On the Inner Planets

Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas’s The Inner Planets: Building Blocks of Personal Reality is the fourth and final book in a series of lectures from the Centre of Psychological Astrology. Where the first two books were thematic (the Puer Aeternus, encounters with the sublime, depression, aggression, alchemical metaphors), the latter two emphasize particular astrological bodies, and this one gives extensive treatment to Mercury, Venus, and Mars. Venus and Mars came up in the first two books, but The Inner Planets is the first to take Mercury seriously, and I’m so glad it did. My own chart is dominated by Mercury and Venus (Sun in Gemini, Moon in Virgo, ascendant in Libra, Mercury in Gemini, Venus in Taurus), so this one spoke to me more deeply than some of the others, and I find Mercury and Venus the most interesting of the planets anyway.

For Greene and Sasportas, Mercury rules not only communication but the very act of thought: the world is an amorphous blur, and Mercury assembles it into a picture we can make sense of — scattered, but assembling. Venus is responsible not only for love and beauty but for what we value: Venus in Capricorn tends to ground a person in patience and hard work, Venus in Sagittarius to point toward philosophy and travel — though you can’t read a single planet on its own and have to look to its aspects. Mars, the third planet covered here, stands for aggression and sexuality, and they’re charitable to it: traditionally the lesser malefic, Mars is nonetheless what lets us exert ourselves in the world, and without it we wouldn’t act at all; we all have it in our charts, and the point is neither to repress it nor to give it too much weight. A decent rule of thumb might be: Mercury shapes, Venus blends, Mars separates — Venus drawing us together with others, Mars letting us find our own individuality.

Greene and Sasportas are at their best on the mythological character of the planets. A reader may want a simple answer for what a planet “means,” but they insist on the plurality of mythological signifiers that give the planets life: Mercury is the god not only of writers but of thieves, diplomats, and merchants, and only by understanding the underlying archetypes can you understand the planet. I find both authors likeable. Greene in particular is present throughout — she drifts into mythopoesis, has a voice like a hammer, and is comfortable with her own boundaries — while Sasportas comes across as a wise, understanding old mystic who simply cares about other people. May he rest in peace. The Inner Planets is a wonderful primer for anyone looking to dip their toes into more serious psychological astrology. There’s plenty of chart analysis, which is probably the least interesting part; the book is at its best on the archetypes, and those sections are everywhere.