Sexing the Sky
Western astrology, which was mapped out and written mostly by men for men, likes to sex, gender, and rank the planets.
As above, so below.
Earth, Moon, and Venus are female and ‘feminine,’ while the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are all marked male and masculine, in their names and their associated imagery.
Interestingly, Mercury, the lowest of the heavenly bodies, is androgynous, associated with Hermes, hermaphrodites, and can change sexes. (I’m getting this from Ptolemy’s Tetrobiblos , who was also a great geographer, and Tester’s A History of Western Astrology). Mercury, the silvery white metal, is also an androgynous substance in alchemy. It’s water and fire.
We read in Ptolemy that the male planets or “bodies” occupy the upper ranks while Mercury and the female bodies like Venus and Moon are situated in the lower ranks of the planetary system. And guess who dwells in the lowest rank of them all, who is literally under our boots? Earth, along with her humans and all our dead ancestors. Father above, mother below.
Ptolemy was extremely influential. In The Color of Angels, historian of the senses Constance Classen points out that each planet is also linked with one of the traditional ages of man. The Moon, Mercury, and Venus are associated with childhood and youth, while the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn govern the ages of maturity and wisdom. In this worldview, the feminine represents our past, and the masculine represents our future, personally and collectively. This encourages misogyny.
The Sun is male, thus hot and dry are also quintessential male qualities, while the Moon and women are cold. The Sun is also always linked with seeing and sight, which is masculine. For the Western mind, the five or six human senses are gendered, ranked, and correlated with the planets. The heavenly bodies even have “senses.”
Quintessentially feminine, Moon and Venus are cold and moist—bodies associated with the sea, with menstruation and reproduction, and in the case of Moon, with lunacy. Moon is feminine while Sun is masculine, and this is problematic because it places maleness in the daytime and femaleness in the nighttime. Men become logically associated with consciousness; women with unconsciousness; men are awake, women are asleep; men are rational, women are irrational and dreaming.
Darkness is blind and can kill, but it has positive effects on the brain, too. (See the brain on caves). Likewise, light can have a negative effect; can play tricks on us. “Seeing is believing, but feeling is the truth,” is how the saying goes.
According to this traditional European ancestral mentality, the planetary positions at conception determine the sex of the child, and even the alleged temperature of the planets was key to a person’s sexual development. Classen documents how one of the most prominent, determining differences between the sexes in Europe for centuries was based on temperature.
People contrasted the essential, congenital “coldness” of women with the essential, God-given “heat” of men. In Making Sex, Thomas Laqueur says females were also deemed to be “half-baked” males — undercooked and imperfect males, the result of an insufficient amount of heat. We were, for a long time, two types of one sex — a “single-sex.” The Bibles also says this, that she comes out of he. (I think this is all part of a male inferiority complex). Remember also that before the microscope showed us sperm and eggs, human beings were understood to be a mix of two substances: his hot, pearly ghee and her cold goopy blood. Can we blame people for believing this?
These popular ideas about differences in temperature were drawn from Aristotle, Galen, Pliny, Ficino, and other ancient authorities, “natural philosophers,” who were also writing about planets and stars. All the supported folklore, scholarship, and really entire worldviews echo into our thoughts and feelings today. We have the power to break from tradition. We can change mind.
Change mind.
It’s not just the sexing but the ranking of the planets that harms us. Even the WHO and says gender is hierarchical. We see it in popular astrology and in Biblical visions like Jacob’s Ladder (Sloterdijk), staircases of angels: it’s a persistent and oppressive vertical axis.
The dream ladder reflects downward into the corporate ladder, corpus, into sports teams and universities, governments, cults, television shows — perhaps all western history is the complex translation of Jacob’s Ladder into daily culture. Peter Sloterdijk: “Where there was dream hierarchy there shall be real hierarchy,” and just as the angels stand above one another in ten ranks, so do the planets; and the members of actual churches: a pyramid of men extending downward until at last they touch the women below. Within the Catholic Church, correct me if I’m wrong, female bodies and women are never invited into the higher positions of power — that of cardinals, priests, and popes. Sisters serve those functions anyway, every day, just unofficially. Officially, male bodies are ranked higher, superior and closer to God than female bodies. Masculine is better than feminine. “Don’t be such a pussy, man.”
Considering the many ways sexing the sky reinforces oppressive gender relations, maybe we should retire the old names of the planets. What do you think?