Sefirot HaOmer & The 7 Classical Planets
As Sefirot HaOmer season approaches, let’s take a look at how the 7 classical/traditional planets are linked to the 7 lower sefirot by the Zohar, and by other Kabbalistic and Rabbinic sources. A close reading reveals that in fact there is no one unambiguously and universally accepted system which "works" in terms of overlaying the 7 classical planets and the 7 lower sefirot and that the various sources have minor or major variations, depending on how exactly they're trying to force the correspondences between the planets and the sefirot.
The Zohar in 3:287a on Parshat Ha’azinu implicitly links the seven classical planets to the seven lower sefirot.
Rabbi Shim’on said, “I have learned an outside barraita – that corresponding to all these seven crowns of the King are found seven firmaments and seven planets running back and forth. They are called by names for their names, although all those thrones of firmaments and seven planets are equivalent. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. These are equivalent to those, in concealment of words, regarding those of whom it is written let them stand and save you – the astrologers, the stargazers (Isaiah 47:13). All those matters are concealed, although these are not the ways of Torah.”[1]
The Zohar scholar and translator Daniel Matt notes:
According to this source, the seven firmaments and the seven planets correspond to the seven lower sefirotic crowns. The second sentence may mean that the sefirot are called by name of the firmaments and planets, which are “equivalent” to the original sefirotic names. Alternatively, the firmaments and planets are called by their own names, which are “equivalent” to the sefirotic names. Their astronomical names conceal the divine correspondence.[2]
This creative linking of the planets to the sefirot becomes explicit in Tiqquney ha-Zohar, where the planets are associated with specific sefirot as well as with specific colors. The associations are as follows:
Planet Color Sefirah
Saturn Black Yesod
Jupiter Tekhelet (blue) Malchut
Mars Red Gevurah
Sun Green Tiferet
Venus (no color) Netzach
Mercury (no color) Hod
Moon White Chesed[3]
The Tiqquney ha-Zohar here seems to want to force associations to fit into a pre-determined template, which doesn’t quite work. Some of these associations are inconsistent with planetary archetypes of both the Talmud and those of Hellenistic (Greek) astrology, codified by Ptolemy in the second century in his Tetrabiblios, and well known by the time of the Zohar. Saturn’s association with the sefirah of Yesod, for instance, flies in the face of every known symbol and archetype, as I will shortly demonstrate.
Yesod is consistently associated with the “Divine phallus,” the sefirah which connects Tiferet to Malchut, corresponding to the functionality of the letter “Vav” in the Tetragrammaton, which connects the upper “Hey” to the lower “Hey.” The core of Yesod’s functionality is connectivity: the ability to facilitate and direct the flow of the “great gushing stream” of shefa / abundance to its destination: Malchut, manifestation into the lower world of material matter. Saturn’s archetype is that of boundaries, borders, limitations. If any of the planets correspond to the functionality of Yesod, the natural association would be Mercury, the “winged messenger,” which carries information and communication from the gods to the humans below. Mercury in the Zodiac facilitates flow. Saturn in the Zodiac impedes it.
Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089-1167), the leading medieval commentator who used astrology and astronomy (then undifferentiated) extensively in his work, writes concerning Saturn:
Among the nations, the Jews are presided over by Saturn, the thought and scarcity of speech and fraud, and the isolation from men and [the power to] overcome them…and every tree which produces the poison of death…and the greatness of thought and the knowledge of secrets and the worship of God, [and the Jewish nation is the lot of Saturn, among the sciences are the sorceries and the incantations and the science of ethics and metaphysics and philosophy and the science of dreams, and foretelling the future.]…hemiplegia and leprosy…and the day of Sabbath.[4]
This general description of Saturn hardly corresponds to the attributes of Yesod as we have seen its role and functionality in the sefirotic structure described in the Zohar.
