Planetary symbolism occupies a decisive position within the depth-psychological corpus, serving as the primary symbolic grammar through which archetypal forces are rendered legible to both clinician and cosmologist. The literature divides, roughly, into three orientive registers. First, the classical reformulation: Rudhyar’s foundational recasting of geocentric astrology insists that planets are not mere physical bodies but coherent symbolic vehicles for organic functions within a living cosmos, while simultaneously diagnosing the ‘utter philosophical confusion’ that attends the mixing of heliocentric and geocentric interpretive frameworks. Second, the archetypal synthesis: Tarnas and his contemporaries elevate planetary symbolism to the status of a metaphysically serious proposition, arguing that each planet embodies a multivalent archetypal principle — Pluto with chthonic transformation, Neptune with transcendence and dissolution, Uranus with revolutionary awakening — whose meanings are not projections but ontologically real correspondences between psyche and cosmos. Third, the Ficinian-Renaissance strand recovered by Thomas Moore relocates planetary symbolism within an animist framework of ‘planetary radiance,’ in which celestial bodies emit living rays that resonate sympathetically with psychic and material objects. Across all three registers, the central tension is epistemological: whether planetary symbols are heuristic psychological constructs, participatory archetypes rooted in Platonic realism, or expressions of synchronistic correspondence. This tension generates the field’s most productive controversies and its most serious philosophical claims.