"Man is a little world(mikros kosmos), for, just like the universe, he possesses both mind and reason, both a divine and mortal body. He is also divided up according to the universe.
"It is for this reason that some are accustomed to say that his gnostic principle corresponds with the nature of the fixed stars.
"His reason corresponds in its contemplative aspect with Saturn, and in its social aspect with Jupiter.
"As to his irrational part-the passional nature corresponds with Mars, the eloquent with Mercury, the appetitive with Venus, the sensitive with Sol, the vegetative with Luna.
"Moreover, the radiant vehicle corresponds with heaven, and this mortal frame with the sublunary region."-From Proclus' Commentary on the "Timæus" of Plato.

Apart from this precise application to prognostication, technical terms belonging to Astrology entered into the studies we now call psychological. The vocabulary and terms of Astrology, in a wide range of thought, were those extant; its general definitions of psychical type and character were then used exclusively, and in so far as the horoscopical method of description was the only one, stars lucky and ill-fortune were frequently referred to in literature. Shakespeare, though one of his characters casts scorn on the natal influence of the stars, yet himself found the theory essential to the philosophy expressed in his sequence of sonnets. The Astrologers who would define the constitution, complexion, and mental attributes of a person, by the aspect of the heavens at the moment of birth (and that is a matter even yet debated), and who were prepared to forecast fortunate and unfortunate times and periods, were in a majority. But there was a small body of men, as there is even to this day, saying little, and that guardedly, who deeply studied the fragmentary traditions underlying ancient theories and the gnomic sayings concerning the outer universe of stars as reflected in the life of man. Within this ring were still more mysterious students, the Alchemists, who used an allied order of signs and symbols of still greater abstruseness, and who dealt with the inner life, as having analogy with the life of the world, with the planets in their spheres as being of the same order as the seven metals of the earth. These psychical chemists, like their contemporary astrologers, regarded the starry heavens as the image of the perfection of the soul of the world; of this greater soul, man's mind gave an imperfect, an inferior, and a dubious reflection, being within the sphere of time and conditioned by the moment of birth, and not as the stars in the firmament, born of Time coequal, and in themselves of its condition and its completeness.

Man, however, as the little universe, "the Microcosm", was thought to be within himself of the nature of the greater universe, and patterned in his mind, had, or might have an equivalent world wherein existed sun, moon, and stars. The Alchemist, dreaming strange dreams, saw a vision of redemption from the fallen state of man's mind by a reordering-a return-to its fount and origin, and propounded a reintegrating chemistry of the soul. Holding this opinion of the potential perfectibility of the soul of man, the Alchemist drew from prophetical books and the Hermetic writings his system of sublimation. The path of the descent of the soul through the realm of Time was traced by the Astrologer past the starry gates of heaven, through the constellations and planets, and these he held to be a scale of the supernal steps of ascent, set also in a fashion within the mind in order that the Kingdom lost might be attained once more.

The whole body of the Astrologers' speculations, had they not possessed from generations of empirical observation evidential correspondences in some regard, would, of course, never have found acceptance. The law of analogy according to which they worked, though riddled with faulty assumptions and defective observation, was, in itself, a beautiful and sympathetic fabric of comparative thought. It was not scientific but artistic; it was the stuff of dream and imagination, and as such alone must it be judged, Indeed, as a psychological document, nothing more entrancing nor touching closer upon the yet unresolved problems of dream-life could be desired than the long order of works by Alchemists, in particular, but those of the speculative Astrologers who were seers of revelation, and saw among the stars the eternal and eternally changing patterns of the mind of the Greater Man, were hardly less of interest.

Their heavens were a mirror of the dreams of those who had gone down into the deeps to conquer the Lords of Hell. For of whatever alchemy gave knowledge in the outer world-and it was the foundation of chemistry-this is entangled with the passion or these men for knowledge of the perilous abyss of the mind, the subterranean world, which Man introspectively finds within his own soul whenever he may have ventured to explore those realms in dream, reverie, and imaginative vision.

Above all, however, it is neccesary to refrain from the temptation to underestimate the precision of knowledge possessed by these explorers of the dark regions of the soul. That they intentionally confused objective and subjective modes of thought, looked on knowledge as power in another fashion of analogy than we now admit, that they believed inordinately in the efficacy of ritual and consequently of magical spells, evocations, and invocations-all this does not invalidate their real knowledge of the ground that they themselves had traversed; their key of access to the region of the unconscious mind was, by their very deficiency in material information of its general structure, the more acute and definite in many of its particulars.

The naming of the constellations was certainly definite in origin and reason: those of the Zodiac were stages in a solar-lunar pathway: but concerning the giving of their names, certain recurring relations observed as between the universal and the personal, by force of the mental effort of comparison and correlation, would form an emotional basis ultimately psychological; objectivised in pictorial symbolical relief, they were translated into the myth of the year's ritual, and so related to the constellation in the heavenly display of the drama of supermundane existence.

The opinion that it necessarily would be psychological is based on Man's continually self-obsessed study of all things, his anthropocentric bias continually and compulsorily dominating his existence. The outer world, the universe, was, and yet is, relative to himself, hence he saw the skies reflected in his own mind and related their movement to his moods and to his passions; beyond this, regarding Man as being the small reflection of the Great Mind patterned in the skies, he saw there moving above the whole mind of the world, its records of ages past, and dreamed that as man's actions in the future can be predicted in some degree from a full knowledge of his mind, so, to an even greater measure, the world soul's memory of the past indicated the things that were eternally to be.

This emotion, in its simplest form, is well expressed by Dr. Franz Cumont in "Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans", in describing Posidonius the Stoic philosopher, who reconciled the beliefs of East and West:-

"The leaning towards mysticism, which is one of the characteristic traits of the Syrian Posidonius, was shared by all the adepts of 'Chaldean" creeds...All systems of theology invoke the order of nature as a proof of the existence of God. What is more original is that they took this 'cosmic emotion' which every man feels and transformed it into a religious sentiment.
"The resplendent stars, which eternally pursue their silent course above us, are divinities endowed with personality and animated by feelings. On the other hand, the soul is a particle detached from the cosmic fires. The warmth which animates the human microcosm is part of the same substance which vivifies the universe, the reason which guides us partakes of the nature of those luminaries which enlighten it. Itself a fiery essence, it is kin to the gods which glitter in the firmament. Thus contemplation of the heaven becomes a communion. The desire which man feels to fix his eyes long upon the star-spangled vault is a divine passion which transports him. A call from heaven draws him towards the radiant spaces. In the splendour of the night his spirit is intoxicated with the glow which the fires above shed upon him. As men possessed, or as the corybantes in the delirium of their orgies, he gives himself up to ecstasy, which frees him from the trammels of his flesh and lifts him, far above the mists of our atmosphere, into the serene regions where move the everlasting stars. Borne on the wings of enthusiasm, he projects himself into the midst of this sacred choir and follows its harmonious movements. Then he partakes in the life of these luminous gods, which from below he sees twinkling in the radiance of the ether; before the appointed hour of death he participates on their divinity, and receives their revelations in a stream of light, which by its brilliance dazzles even the eye of reason.
"Such are the sublime effusions in which the mystic eloquence of a Posidonus delights."

"What characterises ancient ideas is the fact that they closely connect belief in the gods with observation of the skies. Astronomy here serves as an introduction to theology. This sidereal religion, developed by an erudite clergy, has always retained the stamp of its learned origin."