The Lights and Planets
The Major or External Planets
The earth's orbit, ‘third stone from the Sun’ as they say,
is far enough away so we are not burning and close
enough so we are not freezing. At any rate, from where
we sit on Earth, there are planets inside of the earth's
orbit (Mercury and Venus), and planets beyond the
earth's orbit (Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). And beyond
this, we have the so-called outer or transcendental
planets—Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto—which we will
study later.
Since we live here on Earth, we can look either inward
toward the Sun, at the planets Mercury and Venus, the
inner planets (esoterically, these planets are a part of
our inner life, as we have pointed out) or we can look
outside ourselves, to the planets Mars, Jupiter, and
Saturn. These are external or outside our skin. Let's
start with these latter three planets; the very order of
them—Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—as they exist outside the