Review: Thomas Moore, The Planets Within. s.l.: Lindisfarne Books 1982, ISBN: 0940262282

by Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold

The Planets Within is an important book, a great condensation and presentation of Marsilio Ficino’s (1433 – 1499) thoughts about astrology and psychology from his Three Books on Life. Ficino was hired by the Medici family in Florence to furbish translations of Plato, Plotinus as well as The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus; thus Neoplatonism and Hermetica as we know them today owe a lot to Ficino. In the Three Books on Life Ficino is discussing how the soul, body and spirit/mind of men can be kept healthy. By healthy Ficino has in mind a person calm, joyous and stable that is not affected (too much) by the ecstatic raptures of Venus or the soaring melancholy of Saturn, yet acknowledges that all these contrasting forces are important in the human experience.

Ficino himself was dominated by the temperament of Saturn, prone to melancholy, depression and deep despair; and expectably antidotes for balancing Saturn abound in his discourse. Seeing how antidepressants and numbing opioids are rampant in modern days, perhaps Ficino’s ideas are even more pertinent today than they were in his own time. Indeed modern psychology probably owes much of its current form to Ficino as well because it was Ficino’s Platonic interpretation of Thomas Aquinas that was leveraged by the Church to give direction to the universities endorsing what was eventually to become psychology as a part of the greater study of philosophy. Before addressing Thomas Moore’s book, it will be helpful to comment on how Ficino’s influence became vital to the study of psychology.     

Michael Allen and Valery Reeds in their excellent anthology Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy (Leiden: Brill 2002) provide us with an comprehensive overview on Ficino’s work and philosophy: In Platonic Theology (1482), Ficino’s aim is to reconstitute the human eidolon and anchor the human entity in the soul. He describes the unitary plurality (p. x) of man as an ordered song which simultaneously is both a self as well as a partaker in all things, in conformity with the neo-platonic premise of Oneness. Allen observes the following:

Ficino was a bold and speculative thinker who resurrected and indirectly advocated two ancient ideals we now link largely because of him to the Renaissance. The first was that of the magus with his power over nature dominated by sympathies and hidden ciphers and signs and in pursuit of the secrets of macrocosmic transformation. The second was the ideal of the daimonic soul in search of poetic, amatory, prophetic, even priestly ascent into the realm of pure Mind and Will, of Knowledge and of Love. (ibid.)

It is here that we find the unique contribution of Ficino. By unlocking the secrets of nature, man could tempt the soul towards an ascent of the perfect, the pure mind supported by knowledge. “God” was conceived by Plato and the Neo-Platonists as the origin of all emanations in the intelligible world, a massive absolute nothingness of all possibilities. The physical world and God are connected by the ideas that take the form of images and objects. Since God is the initiator of the ideas that manifest in the physical world, the ideas would then represent certain divine knowledge of an intelligible and superior order that is revealed physically. God becomes the totality of meaning or the full understanding of all ideas and all forms. Humanity is a mirror of all things, and therefore all things in the physical world can be seen as intellectual concepts formed eternally in the divine mind. Or, in the words of Marsilio Ficino: 

Since the heavens have been constructed according to a harmonic plan and move harmonically and bring everything about by harmonic sounds and motions, it is logical that through harmony alone not only human beings but all things below are prepared to receive, according to their abilities, celestial things. (Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, s.l.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 1989, p. 363).

The consequence of this reasoning: that it is possible to gain knowledge of God by observing nature, is exactly the reasoning that enabled the Church to accept a more “modern” scientific approach to observation of nature as a valid form of knowledge. This acceptance eventually culminated with the formation of psychology, which addresses precisely the discrepancy between the objective world and private observation of the same world. This suggests that the premises for undertaking the study of psychology as we know it indeed came through the argument of Plato and, by extension, through Ficino as the reviver of Plato’s philosophy in the Renaissance. This would imply that Ficino, based on his nostalgia for the past, actually paved the way for the future. It is in this continuum that Ficino assumes dignity and valour as it makes him an important figure in the formation of psychology as a modern discipline. 

