The philosopher Plotinus ongoing debate with the world hating Gnostics once again surfaces in his hugely interesting tractate "On Providence". Here his theory of the spontaneous emanation of our sensible universe from higher planes of existence is again referred to. Even if having been a consciously thought out creation, he says, the primal principle The Good assures that all parts of the world works as one unity, meaning the mankind is grievously mistaken in detesting what it demonizes as evil since perfection must include everything. Plotinus, however, always wavered a bit since he does sound a bit Gnostic himself, not the least when in this tractate he mentions kinds of spiritual beings (Enneads III, Armstrong p. 53).
According to P. it is as if the universe says: "a god made me, and I came from him perfect above all living beings (embodied, visible or invisible things)... All things are in me (the World Soul)...many gods and population of spirits (daimones), good souls and men happy in their virtue (purer souls clearly inhering in the Good).
The first blog entry depicted the four elements as metaphors for Plotinus' emanations, in line with the radical micro and macro cosmic parallelism where even our lower world reveals traces or images of the highest principles excluding The One (The Good) and only beginning the Intellect of the One, illustrated by the human head (the seat of the soul according to Plato, but better reserved for the Rational Soul, the Sun-Soul located in the human heart is the soul of the living being in this world, man or animal.
Says Plotinus: "It is not true that the power of soul has reached to the sea (water as metaphor for the growth principle in nature, which displays a weak semblance of soul, dimly seen as through water). All the air and the aether (heavenly "fine air") is without a share of soul, but (nevertheless) up there are all good souls, giving life to the stars and to the well-ordered circuit of heaven (the rotating zodiac, Platonists were aware of the precession of the equinoxes) which in imitation of the divine Intellect wisely circles around the same centre for ever."
Here one senses the radical thought that All is everywhere but differently distributed, the same teaching as in philosophically enlightened astrology. Plotinus repeatedly complained about mindless astrologers who hadn't reflected on what they were dealing with. From the above quote, the element Air (and Ether, connected with Jupiter in Hindu astrology) is in this universe but do not belong to soul but rather represents the Intellect of the One. This clearly illuminated the Hindu thought that Moon in Gemini (Air in its Sattvic or illuminated mode) has an affinity with the subject Philosophy. And of course the third house (naturally linked with Gemini) is seen as a mirror to the 9e house of Dharma linked to Sagittarius, whose ruler is Jupiter, the sole planet representative of Aether in this world. This is deep astrology, known in late antiquity but now lost to the disintegrating Western world...
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I came across Plotinus' mention of other kinds of being only a day before discovering American news broadcaster News Nation and its long overdue homage to journalist George Knapp who has devoted four decades to the UFO mystery, again hotter than ever due to Congress hearings with, notably, a high ranking whistleblower David Grusch earlier this year. (See this on YouTube.)
Followers since the start early in 2023 of Weaponized, the podcast by George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell will not find anything new but News Nation has created a clear timeline for the general public to whom Knapp may have been an unknown.
Part 1 (42 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD7uPnXQDSo
Part 2 (42 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u7-_kSP0wU
Before the materialist paradigm, all mankind took pleasure in trying to envision the higher worlds belonging to the gods and immaterial (spiritual) beings and astrology seems to have encoded a common and widespread idea of this material world as the last and least stage in a continuous process. As Darwin's evolution became known to the Chinese due to Western Imperialism during its last obvious stage (the turn of the 19th century), Chinese intellectuals wrote in defense of their time honored Confucianism and made a point of their having known about this secret of nature, at least since their early mapping of the world and developing a cosmology proceeding out of the Great Dao (total unity), the appearance of Polarity (yin/yang) and as a third stage the world of ten-thousand things - our world of innumerable beings.
The question of precedence is beyond my knowledge, but either the human being is hard-wired to develop similar worldviews or civilization really began in the east and drifted westwards. Westerners tended to be stingy dating every other tradition and placed the developed "Yin/Yang cosmology" roughly at the same time as the Indian, during the final centuries before the common era. The oldest Babylonian horoscope so far found takes note of the planetary positions for a day in 412 BC and while no cosmology has been found in connection with the few discovered Babylonian horoscopes (tablets consisting only of astronomical data), it is obvious that a culture doesn't develop the concept of scientific observation (and mathematics) without a simultaneous idea about the nature of the world.
The Internet abounds with good material and there is no need for another history overview; it is the connection of the three worlds view with astrological terms that is important here. But this left field contribution from a student of Jungian depth psychology may suffice which its mention of Anu, Bel and Ea, also used as the three heavenly paths in Babylonian astronomy:
This blog is so good the logical sequel, so that after the "Three" a text on the "Four" or Quaternity is also recommended:
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2020/02/22/20222/
The Four would correspond to the late Plotinus and his division of World Soul (#3) into the pure Rational Soul (Soul when aiming higher, oriented towards the divine Intellect (#2) and the mix and impure Irrational Soul in which man on earth finds himself, slave under the senses due to his orientation away from true being.
