright, shining, jovial Jupiter, who greets us with open arms, and generously dowses us with an abundance of all we need on our climb down (including the drinks we missed so sorely further up… 😉 ).

The thoughts about anything related to the end our lives stay firmly behind in Saturn’s sphere of influence, and we enjoy the refreshments and then turn downwards instead, looking at earth from above and relishing the view of the clouds and thunderstorms. From here on, the walk downwards will be more enjoyable, and also much faster.

So there are two good reasons for us to deliberately make this descent again: First, being of dual nature, we need solid roots not just in the Divine, but also in the material in order to stay sane. And secondly, how are we supposed to apply our divine talent and duty to create if we don’t have a connection to the material world we are supposed to create in?

Hm. So there seems to be a close connection between the Divine and the material, i.e. between that which is above the eighth sphere and that which is below the lowest planetary sphere, the sphere of the Moon. But what about the in-between, the planets and the fixed stars?

How do they connect to everything else?

An interesting question – and we’ll get to it a bit further down, in one of the lower spheres. But first, let’s mentally arm ourselves for our entry into the next sphere, that of driven, action-focused, no-nonsense Mars.

Looking around once more, we certainly remember his sphere from our ascent, with the sounds of swords clashing in the distance, and the very distinct and sharp feeling of being ready to take on the world. But do we really only remember it from the earlier ascent? Or have we been here before?

Marching on downwards, we consider what the old Hermeticists had to say about this.

According to their thought, we must certainly have been here at least once before: on our initial descent down from our divine nature into dual nature, from the highest spheres down into material incarnation.

Represented in the Hermetica through the story of the first human who wanted to create just like his Creator creates, and who (with the permission and blessing of the Creator) descended to earth, promptly fell in love with nature (and with his own reflection in nature), and united with her.

Just like this prototypical first human, each of us descended through the spheres and chose to came down here to earth, in order to create just like the divine Creator does, and to spend some of our time in dual nature.

Thus we must have taken at least one descent before, before our first life in this physical realm.

This would, of course, explain why the spheres of the planets feel so familiar to us, and why we feel such a close connection to the planets themselves, and to their traits and expressions. After all, according to the Hermetica, they have once been our brothers and sisters.

(In some Hermetic passages, we as humans are even considered to have been “above” the planets in the divine hierarchy – but only when we are in our divine nature, of course.)

Either way, we’ve once been close to the planets – and will be again eventually, after having made our ascent back to the Divine.

For now, though, we’re still descending, and our forceful march has brought us to the edge of Mars’ sphere and straight into the next, the warm and bright sphere of the Sun.

We have seen his rays from afar, but now that we are well and truly within his sphere, the heat and radiation are impossible to ignore. Wiping our brows, and trying to collect our thoughts in this almost unbearable heat, we continue on our path while we connect some more dots…

So there has been the descent of the first human, and consequently our own “first” descent into material incarnation and life on earth. But what about the times between lives – what about reincarnation?

As you remember (well, I hope you do – if not, you probably should re-read the earlier essays… 😉 ), I’ve talked a lot about the “coins” of the planets which you picked up in each planet’s sphere on your way down. And not on your first way down into all incarnations, but on your most recent way down into this specific incarnation.

This would necessarily imply that each time between incarnations, you went up all the way at least to the sphere of Saturn, maybe even to the fixed stars, right?

Well, this is where things become a bit murky – and where I might have a confession to make. (cough, cough) Before I go eat some humble pie, though, let’s first check what the Hermetica have to say about this part of our existence, shall we? 🙂

At this point, it’s important to remember the history of the Hermetica, i.e. of the actual texts: Written by various different authors, in different places, and probably over the timespan of a few centuries.

Potentially based on earlier sources, and maybe on a variety of these – but nobody knows for sure what these earlier sources were, what they contained, and which of the Hermetic authors was influenced by what (let alone how old the earliest sources are, and what their origin was!).

Then after their formation, the Hermetica were transcribed, translated, compiled, re-transcribed, re-translated and re-compiled, again and again, over the course of centuries – and mostly by people who saw the world through a very different lense than their original authors did.

Or, in other words: What we know as “Hermetica” today are the two millenia old, heavily redacted and adapted umpteen-hand Chinese whispers copies of just a few texts, randomly preserved out of a probably much vaster pile of diverse material – and in all likelihood, even these texts only very dimly reflect their original sources and tradition(s), which might have been much older, and very different.

Given all this, it’s not a big surprise that the Hermetica don’t purport one consistent, dogmatic worldview. 😉

(On the other hand, and this comes as a bit of a surprise after all they’ve gone through, the Hermetica do still feel like a consistent whole in some ways, even if some of them seem to be more central to the Hermetic core ideas than others.)