The Talmud describes the Saturnian quality of restrictiveness and limitations, which may manifest either positively or negatively: “He who is born under Saturn will be a man whose plans will be frustrated. Others say: All [nefarious] designs against him will be frustrated.”[5]
Tetrabiblos by Claudius Ptolemy was, from its publication in the second century until the discovery of the heliocentric universe by Copernicus in the early 16th century, the universally recognized authority for Western civilization’s understanding the nature of the cosmos. Known to Ibn Ezra as well as to every other educated person engaged in the sciences, Tetrabiblos describes Saturn as producing the following malevolent conditions:
Inducing among men lingering diseases, consumptions, declines, rheumatisms, disorders from watery humours, and attacks of the quartan ague; as well as exile, poverty, and a general mass of evils, griefs, and alarms…dreadfully chilly and frosty, unwholesome, turbid and gloomy…clouds and pestilence. Copious and destructive storms of snow and hail…insects and reptiles noxious to mankind…blight, locusts, floods…famine…”[6]
Ptolemy pulls no punches portraying Saturn as one of the two great classical malefics of the zodiac (the other being Mars). The author(s) of Tiqquney ha-Zohar could scarcely have been unaware of Saturn’s reputation in classical astrological thought. Relating Saturn to the sefirah of Yesod could only have come about through an extreme stretch of symbolism, bypassing the everyday understanding of planetary symbols and archetypes associated with the classical understandings of Saturn and concentrating instead on certain aspects of the Joseph story in relation to Yesod.
The classical seven planets were divided into ruling pairs. Only Mars and Saturn were assigned to malefic status. Venus and Jupiter were the benefic planets, while Mercury, the Sun and Moon were neutral.
Planet Constellation Ruled by Planet Status
Saturn Capricorn and Aquarius Malefic
Jupiter Sagittarius and Pisces Benefic
Mercury Gemini and Virgo Neutral
Mars Aries and Scorpio Malefic
Venus Taurus and Libra Benefic
Sun/Moon Leo and Cancer Neutral[7]
Using these assignments, and understanding that in Zoharic symbolism the “left side” is the side which can be assigned a negative or malefic nature, the only left-sided sefirot available in the lower seven to match to planets would be Gevurah (as we’ve seen, previously assigned to Mars) and Hod, which is assigned to Mercury but as Mercury’s flowing, facilitating, movement-oriented nature attests, should have been assigned to Yesod instead of to Hod. However, that would have left Saturn assigned to Hod, and Hod (understood to be associated with Aaron haKohen, the attribute of “glory”) archetypically had little if any correspondences with Saturn’s symbolism.
Tiqquney ha-Zohar tries but fails to adequately assign all seven visible planets to the seven lower sefirot, at least in a way that will satisfy anyone acquainted with astrological principles. While a decent argument may be mounted likening Jupiter to Malchut and the Sun to Tiferet, the problem with Saturn is that it just does not fit the pattern anywhere in the lower seven sefirot. Moshe Idel in his book “Saturn and the Jews” expends a great deal of energy attempting to tie Saturn via a process he refers to as “vertical selective affinities” to the sefirah of Binah – the third of the top three sefirot, on the “left side” of the sefirotic structure.[8]
One of the “vertical select affinities” he cites the attempt to capitalize on “the dichotomy between the Tzaddiq, the righteous man, who belongs in the realm of the Shekhinah…and the wicked one, who belongs to the feminine counterpart of evil,” Idel quotes the Tiqqunei ha-Zohar:
If he is a sinner, he is from the side of Saturn, he is a gullible person, a black one, from the side of the female of the Qelippah, where all the magic of the black ravens and black birds, from the side of impurity, upon which there are some presiding powers named leilot…”[9]
