Worship of Planetary Spirits Is Idolatrous Astrolatry

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Planetary Rounds and Globes Series · 23 pages

Twenty-three pages opened by an abstract and train of thoughts and by introductory notes. The distinction in its first line is the one the whole study is built on: divine astrology is for initiates, superstitious astrolatry for the masses.

The position is defended before it is applied. The occultist's reverence for planetary spirits, it says, is not worship as the word is commonly understood; for theosophists the planetary angels occupy no higher place than Virgil assigns them, being occult potencies having sway over certain attributes of nature. What follows is a sustained charge against the Church for doing what it condemns. It is argued that the Church is not against magic proper but only against magicians who fail to conform to her own methods and rules of evocation; that worship of the Seven Spirits has been legal within her in all ages; and that the Seven Sabian gods and the seven seats and virtues of the Kabbalists have simply become the Seven Eyes of the Lord and the Seven Thrones. A sharp general claim is made in passing — that no truth upon any subject whatever has ever been made complete by the Church, since otherwise there would be no mystery, and mystery is necessary to the authority of incomprehensible dogmas. The later pages are largely historical and often lurid: the antics of a bishop-sorcerer; the judgement that the miracles performed within the Church, from the apostolic ones down to those at Lourdes, are pernicious in their effect on the human mind; a prophecy corroborated by obeying the command implied in it; the Church's refusal of the Chaldean substitutes for the mystery-names as desecrated by magical practice, while embracing other mystery-names far less known; and the epidemic of obsession and possession which broke out in 1553, when almost all Rome found itself possessed by the devil.

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