By now, you can probably guess where I’m going to end with all this with regards to our topic at hand, can’t you? 😉

And you’d be right, of course: There isn’t one consistent theory of “life between human incarnations” in the Hermetica. Rather, it’s a bit of an inconsistent mess.

I’ll spare you the details. Let me just say that among other things, the various theories and ideas also cover a wide range of very human issues:

The very human urge to put things into neat boxes which can be labelled and counted, for example. Of rating other people as good, bad or worse. Of us versus them, and of course we are better than them! There are also societal factors to consider, for the old Hermeticists were as much a product of their environment as we are of ours (thus the pharao and similar kings will rank higher in level in the time between incarnations, of course! 😉 )

But to me, these are all side issues in specific texts. Interesting from a scholarly point of view, no doubt – but not central to the Hermetic understanding of our world and everything beyond.

(There is a more general issue, too, although I’m not touching much on it in this essay series: Our worldview is very different from the worldview of a Hermeticist in ancient Greek or Egypt two thousand years ago. No matter how much we try, we simply won’t be able to see the world through their glasses – and to understand the Hermetic texts and concepts in the same way they did. Not much to be done about this, though, hence we’ll mostly ignore it and play pretend. 😉 )

There are three core ideas in the Hermetica which directly relate to the idea of inner work with the planets:

First, of us humans coming down into incarnation from the Divine, with the full agreement of the Divine. Secondly, our dual nature while we are “down here” and keep on reincarnating. And thirdly, us longing to get back up again – and how the old Hermeticists attempted to achieve this.

Now, in all honesty, I need to stress that this isn’t the only possible interpretation of the Hermetica. (As evidenced by the fact that people have understood them in very different ways over time!)

In fact, there are certain texts which directly contradict my understanding of some Hermetic core ideas (e.g. the Kore Kosmou has a somewhat different take on us coming down to earth than the Hermetic creation story in CH I which I refer to in these essays).

That’s why I say this is my interpretation – and I’d be delighted if you read the Hermetica for yourself and came up with your own!

Still, the point of this essay series isn’t whether I’m “right” or “wrong”. Its main point is to make a well working system of personal development and inner work available, which is based on my understanding of the Hermetica and of Hermetic concepts. (Or at least I think it’s working very well – your mileage may vary, of course!)

Thus I have to admit that my image of us humans rising up through all the planetary spheres after each incarnation, handing back our planetary coins in each sphere, only to then descend down again into the next incarnation, and to pick up yet another set of planetary coins on the way down… this image isn’t taken from any of the Hermetic sources I’ve read. In fact, it’s not directly covered by any of them.

(And the Hermetica being the Hermetica, some specific texts even contradict this image directly. Of course, they also contradict each other in other details, so there’s that…)

So here’s my confession: I’ve led you astray. Shamelessly. Throughout all these essays, you have innocently believed we’d be working strictly on the basis of the Hermetica – when in reality, I’ve made up both the details about your inter-incarnational ascents and descents, and the planetary coins themselves!

Shocking, I know. These days, you can’t even trust essays about self development anymore! 😉

On the other hand, and in my defense, the image of the planetary coins, and of our “preliminary” rise through the planetary spheres after each subsequent incarnation – these concepts tie in directly with Hermetic thought, and we’ll talk further about this in the next essay.

But note that even in these temporary ascents between lives, we still keep our ties to material incarnation! We are of dual nature for as long as we keep them, i.e. for as long as we keep reincarnating. It’s only after our final ascent, fully back to the Divine with all our divine parts, leaving all ties to the material behind, that we will fully be of divine nature again.

The small embellishments which I have added to the story in artistic liberty are not just a rather good fit to certain Hermetic concepts, though – they are also a helpful way of approaching inner work. And to a tradition which has undergone as many changes and additions as the Hermetic tradition, adding a few extra coins seems to be a rather fitting thing. 😉

(And this might be just me, but I strongly presume the old Hermeticists would much rather have the Hermetic tradition be a living and breathing one, even if people add some strange things to it, than it only being studied by scholars, and kept in museums!)

So. I’ve made my confession, and you’re still here – awesome! (wipes sweat from brow, and not just from the heat of the Sun) At this point, I think some celebration is in order. It’s a good thing we’re about to enter the sphere of Venus, then, isnt it?

But since this essay is rather long already, and there are still a few more planetary spheres to be crossed before we finally set foot on earth’s firm ground again, let’s wrap things up for today and continue our descent in two weeks.

We’ll enter the sphere of Venus in the next essay on Sunday, July 13th 2025.

Please feel free to make use of the comment section for any questions you might have, or any related thoughts, ideas or stories you’d like to share, and I’ll see you in two weeks! 🙂

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Image: Louis Reed on Unsplash