The Body of Seven

I. The Seven as Forces of the Psyche

The Body of Seven is not, in its source texts, a single doctrine transmitted from one origin outward. It is a recurring architecture — seven ruling forces mapped onto seven planetary spheres, seven days, seven soul-components, seven grades of initiation — that surfaces independently across Hermetic Egypt, Gnostic Alexandria, Zoroastrian-inflected Rome, Sufi Persia, and the priestly literature of Second Temple Judaism. Read individually, each occurrence looks like a local curiosity: a numerological habit of the ancient Mediterranean mind. Read together, the recurrence is harder to dismiss. The seven-fold division shows up wherever a tradition attempts a systematic account of what moves a human being — what governs desire, fear, ambition, and the sense of self — and in most of these accounts the seven forces are not neutral faculties. They are described as an occupying power. They rule, they demand surrender, and the texts describe liberation from them in the language of a siege being lifted rather than a lesson being learned.

The clearest statement of this architecture is the ascent-vision in the first tractate of the Corpus Hermeticum, Poimandres, in which the initiate rises back through the seven planetary zones and surrenders, at each one, a specific corrupted disposition:

"Thence the human being rushes up through the cosmic framework, at the first zone surrendering the energy of increase and decrease; at the second evil machination, a device now inactive; at the third the illusion of longing, now inactive; at the fourth the ruler's arrogance, now freed of excess; at the fifth unholy presumption and daring recklessness; at the sixth the evil impulses that come from wealth, now inactive; and at the seventh zone the deceit that lies in ambush." (Corpus Hermeticum I.25, trans. Brian P. Copenhaver)

The list is precise and ordered: increase-and-decrease at the Moon, evil machination at Mercury, the illusion of longing at Venus, the ruler's arrogance at the Sun, unholy daring at Mars, evil impulses of wealth at Jupiter, and a deceit that lies in ambush at Saturn. This passage functions as the anchor of the entire chart below — the only source that numbers all seven positions in sequence while simultaneously describing the psychological character of each. Every other tradition surveyed here is read against it, not the reverse.

The same architecture, described as a hostile occupation rather than a personal habit, appears in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John, where seven planetary rulers are set in authority over the material creation and over the human body formed from it:

"And he appointed seven kings, one over each of the firmaments of heaven, and five more over the depth of the abyss, that they might reign, and he distributed his fire among them, that they might rule over the world and hold humanity in bondage through the count of days, months, and years." (Apocryphon of John)

Whether the framework is Hermetic self-cultivation or Gnostic cosmic captivity, the underlying claim is the same: a human being is built from seven components that correspond to seven cosmic principles, and the central question of the initiatic literature is not whether these seven forces exist, but whether those drives are governing the person or being governed by them.

II. The Master Cross-Map

The chart runs left to right, Moon to Saturn, following the same ascending order fixed by the Hermetic anchor row: increase-and-decrease at the nearest, most material sphere, deceit-in-ambush at the farthest, most subtle one. Every row beneath the anchor is aligned against that fixed order, not against each other. This matters because the seventeen traditions collected here did not originate the same way. Some — the days of the week, the Islamic heavens, Ptolemy's ages of man — carry their own explicit, numbered sequence that can be checked directly against the anchor. Others — the alchemical metals, the Egyptian soul, the neural correlates of the Gateway Network — have no inherent order at all in their source material and have been placed by correspondence of meaning alone. A single mark at the left edge of each row records which of these is true. The mark is not decoration. It is the chart's own account of its evidentiary status, and a reader who ignores it will come away thinking every row in this table is doing the same kind of work, when in fact each mark is doing evidentiary work.

III. The Days of the Week: A Cipher That Survived

Of every row in the chart, the days of the week carry the strongest evidentiary weight, because it is the one correspondence that never went underground. Every literate person who has ever written the date has, without realizing it, been using a seven-planet cosmology. Sunday, Monday, and Saturday preserve the planetary names in English directly; Tuesday through Friday preserve them through the Norse and Roman deities identified with the corresponding planets. The Romance languages preserve the Latin forms almost unaltered: mardi, mercredi, jeudi, vendredi. This is not a case that needs to be argued from fragmentary or contested sources. It survives in the calendar visible on every wall.

