The Seven Planets — Luna, Mercury, Venus, Sol, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn — constitute one of the most architecturally significant symbol-systems encountered across the depth-psychology corpus. Far from serving merely as astronomical data, the septenary functions in these texts as a cosmological grammar: a structured field through which soul, matter, psyche, and divinity are articulated in their mutual relationships. Jung deploys the seven planets primarily through alchemical commentary, identifying them with the seven metals and with Mercurius as their unifying Anthropos-figure — a configuration in which the septenary becomes a map of psychic differentiation prior to the coniunctio. Von Franz extends this into the Aurora Consurgens tradition, where the seven planetary roots of the Black Earth encode the full arc of the alchemical opus as spiritual purification. Edinger reads the planetary ladder as an initiation schema: seven grades between earth and the eighth sphere of the fixed stars, the number seven marking incompletion-toward-totality. Tarnas reconceives the seven as archetypal principles dynamically correlating with observable celestial movements, rehabilitating the ancient synthesis on post-Jungian philosophical grounds. Place and Moore situate the septenary within Hermetic and Neoplatonic emanation cosmologies, where descent through seven planetary spheres encodes the soul’s involution into matter and the mystic’s path of return. The central tension across these voices is whether the seven planets are primarily psychological projections, objective archetypal structures, or sacramental rungs in an initiatory cosmology.
There are, we are told, seven planets amongst these luminaries, and these move in a direction opposite to that of the heaven: hence the name planets… Now these are the names of the seven planets: Luna, Mercury, Venus, Sol, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn
This passage provides the canonical patristic enumeration and cosmological definition of the seven planets, establishing their names, spherical order, and counter-motion as foundational doctrine.
, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021thesis
The above seven archetypal principles correspond to the seven celestial bodies known to the ancients and constituted the foundation of the astrological tradition from its prehistoric origins through the early modern era.
Tarnas argues that the seven planets encode a complete system of archetypal principles whose psychological meanings were continuously elaborated from Hellenistic antiquity through the Renaissance.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis
The seven planets were believed to be gods, and these seven gods were emanations forming a cosmic ladder connecting the celestial world with the physical world.
Place identifies the seven planets as divine emanations constituting a Neoplatonic-Hermetic ladder of descent and ascent between the celestial and physical worlds.
, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005thesis
as you ascend step by step from earth all the way up to the uppermost region, the area of the fixed stars, you pass through each of the seven planets and planetary spheres, and each of them represents a rung on the ladder.
Edinger reads the seven planetary spheres as an initiatory ladder, where passage through all seven grades corresponds to full psychological initiation, with the eighth sphere as totality.
, Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis
From this embrace are born the seven first hermaphroditic beings. The seven are an obvious allusion to the seven planets and hence to the metals which in the alchemical view spring from the hermaphrodite Mercurius.
Jung identifies the seven primordial hermaphroditic beings of the Poimandres myth as allusions to the seven planets-as-metals, grounding the septenary in alchemical psychology via the Mercurius archetype.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944thesis
that hath ears to hear, let him hear what the spirit of the doctrine saith to the sons of the discipline concerning the seven stars, by which the divine work is wrought.
Von Franz shows that in the Aurora Consurgens the seven stars-as-planets are the operative agents of the alchemical opus, requiring ninefold purification before the albedo is achieved.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966thesis
Its connection with the seven metals implies a connection with the seven planets, so that the tree becomes the world-tree, whose shining fruits are the stars.
Jung traces the alchemical tree symbol through its connection to the seven metals and thus to the seven planets, establishing the world-tree as a synthetic image of the opus cosmicum.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis
The seven parables may be understood as alluding to the seven planets and the corresponding metals or spirits of the metals, which are the arcana or pillars of the opus.
Von Franz demonstrates that the seven parables of the Aurora Consurgens are structurally keyed to the seven planets and their corresponding metals, encoding the opus as a planetary totality.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting
On the outside of the basin there are six stars which together with Mercurius represent the seven planets or metals… When personified, he is the unity of the seven planets, an Anthropos whose body is the world.
Jung interprets the alchemical Mercurius as the unifying Anthropos who contains and personifies all seven planets, making the septenary a symbol of integrated psychic totality.
, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954supporting
The seven stars were mentioned before in our text; they are the seven stars the Godhead holds in His hands when He appears in the Apocalypse and at that time they naturally referred to the seven planets.
Von Franz connects the seven planetary stars to the Apocalyptic image of God’s seven stars, showing how alchemical and biblical symbolism converge in attributing the seven metals to planetary powers.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting
besides describing how the first Man… descended the ladder of the seven planets, we discussed how he was able to free himself from the bonds of Nature and ascend back to God by climbing the ladder of the planets
Place describes the Hermetic myth of the soul’s descent through the seven planetary spheres and its redemptive ascent, establishing the ladder of planets as the central soteriological structure of Hermeticism.
, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting
the trees of the seven planets grow in the ‘private garden’ of the blessed isles.
Jung notes the alchemical motif of seven planetary trees growing in the garden of the blessed, connecting the septenary to the paradise-garden symbol as a matrix of the individuation opus.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
in order: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon… The cosmology is that of Hellenistic science, which was later systematized by Ptolemy and carried on to Dante.
Campbell situates the ordered seven-planet cosmology within the longue durée from ziggurat astrology through Hellenistic science to Dante, tracing its structural persistence across Western mythological imagination.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
The seven double letters, which have both a hard and a soft pronunciation, were related to the seven planets, to the days of the week, and to the seven openings in the head.
Place documents the Kabbalistic correlation of the seven double Hebrew letters with the seven planets, the week, and human anatomy, illustrating the septenary’s role as a universal cross-referencing system.
, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting
in the language of initiation, ‘seven’ stands for the highest stage of illumination and would therefore be the coveted goal of all desire.
Jung glosses the number seven as the initiatory symbol of maximum illumination, providing the psychological ground for why the seven-planet ladder functions as an image of spiritual completion.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944aside
So then the seventh planet was the Earth. The Earth is not just an ordinary planet! One can count, there, 111 kings… 2,000,000,000 grown-ups.
Von Franz uses the Little Prince’s journey through seven planets as an aside illustrating how the septenary structures a narrative of soul-descent into earthly incarnation.
, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970aside