I do not remember having ever met in the works of saints or philosophers a denial that the planets are guided by spiritual beings.... It seems to me that it may be proved to demonstration that the celestial bodies are guided by some intelligence, either directly by God, or by the mediation of angels. But the latter opinion seems to be far more consonant with the order of things asserted by St. Denys to be without exception, that everything on earth is, as a rule, governed by God through intermediary agencies.(607) And now let the reader recall what the Pagans say of this. All the classical authors and philosophers who have treated the subject, repeat with Hermes Trismegistus, that the seven Rectors—the planets including the sun—were the associates, or the co‐workers, of the Unknown All represented by the Demiurgos—commissioned to contain the Cosmos—our planetary world—within seven circles. Plutarch shows them representing “the circle of the celestial worlds.” Again, Denys of Thracia and the learned Clemens of Alexandria both describe the Rectors as being shown in the Egyptian temples in the shape of mysterious wheels or spheres always in motion, which made the Initiates affirm that the problem of perpetual motion had been solved by the celestial wheels in the Initiation Adyta.(608) This doctrine of Hermes was that of Pythagoras and of Orpheus before him. It is called by Proclus “the God‐given” doctrine. Iamblichus speaks of it with the greatest reverence. Philostratus tells his readers that the whole sidereal court of the Babylonian heaven was represented in the temples In globes made of sapphires and supporting the golden images of their respective gods. The temples of Persia were especially famous for these representations. If Cedrenus can be credited The Emperor Heraclius on his entry into the city of Bazaeum was struck with admiration and wonder before the immense machine fabricated for King Chosroes, which represented the night‐sky with the planets and all their revolutions, with the angels presiding over them.(609) It was on such “spheres” that Pythagoras studied Astronomy in the _adyta arcana_ of the temples to which he had access. And it was there on his Initiation, that the eternal rotation of those spheres—“the mysterious wheels” as they are called by Clemens and Denys, and which Plutarch calls “world‐wheels”—demonstrated to him the verity of what had been divulged to him, namely, the heliocentric system, the great secret of the Adyta. All the discoveries of modern astronomy, like all the secrets that can be revealed to it in future ages, were contained in the secret observatories and Initiation Halls of the temples of old India and Egypt. It is in them that the Chaldæan made his calculations, revealing to the world of the profane no more than it was fit to receive.