Planet, Sefirah, Body

The seven planets on this page are the seven lights a naked eye can follow — the Sun, the Moon, and the five wandering stars of the ancient sky. Long before telescopes, stargazers in Mesopotamia ranked them from slowest to fastest: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon — the Chaldean order. The weekday column above falls straight out of that ranking. In the old system of planetary hours, every hour of the day gets a planetary ruler, cycling through the Chaldean order without end, and the planet ruling a day's first hour gives the day its name. Twenty-four hours make three rounds of seven with three left over, so each new day the count skips ahead three places — and that skip produces exactly Sunday, Moon-day, Mars-day… The week on your calendar is a piece of Babylonian planet-arithmetic that never stopped running.

The letter column is older than the sefirah column. Sefer Yetzirah, the short Hebrew treatise this whole system leans on, singles out seven of the twenty-two letters as Doubles — letters with a hard and a soft pronunciation — and gives them to seven planets and seven days. An honest footnote belongs here: the surviving versions of that little book do not agree on which letter goes with which planet, so every printed table is one lineage's choice. The pairing shown above follows the same letter table used everywhere else on this site, so a letter here matches its page in the letter index.

The planet-to-sefirah rungs are medieval and later. Once Kabbalists had drawn the ten stations of the Tree of Life, matching the seven classical planets to seven of them was an almost inevitable move, and the version this page runs — Saturn to Binah down through the Moon to Yesod — is the arrangement the nineteenth-century Hermetic schools, above all the Golden Dawn, fixed into the tables most modern books reprint. Seven planets onto ten stations leaves three stations with no planet at all, which is part of why the chain on this page has ends that simply stop.

The body rungs come from a different civilisation entirely. The chakras belong to Indian tantric tradition — the word is Sanskrit for “wheel” — and the source texts describe several different counts of them; the familiar seven-step ladder is one scheme among many, the one that reached English readers in the early twentieth century and stuck. Matching chakras to sefirot is younger still: a modern, syncretic move, made because two ladders running up the body invite the comparison, not because either tradition ever mentions the other. That is why the join creaks — two nodes answer to two sefirot each, one answers to Da'at, and two sefirot are answered by nothing. This page keeps the creaks audible instead of sanding them smooth. (The frequency numbers on the body nodes are a modern layer as well — the Sanskrit sources assign the chakras sounds and symbols, not hertz.)