The Seven Planets in Every Art: Correspondences, Magic Squares and Seals

The seven classical planets are the one vocabulary that nearly every Western occult art shares. The grimoires use them to choose days and hours, geomancy gives them figures, the Kabbalah gives them letters and paths, and Renaissance magic gave each of them a square of numbers from which names and seals could be drawn. Each art uses the planets differently, but the planets themselves stay recognisable from one to the next. This article follows one planet through three of those arts, then turns to the fourth, the planetary magic squares, in detail.

Saturn in the grimoire

In the grimoire tradition Saturn rules Saturday and every hour that falls to it in the Chaldean cycle of planetary hours. Its metal is lead, its colour black or dark, and its concerns are the slow and the heavy: endings, boundaries, the land, old age and the long view. The Key of Solomon asks the operator to choose the day and the hour of the planet whose nature matches the work, so that something meant to last or to bind is begun under Saturn.

The other six follow the same pattern. Jupiter, with tin, governs honour, increase and favour; Mars, with iron, war and strife; the Sun, with gold, rank and success; Venus, with copper, love and friendship; Mercury, with quicksilver, learning, speech and trade; the Moon, with silver, journeys, dreams and messages.

Saturn in geomancy

Geomancy is the art of reading sixteen figures, each made of four rows of one or two points, originally marked in earth or sand. It gives each of the seven planets two figures. The standard attribution, set out in the treatise of astronomical geomancy attributed to Gerard of Cremona and repeated by Agrippa, is:

• Saturn: Carcer (the prison) and Tristitia (sorrow)
• Jupiter: Acquisitio (gain) and Laetitia (joy)
• Mars: Puer (the boy) and Rubeus (red)
• The Sun: Fortuna Major and Fortuna Minor
• Venus: Amissio (loss) and Puella (the girl)
• Mercury: Albus (white) and Conjunctio (conjunction)
• The Moon: Populus (the people) and Via (the way)

The remaining two figures, Caput Draconis and Cauda Draconis, the head and tail of the dragon, belong to the nodes of the Moon rather than to any planet. The two figures of a planet usually show its two faces: Carcer is Saturn as restraint and enclosure, Tristitia is Saturn as weight and grief.

Saturn on the Tree of Life

The Tree of Life takes its planets from the Sefer Yetzirah, an early Hebrew text on the creative power of the letters of the alphabet. It divides the twenty-two letters into three “mothers”, seven “doubles” and twelve “simples”, and sets the seven double letters aside for the seven planets. Versions of the text disagree about which letter goes with which planet. The Golden Dawn fixed one arrangement and gave each letter a path on the Tree and a card of the major arcana. In that system Saturn became Tav, the last letter of the alphabet, on the thirty-second path, carrying the card of the World.

What the three readings share

Set side by side, the three readings of Saturn agree in character though not in detail: the lead and the long hour, the prison and the sorrow, the final letter and the path at the foot of the Tree. That agreement is less a proof than a sign of shared inheritance. The planetary lore of late antiquity passed through Arabic and Latin sources into each of these arts, and each kept what it needed. The same exercise works for any of the seven planets.

The planetary magic squares

A magic square is a grid holding the numbers from 1 upwards in which every row, every column and both diagonals add to the same total. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, in the second book of his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (published in full in 1533), gave one square to each of the seven planets, and Francis Barrett reprinted the set in The Magus in 1801. They are often called by the Hebrew word kameas, “amulets”.

Their order and their totals

The squares grow one row at a time. Saturn has the smallest, three by three, holding the numbers 1 to 9. Jupiter has four by four, Mars five, the Sun six, Venus seven, Mercury eight and the Moon nine by nine, 81 cells in all. Read from the smallest to the largest, the planets fall into the Chaldean order, from the slowest to the fastest: the same order that turns the planetary hours and gives each day its ruler.

The totals follow from the size of each square. A square of side n holding the numbers 1 to n² has a line total of n(n² + 1)/2, and a total for the whole square of n²(n² + 1)/2.