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By the time Plato "rationalized" ancient myths to suit his own time (leaving a few to his distant successor Plotinus to translate (see his difficult but hugely interesting "On Love"), Babylonians already had developed the three worlds cosmology which spread to the ends of the world - as seen e.g. in Norse mythology, but seen already in Greek Hermes, able to traverse the three worlds, bringing messages from the divine world to the middle world of the human race and even moving freely in the Underworld.
Note, the threefold does not yet include the separation of the World Soul into the pure part and the "Underworld", the irrational soul or the cave of the spiritually ignorant human and other souls mistaking the world of the senses for true being - the dilemma still obtaining in the West and having gotten progressively worse due to the discoveries of material science. Only near his death did Plotinus include the cave or Nature as a fourth emanation, seen in the initial post's illustration as the brown circle, the earth element outside the growth soul or lower soul ("Water") but still with some function due to water's relaying of the higher world's intellectual Forms to the lower or sub lunar world, the Irrational world of seeming existence (continuous becoming but never of itself attaining lasting or true being). Initially this is confusing mix of symbols relating both to the physical and metaphysical, needing a working knowledge of the ancient worldview not to become a source of confusion.
Hermes' (Mercury's) ability to traverse the three worlds is a motif that rubbed off on Christianity so that a tradition about Jesus preaching to the dead in the Underworld (here literal and not a metaphor for life on earth) became attached to his being dead three days before escaping from ... Plato's cave of the fallen and bound souls. Human race relatively speaking being dead on earth compared to Man's essence belonging to the purer regions. Early philosophy resonates in religion and vice versa.
Plato thus systematized the age-old idea about the three worlds, and the father of Neo-Platonism, Plotinus, elaborated further on it. the Divine or The One itself, the divine Intellect as a second plane of existence and the Soul of the All as the third world and the last "unmixed" and truly eternal world.
Plotinus was adamant the universe was eternal and thus in a sense static, even though he agreed with Plato that the world was a rolling out in time of Eternity, and that the seven planets and their circuits together wove our - we the fallen souls - and our experience of a lifetime. Other species may experience Time quite differently from what experience is alotted to Man.
Had the zero been invented then, the One would therefore rather be divine Intellect (Plotinus' first emanation) and creating its self-conciousness by naturally inclined to itself/its original (The One), before flowing on towards subsequent worlds. Only with the old Plotinus' there seems to be room for a certain hesitation in his traditional Greek world-affirming, although he stills refuses the Gnostics and their opinion that Nature is evil. For Plotinus' Man has a certain free will to either turn further away from the Source and thus expose himself to Nature with its mix of good and bad, or start contemplating the soul's eventual escape from the human form of existence.
Here is where astrology occupies itself. The philosophy and cosmology is toned down but is discreetly there, especially in the Hindu basis in its cosmology. The One is of course the human soul's innermost essence, the Self among Jungian psychologists, the divine Intellect (Nous) can be inferred in astrological teaching, thanks to Plotinus' insistence that the All (World Soul and its higher principles) is to be found in each individual soul, although to varying degree (this universe is a mix). Some souls’ seeming misfortune in the lack of any connection to the divine Intellect shows in the mild mental disease Atheism in real life and symbolically certain astrological omens likewise indicate that the soul in question is presently not in tune with the upward path to the Good.
Another view would be that even in this universe of sense the higher supernatural worlds are present but in covert form and represented metaphorically by the three Qualities and the four Elements. On the lowly earth the zodiac is an image consisting of various mixes, and - sorry to step on many toes - various evolutionary degrees. The dark quality combined with Earth is certainly not the same as darkness combined with Air. Taurus of the Ox symbolizes mindless identification with the material world while the Water Bearer is mankind's station in the great chain of being, higher than the beasts but lower than the angels (daimones)...
The perceived immovability or lastingness in the Dark Quality may either represent a radical fall into the hallucination of a material and only material world, while ignorance at the level of the human collective thus symbolizes the species as a harbor, as a lasting haven. In reality it is the sign Gemini that represents enlightened Air. Hermes/Mercury is a human spirit so developed in the way of freedom and knowledge that not even the middle world will do.
Air in the Sattvic mode represents human essence capable of sojourning in all three worlds - the magic number 3 which is the portal to the "ten-thousand (innumerable) things" according to the ancient Chinese. The open-ended eternity which makes man's soul at least a potential co-creator with The One. "In my Father's house there are many mansions," as the clearly initiated teacher Jesus said.
More on possible "daimones":
https://www.weaponizedpodcast.com/episodes-2/episode-41