It started with a question I thought would take five minutes.
The seven deadly sins have been scowling down from cathedral doors for fourteen centuries. What, I wondered, are their opposites?
The medieval church, bless its tidy heart, already had the answer filed: humility for pride, charity for greed, chastity for lust, kindness for envy, temperance for gluttony, patience for wrath, diligence for sloth.
Prudentius wrote it as a pitched battle around 410 AD, in which Patience simply stands there while Wrath, having thrown everything she owns, shatters her own sword against herself and falls on her spear in sheer frustration. I have been Wrath in that scene. You may have been too.
Then I found an older story, and it changed the question.
In the Poimandres, the first book of the Corpus Hermeticum, written in Egypt around the second century, the soul climbs home through the seven planetary spheres, and at each gate it hands something back.
To the Moon’s sphere it returns growing and shrinking.
To Mercury’s, scheming.
To Venus’s, the trick of longing.
To the Sun’s, the arrogance of rulers.
To Mars’s, reckless daring.
To Jupiter’s, the appetites that come with wealth.
To Saturn’s, the lie that waits in ambush.
The seven deadly sins would not be written down for another four hundred years, and five of them are already standing at their gates.
That was the invitation. Seven sins, seven planets, seven gates.
The chakras are the same seven gates set inside the body, from the base of the spine to the crown.
And the tarot, whose modern form was built by people who read the Hermetica closely, gives every gate its pictures: the planet’s own card and the cards of the signs that planet rules, with the sin and its remedy painted side by side.
What follows is the climb, gate by gate, from the bottom.
Every gate has a keeper
Four of the keepers were never in doubt. Wrath is Mars, red, iron, blood, the one who punches first. Lust is Venus; no notes. Pride is the Sun, who has never once considered that it might not be the center of everything.
Sloth is Saturn, the planet of long winters and heavy blankets, whose older name among the desert monks was Acedia, the listlessness Evagrius called the noonday demon, the one that drops by around lunchtime and whispers that nothing matters and you should probably lie down.
That leaves gluttony, greed and envy to be divided among Jupiter, Mercury and the Moon, and here the astrologers scatter like cats.
I went by temperament. Jupiter expands; that is simply what he does. He rules the liver and the feast, and the word jovial still describes a man ordering a second dessert for the whole table, so gluttony is his.
Mercury rules merchants, messengers and thieves, three jobs that sit closer together than anyone likes to admit, so greed is his.
And the Moon? The Moon shines entirely by borrowed light and is full for about one night a month; the rest of the time, she waxes toward what she wants or wanes away from it. That is envy with a prettier face, and it is the first thing the Hermetic soul hands back on its way home: growing and shrinking.
The gates run up the spine, aka chakras
Three placements came without a fight.
Venus keeps the sacral gate, the water center of pleasure and making things.
Mercury keeps the throat; the messenger belongs where the words come out.
The Sun keeps the heart, and this is less whimsical than it sounds.
Traditional astrology has always handed the Sun rulership of the heart, and in the Chaldean order of the planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, the Sun stands fourth of seven, dead center, exactly where the heart stands among the seven chakras. The middle of the sky and the middle of you share an address.
The other four took some arguing. Here’s how I assigned them:
Mars keeps the root, the red gate of survival and fight-or-flight, where the body stores its emergency fire.
Jupiter keeps the solar plexus, the belly, the liver, the digestive fire, the gate where gluttony literally lives.
The Moon keeps the third eye, the eye of night, the gate of dreams and hunches; traditional astrology gives the Sun and Moon the body's two eyes, and the Moon’s is the one that works after dark.
And Saturn keeps the crown.
That last one deserves a candle. In the cosmology Dante inherited, Saturn’s sphere is the final planet before the fixed stars, the last gate before the open sky.
Sloth at the final gate. Of course. Karma. Lessons. Success or tied to failure.
Only after the keepers were posted did I see the pattern. The two malefics guard the two ends, Mars at the bottom gate and Saturn at the top.
The two benefics hold the two appetite gates, sacral and belly, which is exactly where you would expect the fun ones to end up.
The Sun holds the middle.
The two swiftest bodies, Mercury and the Moon, take the gates of speech and sight.
I planned none of it. I just kept finding it already there.
Tarot cards at every gate
Now I brought out the cards. The tarot brought its own seven, and then some.
The Golden Dawn tied the seven planets to seven major arcana through the seven double letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and tied the twelve zodiac signs to twelve more through the twelve simple letters.
The Rider-Waite and Thoth decks were both built on that key.
So each keeper has a portrait: Mars is the Tower, Venus the Empress, Jupiter the Wheel of Fortune, the Sun the Sun (he insisted), Mercury the Magician, the Moon the High Priestess, Saturn the World.
Then comes the twist I didn't expect to love so much.
Every planet rules signs; every sign has a card, so every keeper carries the cards of its own signs through the gate.
The Sun and Moon rule one sign each; the other five rule two.
Mars brings the Emperor (Aries) and Death (Scorpio).
Venus brings the Hierophant (Taurus) and Justice (Libra).
Jupiter brings Temperance (Sagittarius) and the Moon card (Pisces), so if you expected the Moon card at the Moon’s gate, she is carrying Jupiter’s banner.
The Sun brings Strength (Leo).
Mercury brings the Lovers (Gemini) and the Hermit (Virgo).
The Moon brings the Chariot (Cancer).
Saturn brings the Devil (Capricorn) and the Star (Aquarius).
Lay them out, and in nearly every pair, one card shows the sin and the other the cure, painted in 1909 by people who had no idea they were doing it.