What is less well known is why the days fall in that particular order — Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus — rather than in the plain planetary order of the anchor row. The Roman historian Cassius Dio addressed this directly in the third century, noting that the custom did not originate with Rome:

"The custom of referring the days to the seven stars called planets was instituted by the Egyptians, but is now found among all mankind, though its adoption has been comparatively recent; at any rate the ancient Greeks never understood it, so far as I am aware." (Cassius Dio, Roman History XXXVII.18)

Dio then supplies the mechanism. The Chaldean astrological system assigned a planetary ruler to each of the twenty-four hours of the day, cycling continuously through the descending planetary order — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon — without pause between one day and the next. A day was then named for whichever planet ruled its first hour:

"If you begin at the first hour to count the hours of the day and the night, assigning the first to Saturn, the next to Jupiter, the third to Mars, the fourth to the Sun, the fifth to Venus, the sixth to Mercury, and the seventh to the Moon, and continue the round in this order through all twenty-four hours, you will find that the first hour of the following day falls to the Sun; and carrying the process forward in the same way, the succeeding days come to be named for the planets in the order in which they are now called." (Cassius Dio, Roman History XXXVII.19)

Because twenty-four is not a multiple of seven, the ruling planet of each day's first hour steps forward by exactly three positions in the descending order every time the cycle turns over — and that three-step skip, applied seven times, reproduces precisely the Saturday–Sunday–Monday–Tuesday–Wednesday–Thursday–Friday sequence in use today. The order of the days is not a second, independent seven-fold tradition. It is a derivative of the same seven-sphere cosmology recorded in the anchor row, generated by a specific, checkable arithmetic operation, and the mechanism requires the seven-sphere order to exist and to be operative.

It should be said plainly that the hour-star mechanism Dio describes was already an antiquarian curiosity by the time he wrote it down, and that modern historians of ancient astrology treat it as the best available explanation rather than a documented certainty — no surviving Chaldean source states the rule as directly as Dio does. What is not in dispute is the order the days actually appear in, in every language that names them for planets or planetary deities, and that this order is derivable from the seven-sphere sequence and is not derivable from any other known seven-part system. Whatever the precise mechanism, the days of the week are evidence that the seven-sphere order was not merely a philosophical abstraction confined to initiatic texts — it was operative enough to organize everyday timekeeping across the Roman world and to outlive the religion that produced it.

IV. What Is Independent and What Is Not

Not every row in the chart carries the same kind of weight, and treating them as if they did would be the single easiest way to discredit an otherwise defensible pattern. Some of the traditions surveyed here are independent witnesses — systems that developed with no direct textual contact with the Hermetic or Chaldean material and that nonetheless converge on a seven-part structure organized around broadly the same set of qualities. The Sufi valleys, the Egyptian soul-components, the Ptolemaic ages of man, and the Mithraic grades belong to this category: distinct literatures, distinct languages, distinct religious contexts, arriving at seven divisions that align with the planetary order closely enough to be worth recording. Other rows are not independent at all. The days of the week are a derivative of the Chaldean hour-star system, not a second discovery of it. The modern chakra system, as popularized in the West from the late nineteenth century onward, was itself partly shaped by comparative religionists already familiar with the planetary-sphere literature, and its inclusion here is explicitly marked as a modern correspondence rather than an ancient one.

The distinction matters because the strength of a cross-cultural pattern is not measured by how many rows can be piled onto a table. It is measured by how many of those rows are causally unconnected to one another and still agree. A chart that quietly mixed genuine independent witnesses with derivatives of a single source, or with modern impositions dressed up as ancient testimony, would be manufacturing convergence rather than reporting it. This chart marks that distinction on every row rather than letting the reader assume uniformity, because the honest version of this argument is also the more interesting one: it is not that seventeen traditions all independently invented the same system, but that a smaller number of genuinely independent traditions agree, a larger number of derivative traditions preserve that agreement downstream, and a few modern systems have been included, clearly labeled, because they remain useful for orientation even though they carry no evidentiary weight of their own.

V. Descent and Ascent: The Two Recensions of the Stripping

Two Mesopotamian myths, composed centuries apart in two different languages, describe a goddess descending through seven gates to the underworld and being stripped of one garment or ornament at each gate before she can pass. Both stories run in descent order — the goddess loses her royal regalia piece by piece as she goes down, not as she comes back up — which is the reverse of the ascent orientation used throughout this chart, and both are marked R in the master cross-map for exactly that reason: the reversal is a change of direction, not a change of meaning. Read in reverse, as an ascent, each gate returns an item to the goddess as she rises back toward the light, in the same order this chart uses for every other row.