The “side of the female” and the “side of impurity” have been referenced in the Zohar to Gevurah, which in Idels’s vertical affinity system is the lower version of Binah. However, Binah is not mentioned explicitly here, nor can I find in Idel or elsewhere a direct mention of Binah’s association with Saturn in the extra-Zoharic texts. Binah’s association with Saturn comes not from the Zohar or extra-Zoharic texts, but from associations strung together from other medieval kabbalists. Idel connects Binah with Saturn via associations/attributes assigned to Saturn which also correspond to Binah: specifically, that of the shemitah / yovel (50 year) “jubilee”, via the writings of the fifteenth century Italian kabbalist Yohanan ben Isaac Alemanno, who overtly connects Binah with Saturn as well as to the archangel Michael:
Since the Binah is the property of Israel..the Binah is the Zodiac sign of all the Zodiac signs…Yovel, which is the fiftieth year…and to this sefirah was [attributed] the revelation of the Torah…and to it the counting of the seven Sabbaths, years, and all the heptads, and the redemptions…and the third [sphere] is the sphere of Saturn, which is the first under the sphere of the zodiacal signs…the angel of Saturn is Michael, the great minister, so called because of his great power in divine matters and He is the ministering angel of Israel…”[10]
Idel notes that Alemanno was “deeply influenced” by Joseph Ashkenazi’s “Commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah” as well as by commentators on Ibn Ezra and various theosophical kabbalists.[11] While Idel’s primary focus is on associating Saturn with the Sabbath and ultimately, Saturnian messianism as embodied in Sabbateanism, he uses a variety of non-Zoharic medieval sources in addition to Alemanno to associate Binah with Saturn.
Whether his attempt is convincing to scholars who are not also astrologers I cannot say. What I can say as an astrologer who is also an aspiring scholar is this: An attempt to overlay the seven known planets to the ten sefirot (three upper and seven lower) might have succeeded if the medieval writers were aware of the presence of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, which would have rounded our solar system up to ten planets: one for each of the sefirot.[12] In that case, Saturn would have fit nicely with Binah. However, lacking a knowledge of the outer planets at the time, the author(s) of the Tiqquney ha-Zohar relied on non-astrological associations to tie Saturn to Yesod: specifically, those relating to the character of Joseph, the Tzadik, embodiment of the “Divine phallus,” some of which were detailed in the passage from Ibn Ezra cited earlier. Qualities such as “isolation from men and [the power to] overcome them” (Joseph in prison and his eventual triumph), “…and the greatness of thought and the knowledge of secrets and the worship of God,” (Joseph again), “among the sciences are the sorceries and the incantations and the science of ethics and metaphysics and philosophy and the science of dreams, and foretelling the future.]…” all reminiscent of Joseph, the dreamer of dreams, exiled in Egypt, whose prophetic dreams and God-given gifts of dream interpretation raised him from the dungeon to the throne room.
It has been noted that there is a fair amount of interchangeability between the sefirot when it comes to analogies, especially so when the sefirot are only alluded to and not explicitly named. This is the case in the Zohar on Va-Yhi, which in discussing what Matt calls the “Garment of Days” a glorious garment a righteous person will wear in the next world, woven of good deeds done in this life. “All the virtuous ones, entitled to wear a glorious garment of their days, are crowned in that world with crowns adorning the patriarchs, from the stream flowing and gushing into the Garden of Eden…”[13]
Matt in his note writes: “Here the “crowns adorning the patriarchs” are their respective sefirot: Hesed, Gevurah, and Tiferet. The stream is the flow of emanation from Binah that fills Shekhinah, the celestial Garden of Eden.”[14] It is not clear why Binah here instead of Yesod, which is the sefirah we often see associated with the frequent imagery of the “flowing” and “gushing” “stream” which empties itself into Malchut, the sefirotic equivalent of Shekhinah. The interchangeability of Binah with Yesod in this passage gives more weight to Idel’s argument in favor of associating Saturn with Binah, rather than the Tiqquney ha-Zohar’s association of Saturn with Yesod.
