Notions formed about “children of the planets,” indeed, the science of astrology in general, were revived from the eleventh to twelfth centuries onward. Through Arab stargazers (Abu Ma’shar and Ibn Ezra), a gradually spreading antique Hellenistic astrology aimed to find a correspondence between individual diversity and the unity of the world. The Greeks adopted from the Orient the idea that there was a parallel between the human body and the universe (the body of the cosmos); the two kinds of medical schools of thought — the Hippocratic and the Empedoclean — likewise grew out of these; indeed, in the sixth century BCE, Alcmaeon of Croton, often referred to as a pupil of Pythagoras, anticipated Plato in discerning a connection between the constant movement of the stars and the immortality of the soul. (Pythagoras is said to have called the planets the dogs of Proserpine; see Jaap Mansfeld, Die Vorsokratiker: Auswahl der Fragmente, 1:191.) The late Middle Ages revived that doctrine, and the astrological approach began to gain ground within the field of medical science. Paracelsus was of the opinion “that a physician without the knowledge of stars can neither understand the cause or cure of any disease, either of this [melancholia] or gout, not so much as toothache” (quoted in Burton, Anatomy, partition 1, sec. 2, member 1, subsec. 4, 206). According to Melanchthon “this variety of melancholy symptoms proceeds from the stars” (ibid.). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an external cause was always sought in relation to the mind, and mental illnesses (for example, melancholia) were attributed to supernatural forces, and above all to an influence of the stars.8 The derivation of melancholia from the position of the stars set it in a new light in opposition to the theological interpretation of the Middle Ages. Anyone who was melancholic was under the sway of Saturn — his condition was therefore not a matter of choice, a consequence of rejecting grace or shutting himself down, but of fate, against which one could only fight, at best, with the help of other planets. The closedness of a cosmos made up of seven planets was not the same as the power of divine omnipotence to close up everything (which was why Christianity persecuted astrology at various points in history), so the Christian perception of the Hellenistic era had to provide the planets with a Christian-ethical interpretation in order to fit astrology into its worldview.9 In the Christian view, the planets, too, were moved by God and were thereby deprived of their omnipotence: “This Mind. . was fashioned by the seven Governors [that is, the spirits of the planets], who encompass within their orbits the world perceived by the senses. Their government is called destiny,” one reads in “Pœmandres,” an early Christian Hermetic dialogue. Boethius, in the Consolation of Philosophy, wrote: “Providence embraces all things, however different, however infinite; fate sets in motion separately individual things, and assigns to them severally their position, form, and time. . So the unfolding of this temporal order unified into the foreview of the Divine mind is providence, while the same unity broken up and unfolded in time is fate” (bk. 4, 6). According to the Gnostics, a soul, on descending to Earth, comes ever closer to the material world and, resting every now and then in the circles of the seven planets (that is, the seven low-lying spirits), acquires ever-newer material (that is, bad) attributes (the way the seven Christian cardinal sins appear in “Pœmandres” is that in the soul’s fight with the spheres, the higher she rises, the more she sheds her sins). For Christian Neoplatonists, by contrast, the higher the planets raised a soul toward God, the more good properties (the seven virtues) they could bestow on her. For both approaches, the seven planets were tools with which God renders earthly souls material. Their role is nevertheless ambiguous: they are characterized by polarity and ambivalence. This manifests itself most spectacularly in the case of the seventh and most distant planet: according to the author of “Pœmandres,” the soul in the seventh zone divests herself of “the malicious lie” (25) or, according to other Gnostics, the sin of dolefulness, idleness, and stupidity. According to Plotinus, however, the seventh planet ensures a person’s intellect (
) (see Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 153); in his commentary to Somnium Scipionis, on the other hand, Macrobius endowed the seventh planet with the capabilities of logic and theory (
and 
, ibid.).
The seventh planet is Saturn, and it seems fateful that this planet — which according to astrology and its related body of beliefs is endowed with the most extreme properties (for Neoplatonists, Saturn exerts the greatest influence on earthly affairs) — was allied to melancholia during the Hellenistic era. Melancholics were seen as persons of extremes (
), exposed to risk from all directions. Their capabilities extended to the limits of human life, and like the planet Saturn, melancholics could rightly claim that beyond them there was either nothingness or God. It mattered not whether one gave a name to that void and held it to be God; it was more important that on reaching that utmost point, the melancholic would no longer be faced with any human being. Standing there, he was no longer surrounded by people; anyone hitherto familiar would become unfamiliar, and anything that appeared before him would arouse feelings of homelessness. As a result of his extreme position, he felt himself to be an outcast, an elect, sinful and saintly. And like souls that reach Saturn after voyaging among the other planets, where they have to leave their earthliness behind and become incorporeal (according to Neoplatonists) as well as to step into earthliness and assume a definite form (Gnostics), the melancholic is subjected to multiple trials: in one and the same person, the most excellent and most unfortunate, like Heracles; the wisest and most ignorant, like Socrates; the most blasphemous and holiest, like Empedocles. The Neoplatonist and the Gnostic explanations of Saturn seem, at first sight, to contradict each other. Plotinus explained the name of Cronus, the Greek counterpart of Saturn, as being a compound of koros (a boy or plenty) and nus (spirit), seeing Cronus as a symbol of fulfillment (other suppositions derived the name from the verb