(Ptolemy's Cosmos)
Magic is predicated on the assumption that the Earth is the center of the universe. This view might seem simplistic, but esoterically speaking, it is no less true today than it was two thousand years ago. We are the center of the universe, each of us, from our own perspective. We stand upon the Earth, and from out perspective everything else moves around the Earth, and around us.
It is only when we artificially remove our point of view from where it is naturally located, within us, to some remote conjectured place in space, that we can imagine the Earth moving around the sun. To see this in our minds, we must hover in space above the plane of the solar system, and mentally watch the planet Earth revolve around the sun.
Scientifically speaking, there is no doubt - the Earth revolves around the sun. But magically speaking and esoterically speaking, the sun and everything else in the universe revolve around us. We conceive the model of the universe in our own minds, based on sensory input that is processed and transformed into images of shapes and distances. We place all of this model of creation, which we ourselves create, outside of our mental point of view - the place from which we observe the world. Naturally it all must revolve around us, because each of us is the center of our own world.
The universe as conceived by the Greeks and Romans of ancient times was much nearer this magical model. It reached its perfection during the life of the Greek astronomer and astrologer Claudius Ptolemaeus, better known simply as Ptolemy, who observed the heavens from his home in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in the second century AD. Egypt was under the rule of the Romans at this time, but before their conquest of Egypt it had been ruled by the Greeks from 323 to 30 BC, and Alexandria was still largely a Greek city.
As the accompanying image of the Ptolemaic System suggests, the Earth was conceived as a kind of stable platform at the center of everything. It is round because the circle was regarded by the Greeks as the perfect form, and the Earth having been created by the gods, must be perfect. This particular image does not make it clear, but the zone of elemental water is often shown as a band that surrounds the circular island of the Earth, as a kind of endless river that connects with itself. This river-ocean is sometimes anthropomorphized as a dragon or sea-monster. Since both the element earth and that of water tend downward, they are usually depicted as lying flat. Another conception was that the island of the Earth floated upon the ocean, which extended beyond and around its boundary.
Above the zone of elemental earth encircled with the endless band of ocean that represents elemental water, is the zone of elemental air. This was often conceived as hemispherical in shape, arching over and above both the land and the sea. It is invisible because the air is transparent. Above this hemisphere of perfectly clear air is a hemispherical shell of very subtle and attenuated elemental fire. It is not the blazing fire that burns on the surface of the Earth, but the rarified essence of that fire. Physically, it might be represented by the northern lights, which blaze with cold fire high above the clouds.
These four successive zones, the Earth itself surrounded by an endless river of salt water, over-arched by a hemisphere of transparent air, beyond which is the shell of subtle and rarified elemental fire, represent the sublunary realm - that is, the realm that is below the sphere of the moon. It is more correct to think of the Earth as an inverted hemisphere of rock, flat on its top, floating in an inverted hemispherical ocean that extends beyond its edges, these zones surrounded by a sphere of air which extends both above and below them, which in turn is completely surrounded by a sphere of elemental fire.
The moon and its course through the heavens marks the transitional boundary from the region of the four elements to the region of the celestial spheres. For this reason it was known as the gatekeeper of the heavens. It was conceived to be set in a perfectly spherical shell of transparent crystal that was invisible to the sight. This hollow crystal shell was thought to rotate upon itself around the sublunary realms, carrying the moon along with it. Since astronomers could only see from horizon to horizon, this crystal shell was sometimes conceived, and illustrated in woodcuts, as a hemisphere, but astronomers such as Ptolemy always understood it to be a perfect sphere.
The wandering bodies of the heavens known as "planets" to the ancient astronomers similarly were set in rotating crystalline spheres, nesting one inside the other. They were ordered based on their observed rate of motion across the sky. The sphere of the moon, being quickest, was assumed to be the smallest of the heavenly spheres, and the closest to the Earth. Beyond it, successively enclosing the smaller spheres, came the spheres of Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which was the final and outermost readily visible planet (Uranus was not known to the ancients, although it is dimly visible to the naked eye under perfect seeing conditions).
The eighth sphere, beyond the sphere of Saturn, was the sphere of the fixed stars. It was conceived by Ptolemy and his contemporaries as having the stars set in its sides. The stars were not observed to move from their places with nearly the same rapidity as the planets, hence their description as "fixed" - they were a fixed backdrop against which the movements of the planets could be measured.
It was observed that the stars, although they did not move very rapidly, did in fact move, with a motion known as the "precession of the equinoxes." This perceived motion of the stars is caused by the bobble of the axis of the planet Earth, but of course this was not known to Ptolemy and his peers.
One complete rotation of the stars takes a period of approximately 26,000 years. This is known as a Platonic Year. In ancient astrology, each of the twelve signs of the zodiac was associated with an age of approximately 2,150 years duration, a Platonic Month. The period from the birth of Christ to the present was known in astrology as the Age of Pisces, the Fish. We are passing into a new age, the Age of Aquarius, the Water-bearer, which will also last for 2,150 years.
To account for the movement of the "fixed" stars, another invisible sphere, called the Crystalline Sphere, was conceived as a backdrop for the eighth. Sometimes there are said to be two of these spheres. Beyond this was conceived a tenth sphere known as the primum mobile (first mover), the outermost sphere that imparted rotation to all the rest. Beyond this, there was only God.
It is worth noting that in this ancient system the sun was at the center of the planetary spheres, even as in the modern scientific model the sun is at the center of the solar system. The concept that the planets went around the Earth was true in an absolute sense for only one of them, the moon, which is not called a planet in modern science, but is still called a planet in modern astrology.