It could also be the case that a planet can represent more than one of the sefirot. It’s theoretically easy enough to match seven sefirot with seven planets – but in a pre-Copernican world, how does the thirteenth-century Zohar match seven planets to ten sefirot? Perhaps by breaking them up into two groups: the bottom seven and the top three. Although I’ve seen nothing yet in any source associating all three of the upper sefirot with planets other than that of Binah with Saturn in Idel’s work, I’d guess that Keter might be associated with the sun (which also is associated with Tiferet, directly below Keter in Idels’s “vertical select affinities” system. Hokhmah would likely correspond to Jupiter, the Great Benefic, and Binah could easily be Saturn, the Great Malefic. These analogies are relatively fluid, as the Zohar in 1:223b also links Shekhinah with the moon, while in the Tiqquney ha-Zohar the moon is associated with Hesed.[15]
The extra-Zoharic text of Tiqquney ha-Zohar exhibits some innovative creativity in its attempt to link the seven known planets to the seven lower sefirot, with mixed results. The association of Saturn with Yesod when, symbolically speaking, Mercury would have been a better choice, remains problematic. Ideally, in terms of planetary symbols and archetypes, Saturn would be Gevurah and Mars would be Hod, with Venus as Netzach and Mercury as Yesod, conducting the “gushing, flowing river” of shefa by connecting the sun of Tiferet with Jupiter/Malchut.
Thusly configured, the planetary archetypes would fit the sefirotic symbology in a much neater way. I conclude from this analysis that the writer(s) of the Tiqquney ha-Zohar were creative and enthusiastic kabbalists, but not very good astrologers.
What about Rabbinic attempts to fix correspondences between the planets and the sefirot?
The Ramak (Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (1522-1570)) gives another version of the correspondences, which is: Saturn as Chesed, Jupiter as Gevurah, Mars as Tiferet, the Sun as Netzach, Venus as Hod, Mercury as Yesod and the Moon as Malchut. The Otsar Yisrael (Hebrew Encyclopedia, edited by Julius Eisenstein 1907-1913) echos the Ramak's version.
The Gra (Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, The Vilna Gaon, 1720-1797)'s version of the Sefer Yetzirah has this version:
Moon - Chesed
Mars - Gevurah
Sun - Tiferet
Saturn - Yesod
Mercury - Hod
Jupiter - Malkhut
Venus - Netzakh
So, to summarize - everyone has an opinion, and there is no universal agreement! Because essentially what the mystics and the rabbis are trying to do is force a round peg into a square hole. Not everything has an unambiguous correspondence!
NOTES:
[1] Daniel Matt, Zohar Vol. 9, pp. 673-74
[2] Ibid, note 23
[3] Ronald C. Kiener, “The Status of Astrology in the Early Kabbalah: From the ‘Sefer Yesirah’ to the ‘Zohar,’” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought, no. 3–4 (1987): 1–42. P. 40. Also seen from the inside in Tiqquney ha-Zohar, no. 70 (128b) via Kiener and Matt.
[4] Moshe Idel, Saturn’s Jews: On the Witches’ Sabbat and Sabbateanism (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011). P. 7-8, Idel quotes Ibn Ezra’s Reshit Hikhmah, chapter 4.
[5] BT Shabbat 156a, The Babylonian Talmud (London, Soncino Press, 1938).
[6] Claudius Ptolemy, Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, vol. 1–4 (San Bernardino, California: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2011). 54.
[7] Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Chapter V, p.12.
[8] Idel, p. 38
[9] Idel, p. 34, quoting Tiqqun no. 70, fol. 124a (note 138, Idel p. 140).
[10] Idel, p. 24-25, quoting Alemanno’s untitled writing extant in a unique manuscript in the National Library of Paris.
[11] Idel, p. 25
[12] Pluto’s status (“planet” or asteroid) has been a subject of debate among astronomers over the past decade. Nevertheless, all modern astrologers consider Pluto to be the modern ruler of the constellation of Scorpio (classically ruled by Mars) and, by and large, ignore the debates within astronomy’s circles, preferring to permanently incorporate Pluto into the pantheon of planets.
[13] Matt, Zohar vol. 3, p. 349 (Zohar 1:224b)
[14] Ibid, note 258
[15] Matt, Zohar Vol. 3, p. 343, n. 230. See also p. 341 n. 218 where the moon is equated with Shekhinah.
