In all the religious systems of later antiquity, if I mistake not, the Seven Planets play some lordly or terrifying part. The great Mithras Liturgy, unearthed by Dieterich from a magical papyrus in Paris,[146:1] repeatedly confronts the worshipper with the seven vowels as names of 'the Seven Deathless Kosmokratores', or Lords of the Universe, and seems, under their influence, to go off into its 'Seven Maidens with heads of serpents, in white raiment', and its divers other Sevens. The various Hermetic and Mithraic communities, the Naassenes described by Hippolytus,[146:2] and other Gnostic bodies, authors like Macrobius and even Cicero in his _Somnium Scipionis_, are full of the influence of the seven planets and of the longing to escape beyond them. For by some simple psychological law the stars which have inexorably pronounced our fate, and decreed, or at least registered the decree, that in spite of all striving we must needs tread their prescribed path; still more perhaps, the Stars who know in the midst of our laughter how that laughter will end, become inevitably powers of evil rather than good, beings malignant as well as pitiless, making life a vain thing. And Saturn, the chief of them, becomes the most malignant. To some of the Gnostics he becomes Jaldabaoth, the Lion-headed God, the evil Jehovah.[147:1] The religion of later antiquity is overpoweringly absorbed in plans of escape from the prison of the seven planets.
In author after author, in one community after another, the subject recurs. And on the whole there is the same answer. Here on the earth we are the sport of Fate; nay, on the earth itself we are worse off still. We are beneath the Moon, and beneath the Moon there is not only Fate but something more unworthy and equally malignant, Chance--to say nothing of damp and the ills of earth and bad daemons. Above the Moon there is no chance, only Necessity: there is the will of the other six Kosmokratores, Rulers of the Universe. But above them all there is an Eighth region--they call it simply the Ogdoas--the home of the ultimate God,[147:2] whatever He is named, whose being was before the Kosmos. In this Sphere is true Being and Freedom. And more than freedom, there is the ultimate Union with God. For that spark of divine life which is man's soul is not merely, as some have said, an +aporroia tôn astrôn+, an effluence of the stars: it comes direct from the first and ultimate God, the Alpha and Omega, who is beyond the Planets. Though the Kosmokratores cast us to and fro like their slaves or dead chattels, in soul at least we are of equal birth with them. The Mithraic votary, when their wrathful and tremendous faces break in upon his vision, answers them unterrified: +egô eimi symplanos hymin astêr+, 'I am your fellow wanderer, your fellow Star.' The Orphic carried to the grave on his golden scroll the same boast: first, 'I am the child of Earth and of the starry Heaven'; then later, 'I too am become God'.[148:1] The Gnostic writings consist largely of charms to be uttered by the Soul to each of the Planets in turn, as it pursues its perilous path past all of them to its ultimate home.