Ficino’s psychology, I would say, is healthier in its approach than much of modern psychotherapy because Ficino is more occupied with keeping the harmony between the planets as they influence soul, body and mind. For Ficino, mind and imagination are superior to the soul in terms of impact and influence; this is because soul is so much more than what we have been accustomed to think it is. Ficino viewed the soul as something of quality rather than quantity, as Moore states in his book. Hence, he suggests it is better to speak about “soul” and not “a soul”; as soul is what lends a person movement, and a person who possess soul will show a certain depth and vitality and be intuitively in rapport with world and nature in unusually dynamic ways. Just as the planets engrave energetic patterns in the cosmos, they likewise do so on the soul. The soul is subject to the influence of the planets in many ways: the physical world and the quality of our thoughts, the content of mind – all influence soul and in turn move us in ways healthy or unhealthy. 

Defining the overall objective, Moore writes: “The goal of Ficinian theory and practice is a kind of spiritual and psychological harmony; qualities of the soul as well as the body need to be ‘tempered to a celestial consonance’” (p. 195). This is no reference to the elimination of suffering but the understanding of how to balance it out. For instance, the great focus of Ficino, namely how to balance out melancholy, was found in Jupiter and Venus that held distinct remedies for the sorrows Saturn might inflict on the soul and mind. A Jupiterian remedy would for instance be wine saturated with Jupiterian and/or Venusians herbs, or engaging oneself in beautifying one’s home or the like; since Jupiter was considered to be the authority of architects, thus constituting a fitting balance to the rotting away of house and cottage Saturn would cause. Likewise Venus would be a proper remedy, where in its more simple form it would be about sitting quietly in a beautiful and flower-scented garden, merely taking in the entire fragrance and frequency of the place. In other words, healing for Ficino was about harmony, and harmony was like music, and it was like astrology as well. The more we establish a harmonious life, the greater the ease with which we will notice the dissonance and off keys. In relation to astrology, Ficino was very aware that just as planets could enter into negative aspects with other planets, so could humans do with one another, whereby we might equally experience dissonance of soul and mind that would affect our life negatively. Restoring harmony would lead to a deeper and more profound understanding of soul and mind, the tempering of soul. 

The Planets Within is a book relevant for anyone interested in astrology, psychology and Renaissance magic. It is a book that gives a great idea of how the Renaissance magus thought about the world and how all things were connected for these practitioners of the art who impacted modern occultism in the form of Hermetica, the making of talismans and traditional astrology. Incorporating this astro-psychological dimension can only serve as a great addition to our understanding of the holistic panorama of Ficino and his contemporaries. 

My only contention with Moore’s presentation of Ficinian astrological psychology is his deployment of the modern psychoanalysts C.G. Jung and James Hillman; this because modern psychotherapy tends to have an infernal focus on soul in the sense of giving attention solely to the soul and the subconscious, whilst the cosmic dimensions become mere inner archetypes. It was not like that for Ficino. For him, the stars and planets, the flowers and scents were real factors influencing soul through vapours, mind and presence. Man was conceived to be a complete cosmos in his own right, but this cosmos was embedded in a greater cosmos. In all fairness it must be said that Moore does comment on this himself and stresses that a proper reading of Jung (especially his later works) would find a greater harmony with Ficinian ideas. But this also goes to show how good this book is: that in order to find something to criticise, it is solely this concern regarding the attempt to understand the pre-modern world by viewing it through modern lenses which comes to mind. 

So, to conclude, this is a book you would want to read. It is clear in its presentation of Ficino’s astrology and psychology to such a level that it is bound to enhance your understanding both of the planets themselves as well as the nature of soul, and it will give many wonderful suggestions as to how to establish a greater inner and outer harmony in our own lives. It is a book that will make your life better if you let it, and it will definitely enable a better comprehension of the pre-modern enchanted world view.