The Sumerian Version — Inana's Descent to the Netherworld

Composed in Sumerian sometime before 1750 BCE — making it, by a wide margin, the oldest text in this chart — Inana's Descent to the Netherworld describes the goddess passing through seven gates guarded by the gatekeeper Neti, surrendering one item of royal dress at each: the turban of the open country, small lapis beads, a double strand of beads, the "come, man, come" pectoral, a golden ring, the measuring rod and line of lapis, and finally the pala dress itself, the garment of ladyship. Three details in this version deserve attention. First, the items are not generic jewelry; each is a specific marker of Inana's authority as queen of heaven, so the stripping is a systematic dismantling of political and religious office, not merely of clothing. Second, the text numbers the gates explicitly, one through seven, which is what allows this row to be checked against the planetary order at all rather than merely assumed. Third, the myth supplies its own ascent: when Inana's minister Ninshubur secures her resurrection, she rises back through the same seven gates and each item is restored to her in the reverse order of its loss — the myth already contains, in its own return journey, the exact ascent structure this chart imposes on it.

The Akkadian Version — The Descent of Ishtar

The later Akkadian version, The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld, follows the same seven-gate structure closely enough that its dependence on the Sumerian original is not in serious dispute among Assyriologists, substituting a great crown, earrings, a necklace, breast ornaments, a girdle of birthstones, bangles of the wrists and ankles, and finally a garment described simply as the proud garment of the body. The single most important structural fact about the Akkadian version is that it preserves the seven-gate, one-item-per-gate architecture essentially unchanged across a language shift, a roughly thousand-year gap, and a substantial theological distance between Sumerian and Babylonian religion — which is strong evidence that the seven-fold stripping was treated as a fixed narrative unit, not an incidental detail either scribal tradition felt free to alter. Where the Akkadian text does differ, it is in the items themselves rather than in their number or structure: the specific ornaments shift toward what a first-millennium Mesopotamian audience would recognize as royal Akkadian dress rather than third-millennium Sumerian regalia — exactly the kind of surface adaptation expected when a fixed structure migrates into a new cultural idiom while its skeleton survives intact.

VI. The Gnostic Sevens and the Doctrine of Two Names

The Apocryphon of John, the single most influential cosmological text recovered at Nag Hammadi, is unusual among the sources in this chart because it does not give one seven-fold list. It gives three, nested inside a single cosmogonic narrative, and the three do not perfectly agree with one another — a fact the text itself does not resolve and this chart does not paper over.

• The Twelve Authorities. The chief archon Yaltabaoth first creates twelve authorities to rule over twelve aeons, one for each sign of the zodiac — among them, distinctively, figures drawn from the Book of Genesis rather than from any planetary vocabulary.
• The Seven Bodies. Yaltabaoth then appoints seven rulers, one for each of the seven heavens, each given an animal face and a name: Athoth, Eloaiou, Astaphaios, Yao, Sabaoth, Adonin, and Sabbede.
• The Seven Powers. A corresponding "power" is assigned to each of the seven rulers — Goodness, Foreknowledge, Divinity, Lordship, Kingdom, Envy, and Understanding — used elsewhere in the text to describe the components of the first human's psychic soul.

The first list is the source of the section's title. Among the twelve zodiacal authorities, the text states plainly:

"The sixth is Cain, whom the generations of men call the sun." (Apocryphon of John)

Cain — a name with no planetary etymology at all — is identified explicitly with the Sun in this list, while the separate, later list of seven heavenly rulers assigns solar rulership to an archon named Yao, described with the face of a seven-headed serpent. The text is operating with two independent naming systems for its rulers, a biblical one and a planetary-cosmological one, and it does not trouble to reconcile them. This is the doctrine of two names: the same cosmic office can be addressed by a Genesis figure or by a Hellenistic-Egyptian archon name depending on which layer of the text is speaking, and later readers are left to sort out which name belongs to which register.

The second list, by contrast, closes with an explicit statement of its own organizing principle, tying the seven rulers directly to the seven-day week:

"These are the seven forces of the seven heavens of chaos. This is the sevenness of the week." (Apocryphon of John)

Two consequences follow. First, because the text numbers the seven bodies and explicitly ties them to the sevenness of the week, this row can be checked against the planetary order in the same direct way as the day-names, rather than assigned by inferred correspondence — hence its mark of "=" rather than "N" in the master chart. Second, because the seven powers are bound to the seven bodies by the text's own internal cross-reference rather than by any independent numbering, they inherit the same sequence-status as the row above them rather than establishing their own.

