The universe is alive and it keeps time

The Timaeus is the weirdest thing Plato wrote and, for about a thousand years, the only one of his books anybody in Western Europe could read, because it was the only one translated into Latin. When a medieval monk said Plato, he meant this. It is a creation story told by a Pythagorean astronomer from Italy, and it is where the word cosmos gets the meaning this site is named for.

Kosmos means order

In everyday Greek, kosmos meant arrangement. A well run house was kosmos. A woman's makeup was kosmos, which is where cosmetics comes from, and I am not making that up. Pythagoras is supposed to have been the first to point the word at the sky. Plato is the one who made it stick. The universe is a kosmos, he says, because a divine craftsman looked at a mess of raw stuff and arranged it according to the best possible pattern, and the best possible pattern is math.

He builds an animal

The craftsman does not build a machine. He builds a living thing. One creature, spherical because the sphere is the perfect shape, with no eyes because there is nothing outside it to look at and no hands because there is nothing outside it to grab. It has a body made of the four elements locked together in geometric proportion, and it has a soul.

The soul is where the Pythagoreans walk back in. The craftsman mixes it up and cuts it into lengths in the ratios 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9 and 27, then fills the gaps with the intervals of the musical scale. The soul of the universe is literally a tuned string. Then he bends the string into two rings set at an angle, which are the celestial equator and the ecliptic, the road the planets walk. The outer ring carries the stars. The inner ring splits into seven and goes the other way, and those seven are the Moon, the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

So the planets are not just in the universe. They are pieces of its soul, moving in the ratios the soul is made of. Two thousand years later, when Kepler goes hunting for musical intervals in the planets' speeds, he is doing the Timaeus with better instruments.

The planets are a clock

Plato gives the planets a job, and it is the job astrology would grab for itself. He calls them the instruments of time. Before them there was no day, no month, no year, because those are measurements and there was nothing to measure with. The Moon makes the month by going around. The Sun makes the year. The others make periods so long most people never noticed they were periods. When every planet gets back to where it started, that is the Great Year, and the whole dance resets.

Then he drops a line that is basically the thesis of this site. Sight, he says, is the greatest gift the gods gave us, because by looking up we discovered number, and from number we got time, and from studying time we got philosophy. The stars taught us to count. Counting taught us to think. The order up there built the order in here.

Where the horoscope gets its spine

In the Republic, Plato has a dead soldier named Er come back and report what he saw on the other side: a giant spindle turned by the goddess Necessity, the planets as its rings, a Siren on each ring singing one note, eight notes making one chord. The Fates sit around it singing past, present and future. Souls waiting to be born pick their next lives and then pass under the spindle, and that seals it.

The sky as a singing machine that locks in a life at birth. That picture is older than Greek astrology and astrology swallowed it whole within a couple of generations. Plato never cast a chart. He built the house the charts would live in.

The next tenants were the Stoics, and they are the reason astrology ended up with a philosophy instead of just a method. You are going to like them. They are the original do your job and do not whine people.