• Saturn, 3 × 3: each line 15, the whole square 45
• Jupiter, 4 × 4: each line 34, the whole 136
• Mars, 5 × 5: each line 65, the whole 325
• The Sun, 6 × 6: each line 111, the whole 666
• Venus, 7 × 7: each line 175, the whole 1225
• Mercury, 8 × 8: each line 260, the whole 2080
• The Moon, 9 × 9: each line 369, the whole 3321

Saturn’s square is the same arrangement of nine numbers that Chinese tradition knows as the Lo Shu, the diagram said to have appeared on the shell of a turtle emerging from the river Luo:

4	9	2
3	5	7
8	1	6

A trap with the number 3

Agrippa links the number 3 to Saturn, because Saturn’s square is built of three rows. Modern numerology, on the other hand, links the number 3 to Jupiter. These are two different ideas. In numerology the planet comes from the number’s character: 1 is the Sun, 2 the Moon, 3 Jupiter, 5 Mercury, 6 Venus, 8 Saturn and 9 Mars, with 4 and 7 given to Uranus and Neptune in most modern books, or to the Sun and Moon in Cheiro’s older pairing. A numerologist who wants to use the squares should go through the planet, so that a person whose number is 3 is taken to Jupiter’s square of four, not to the square of three.

Names and gematria

Hebrew letters are also numbers, and adding the letters of a word is called gematria. Aleph is 1, Yod 10, Qoph 100 and Tav 400. Agrippa lists names for each square whose letters add to one of the square’s own numbers: its line total, its whole total, or in one case its number of cells.

Each square has an Intelligence, counted as the good power of the planet, and a Spirit, counted as the harmful one. Saturn’s Intelligence, Agiel, adds to 45, the whole of Saturn’s square. Mars’s Intelligence, Graphiel, adds to 325, the whole of Mars’s square. Mercury’s Intelligence, Tiriel, adds to 260, the total of any one of its lines. The Sun’s Spirit, Sorath, adds to 666, which is simply the sum of every number in the Sun’s square.

Checking these sums by hand shows that not all of them work as printed. Barrett’s printing carries some misprints in the Hebrew, which are easily corrected. A few names, however, are genuine exceptions in Agrippa himself. He gives 1225 for Bne Seraphim, whose letters make 1252. He describes Asboga as “eight extended”, yet its letters add to 24. The Moon’s Intelligence is spelled in so many ways across the sources that no common form reaches 3321, the total of the Moon’s square. One form of the Moon’s Spirit reaches 3321 only when the final letter Nun is counted as 700, a known alternative way of valuing the final forms of letters. None of this is surprising in a sixteenth-century printed table built by hand, but it is worth knowing before treating every printed figure as authoritative.

Making the tables and drawing the seals

The tables were meant to be made, not only read. Agrippa has each one engraved on the planet’s metal while the planet is fortunate, strong and ruling, which in practice means on its own day and in one of its hours: Saturn’s on a plate of lead, the Sun’s on gold, the Moon’s on silver, and so on, with some alternatives allowed. The square thus brings together the planet’s number, its metal and its time.

Seals were drawn from the squares as well. The method usually given today is a line traced through the square, visiting in order the cell of each letter of a name. When a letter’s value is larger than the square holds, it is divided by ten until it fits: 200 becomes 20 on the square of Mars, and 30 becomes 3 on the square of Saturn. By convention a small circle marks the start of the line and a short bar its end, and a small loop marks a letter that falls on the same cell as the one before it.

This tracing method was set out by the Golden Dawn in the nineteenth century, not by Agrippa. The seals printed by Agrippa and by Barrett do not always agree with it, and no one can say for certain how the originals were made. A seal drawn by the method today is a reconstruction in the spirit of the tradition, not a copy of the Renaissance figure.

Some modern practitioners trace their own names on the squares in the same way. Latin letters have no rule of tens, so a value too large for the square is usually reduced by adding its digits instead: with the ordinal values A = 1 to Z = 26, Z becomes 2 + 6 = 8 on Saturn’s square. It is a modern extension of the practice rather than a classical one, and it is best described as such.

A shared grammar

The planetary hours, the geomantic figures, the letters of the Tree and the magic squares were developed in different centuries by people with different purposes. What unites them is a grammar of seven, inherited from late antique astrology and kept in remarkably stable form. Learning one planet thoroughly, its day, metal, figures, letter, square and names, is the quickest way into all of these arts at once, and the clearest way to see where they agree and where they were simply set side by side.