One anomaly is left open rather than resolved. The Twelve Authorities passage names Cain at the sun-analogous position using a biblical register entirely absent from the seven-rulers passage, and no surviving recension of the Apocryphon of John explains why the text's own zodiacal list and its own planetary list do not share a naming convention. Scholars working from the surviving Nag Hammadi and Berlin Codex recensions have noted the inconsistency without resolving it, and this chart follows their lead: the discrepancy is recorded, not smoothed over.

VII. The Menorah: The Seven Inside the Temple

Unlike the mythic and initiatic sources surveyed elsewhere in this chart, the seven-branched lampstand of the Jerusalem Temple was a physical object, built to a specification given in Exodus 25 and maintained in continuous cultic use for roughly a millennium, and two writers who could plausibly have seen it or spoken to those who had — Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus — both state directly that its seven lamps were understood to represent the seven planets. Josephus, describing the Temple's furnishings in the Antiquities of the Jewish People, writes of the candlestick's seven branches:

"The candlestick had six branches which sprang out of it, three on each side, and seven lamps upon their extremities, made in imitation of the number of the planets." (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jewish People III.182)

Philo makes the same identification in his own account of the tabernacle furnishings, treating the seven-branched form as a deliberate cosmological statement rather than an incidental design choice. Taken together, the two accounts are among the clearest evidence in this chart that the seven-planet correspondence was not confined to esoteric or initiatic circles. It was built into the central cultic object of Second Temple Judaism, described that way by two mainstream Jewish writers of the first century CE, in a context with no obvious reason to borrow from Hermetic or Gnostic literature.

A qualification is necessary. Neither Josephus nor Philo specifies which lamp corresponds to which planet, and no ancient source assigns the seven branches an ordered planetary sequence the way Corpus Hermeticum I.25 orders its seven zones. The menorah therefore belongs in this chart as confirmation that the seven-planet correspondence attached to the number seven itself in mainstream Jewish thought — not as a row that can be checked, gate by gate or branch by branch, against the ascending planetary order used elsewhere in the table. It has accordingly been left out of the master cross-map's ordered rows and is discussed here on its own terms.

VIII. Mithraism: The Row That Disagrees

The Mithraic mysteries, practiced across the Roman Empire from roughly the first through fourth centuries CE, organized initiates into seven named grades, each under the protection of a specific planet: Corax (Raven) under Mercury, Nymphus (Bridegroom) under Venus, Miles (Soldier) under Mars, Leo (Lion) under Jupiter, Perses (Persian) under the Moon, Heliodromus (Runner of the Sun) under the Sun, and Pater (Father) under Saturn. The grade-names and their planetary patrons are confirmed outside the Mithraic material itself by Jerome, writing polemically in the late fourth century about the destruction of a Mithraic sanctuary at Rome:

"Has not your kinsman Gracchus, whose name betokens his patrician origin, when a few years back he held the prefecture of the city, overthrown, broken to pieces, and shaken to fragments a cave of Mithras with all the monstrous images therein, by which the worshippers were severally initiated as Raven, Bridegroom, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Runner of the Sun, and Father?" (Jerome, Epistle 107, to Laeta)

The Mithraic sequence is included in this chart marked ≠ — dissenting order — because it is the one row surveyed here that has its own fully explicit planetary assignment, and that assignment does not match the ascending order used everywhere else. Raven under Mercury and Bridegroom under Venus align well enough with the Moon-to-Saturn progression at the bottom of the ladder, but Lion sits under Jupiter at the fourth grade rather than the sixth, and Persian sits under the Moon at the fifth grade rather than the first — an arrangement that tracks the initiate's ascending rank far more closely than it tracks the ascending planetary sequence.

This is included deliberately rather than quietly omitted, for a specific methodological reason. A chart built only from rows that agree with its own thesis is not evidence of anything; it is a demonstration that the compiler discarded whatever did not fit. Mithraism had its own coherent, well-attested seven-planet system, built for its own initiatic logic rather than the strictly ascending cosmological order this chart otherwise tracks, and admitting that disagreement openly is what allows the agreement in the other rows to be taken seriously.

