Taking a Crack at the Planets

[sdi]

You know me, I can only make sense of things by attempting to work forward from first principles: large lists of random associations don't make any sense to me. As I start to dig a little deeper into astrology, here's an attempt at the planets:

Planet	Principle
Saturn	contraction
Jupiter	expansion
Mars	conflict
Sol	emission
Venus	harmony
Mercury	mediation
Luna	reception

Of particular note, these form three orthogonal poles: Jupiter/Saturn (up/down), Mars/Venus (left/right), Sol/Luna (forward/back), with Mercury sitting in the center between them all. I'm not yet certain of Uranus/Neptune, except that I suspect they form a forth orthogonal pole of some kind (future/past?).

Comments

[sdi]

I, too, have been trying to put together a post at it... but I've been realizing that the requisite knowledge requires years of attainment, so it's very hard to describe the concepts for the layman. I think I need a better understanding of other models (for example, my knowledge of Western occultism is pretty lacking, though I'm working on that) before I can attempt to bridge the gap by analogy.

This is also complicated by the many different facets involved. Above I talked about potential vs. realization; another concept of interest is Kolmogorov complexity, which is a way of defining the nature of Order (small Kolmogorov complexity) vs. Chaos (large Kolmogorov complexity).

Another example is Stephen Wolfram's quixotic Wolfram Physics Project, which strikes me as a concrete way of redeveloping and exploring Neoplatonism using the tools of discrete mathematics.

(And, tying these together, Wolfram's also talked a lot in A New Kind of Science about how the boundary of Order and Chaos is where everything interesting in computer science happens; he's using mathematical terminology, but there's a certain mythic quality to it to my ears.)

I have a lot more pondering on this to do before I can really attempt to communicate bits of it, but even though occultists and the spiritually-minded like to denigrate computer programming (and not without reason), I'm quite certain there's value there for them.

[boccaderlupo]

These sound truly fascinating and I shall check them out.

Yes, if you were to look at the 211 propositions of Proclus in Elements of Theology--in the raw, sans commentary--they could almost work as a kind of code for procession from The One.

Excellent.