IX. Notes on Individual Rows

The Egyptian Soul Components

The Egyptian tradition did not organize its account of the soul into a numbered planetary sequence — no Egyptian source assigns Ka, Ren, Ib, Ba, Shuyet, Sah, and Khat an order corresponding to the seven classical planets, if only because the Hellenistic seven-planet system postdates the core Egyptian soul-theology by well over a thousand years. The row is included and marked N because the individual correspondences are strong on their own terms: Ka as the animating vital force belongs with the Moon's increase and decrease; Ren, the true name, belongs with Mercury's domain of language and designation; Ib, the heart weighed against the feather of Maat, belongs with Venus's moral-emotional register; Ba, the individual personality-soul, belongs with the Sun's central identity function; Shuyet, the shadow, belongs with Mars's confrontation with the hidden and repressed; Sah, the incorruptible spirit-body, belongs with Jupiter's expansive, transpersonal register; and Khat, the dense physical corpse, belongs with Saturn's rulership of matter and mortality. Each pairing is defensible by meaning; none is licensed by an Egyptian sequence, because none exists.

The Sufi Valleys

Attar's twelfth-century Conference of the Birds describes seven valleys the seeking birds must cross — Seeking, Love, Knowledge, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, and Annihilation — and the poem gives this sequence explicitly and narratively, one valley leading into the next, which earns the row its = mark for preserved source order. The divergence the ≈ mark records is internal to the correspondence rather than to the ordering: by planetary meaning, Love sits more naturally with Venus and Knowledge with Mercury, yet Attar's narrative places Love second and Knowledge third, matching the planetary sequence's own second and third positions but with the two qualities' usual meanings crossed relative to what a strict Venus/Mercury reading would predict. Rather than silently swap the two valleys to force a cleaner meaning-match, Attar's own order has been preserved and the crossing flagged for what it is: the birds must pass through Love before Knowledge in the poem's own internal logic, and that narrative sequence takes priority over a tidier planetary symmetry.

The Chakras

The seven-chakra system in the form familiar to a Western reader — Muladhara through Sahasrara, mapped one-to-one onto the seven planets — is a modern synthesis. Classical Hindu tantric sources describe varying numbers of cakras and none assign them planetary rulers; the popular seven-chakra-to-seven-planet correspondence took shape largely through late nineteenth and twentieth-century theosophical and New Age literature synthesizing Indian tantric material with Western esoteric planetary symbolism already in circulation. It is included here, marked M, not as an ancient witness but because the resulting body-position correspondence — root to crown mapping cleanly onto the Moon-to-Saturn material-to-subtle axis — is useful for orientation and is likely to be the reference point most readers already carry into this chart.

The Neural Correlates

The seven entries under the neural-correlate row are this project's own synthesis of findings from affective NEUROSCIENCE, not a claim that any of the cited research organized itself into a seven-part planetary framework. The amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, the noradrenergic locus coeruleus system, the nucleus accumbens shell and ventral pallidum, the default mode network, the periaqueductal gray and anterior cingulate cortex, the oxytocin–VTA axis, and the cerebellum and basal ganglia are each independently documented structures with independently documented functions; the alignment of each with a specific classical planetary drive is an interpretive act performed by this project, marked N because no inherent sequence connects them in the neuroscience literature itself.

Panksepp's Affective Systems

Jaak Panksepp's seven primary-process emotional systems — SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY — are included as a count parallel only: seven systems, no more and no less, hardwired into the subcortical mammalian brain beneath the reach of cognitive elaboration. Panksepp did not propose a planetary correspondence, and the mapping used in this row is looser than any other in the chart: PANIC/GRIEF is folded together with FEAR at the Moon, SEEKING's investigatory aspect is separated out at Mercury, and no primary-process system is assigned to the Sun at all, since Panksepp's own architecture locates the sense of self elsewhere, in cortical and self-referential processing rather than in a seventh subcortical circuit. This row is marked N and should be read as the loosest correspondence in the table — seven ancient positions and seven modern systems sharing a number, not a demonstrated one-to-one mapping.

X. The Dual Nature: Archonic and Biophilic

Every drive catalogued in this chart is morally neutral in itself. What determines whether a given planetary force functions as bondage or as strength is not the force but its mode — and the esoteric literature surveyed throughout this page consistently describes exactly two such modes. This project's own framework, developed in the analysis of PSYCHO-VULGARISM (PV), names them Archonic and Biophilic: the Archonic mode reactive, defensive, and structured around the avoidance of threat to identity; the Biophilic mode — a term drawn from Erich Fromm's writing on the love of life and growth — flexible, responsive, and oriented toward accurate engagement with reality rather than its defense.

A consequence worth stating: because these are directions rather than states, "restoration" never means converting a person from one type to another. It means a specific drive changing direction — which can happen to one drive while the other six are unaffected. THIS FRAMEWORK'S OWN SYNTHESIS

The seven drives do not become Biophilic through effort of will alone. The ascent described in Corpus Hermeticum I.25, in which each planetary sphere is stripped of a specific corrupted disposition, describes a structural transition — what the Hermetic tradition calls PALINGENESIA, rebirth — not a moral improvement accomplished by better behavior within the Archonic mode. The table below sets the two expressions of each drive side by side.

The mechanism behind this transition is no longer confined to ancient description. Structural neuroplasticity — the physical remodeling of neural circuitry, not merely a shift in mood or belief — has been documented as the biological substrate of exactly this kind of transition, most directly in research on the temporary suppression of the default mode network and the reopening of critical periods of social learning under serotonergic 5-HT2A agonism. Where the Hermetic initiate is described stripping off the ruler's arrogance at the solar sphere, the modern account describes the loosening of a chronically overactive default-mode network's grip on self-referential prediction. The vocabulary differs by two thousand years; the transition being described — from a rigid, threat-defensive mode of operation to a flexible, accurately responsive one — is the same event.

This is also why the distinction between Archonic and Biophilic matters beyond the individual psyche. A drive operating in Archonic mode does not merely feel worse to the person experiencing it; it produces specific, predictable behavioral output — Mercury's discernment collapsing into rationalized deceit, Jupiter's generosity collapsing into dogmatism, Saturn's discipline collapsing into the terror-driven conformity documented at length elsewhere on this site. The Body of Seven, in other words, is not only a description of cosmology or of neurobiology. It is a description of the specific point at which a person's own internal architecture tips from serving them to ruling them.

XI. Seven, Ten, Twelve, Fourteen

The seven-fold structure surveyed in this chart is not the only numerical architecture these traditions use, and situating it against its neighbors clarifies what it is and is not claiming. The Body of Twelve, generated when the seven planetary drives interact with the twelve-fold zodiacal wheel, appears across this same literature as the twelve tormentors of Corpus Hermeticum XIII, the twelve authorities of the Apocryphon of John, and the twelve lords of Xibalba in the Popol Vuh — a distinct structure built from the sevenfold one rather than competing with it. The Body of Ten, by contrast, sits above the seven rather than beside it: three supernal principles added once the seven lower drives are integrated, named Keter, Chokmah, and Binah in Kabbalistic literature and given structurally equivalent triadic treatments elsewhere. Neither the twelve nor the ten is addressed in depth on this page, which is concerned specifically with the seven-fold architecture and its cross-traditional attestation.

One number requires a specific caution rather than a passing mention. Fourteen appears in some of the same source material — most notably as the fourteen pieces into which Osiris's body is scattered in the Egyptian myth as recorded by Plutarch — and it is tempting to read this as a doubled seven, extending the pattern established here. That temptation should be resisted. The fourteen-piece dismemberment narrative has its own independent structure, its own textual history, and its own scholarly literature, and folding it into the seven-fold chart on the strength of a numerical coincidence would repeat exactly the error Section IV warns against: manufacturing convergence rather than reporting it. Fourteen is noted here as a boundary of this survey, not extended into it.

XII. Primary Sources

Hermetic: Corpus Hermeticum I (Poimandres) and XIII (The Secret Sermon on the Mountain), trans. Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Gnostic: Apocryphon of John (NHC II,1; III,1; IV,1; and BG 8502,2), trans. Frederik Wisse and Michael Waldstein, The Apocryphon of John: Synopsis of Nag Hammadi Codices II,1; III,1; and IV,1 with BG 8502,2 (Brill, 1995); also trans. Marvin Meyer in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2007).

Mesopotamian: Inana's Descent to the Netherworld (Sumerian, c. 1900–1750 BCE), trans. Samuel Noah Kramer; The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld (Akkadian), trans. E. A. Speiser, in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. James B. Pritchard (Princeton University Press, 3rd ed. 1969).

Jewish: Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jewish People, Book III; Philo of Alexandria, De Vita Mosis and Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres.

Roman: Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book XXXVII, chapters 18–19, trans. Earnest Cary (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1914).

Christian: Jerome, Epistle 107 (to Laeta), trans. W. H. Fremantle, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 6.

Islamic: Attar of Nishapur, The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr), trans. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (Penguin Classics, 1984); the Mi'raj narrative as treated by Ibn Arabi.

Astrological: Claudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book IV, trans. F. E. Robbins (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1940).

Modern: Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford University Press, 1998).