Why Planetary Magic: The Planets as Allies and the Full Spectrum of Human Experience (Episode 6)
In Episode 6 of The Seven: Living with the Planets, Lucy Baldwin answers the central question:
Why planetary magic at all?
Is it necessary?
No. Planetary magic is not the only path. But Lucy explains why this framework is so comprehensive, so potent, and so deeply human.
Planetary magic is a way of living in relationship with forces that already exist within you: archetypes, frequencies, psychological currents, and patterns of being that shape the entire spectrum of experience.
This episode is a foundational orientation for anyone wondering why the planets matter and why working with them can change your life.
Watch Episode 6 of The Seven here:
Key Takeaways (Why Planetary Magic)
In this episode, Lucy explores:
Planetary magic as a low-barrier, high-potency spiritual practice
The planets as allies and archetypal forces within the psyche
The seven planets as the full spectrum of human experience
Why planetary symbols are uniquely powerful and culturally “pre-loaded”
How planetary magic offers agency, not astrology victimhood
Devotion, meaning, and connection in a disenchanted modern world
Planetary Magic Is Not Necessary, But It Is Remarkably Effective
Lucy begins with an important clarification:
Planetary magic is not required.
It is not the only framework.
There are many valid spiritual paths, and different tools work for different people.
But planetary magic is unusually comprehensive, accessible, and effective.
You do not need a jungle retreat.
You do not need an expensive initiation.
You can begin simply, through offerings, ritual, attention, and relationship.
The cost of entry is low.
The potency can be very high.
The Planets Awaken Parts of You That Already Exist
One of the most powerful reasons to work with the planets is that they help you meet yourself.
The planets are not foreign energies being imposed from the outside.
They are archetypal frequencies that already live within you:
solar vitality
lunar emotional rhythm
Saturnian structure and time
Venusian desire and attraction
Martial courage and action
Mercurial mind and movement
Jovian blessing and expansion
Planetary magic is a way of awakening potentials that may have been dormant, hidden, avoided, or out of balance.
It lets you access parts of yourself that were previously unavailable.
The Seven Planets Are the Full Rainbow of Human Experience
Lucy describes the seven traditional planets as a complete spectrum.
Just as light contains all colors, the planetary system contains all major modes of being.
Whatever you are facing, whatever you are creating, whatever you are longing for, there is a planetary ally that corresponds to it.
That is part of the beauty of this system.
It is whole.
It is coherent.
It is comprehensive.
Planetary Symbols Have Deep Grooves in the Unconscious
Planetary magic works so well because the symbols are ancient, weighty, and culturally embedded.
Human beings have studied and revered the planets for thousands of years.
These archetypes are pre-loaded into our collective imagination.
Even if you are new to astrology, you already know something about them unconsciously:
Venus is love.
Mars is war.
Saturn is time.
The Moon is emotion.
These are known entities, and that familiarity creates a kind of symbolic clarity and safety.
When you work with planetary symbols, you are sledding down deep grooves that already exist in the psyche.
Astrology Diagnoses, But Magic Gives Agency
Lucy offers one of her sharpest points here:
Astrology can diagnose.
But planetary magic gives you something astrology often lacks: response.
If you feel burdened by a challenging placement, you do not need to remain a victim of it.
You can work with that planet.
You can petition it.
You can form relationship.
Planetary magic is an answer to the question: What do we do with what we are given?
It returns authority to you.
Devotion, Meaning, and Spiritual Connection
Lucy also speaks to a deeper hunger.
Modern life often tells us we are beyond spirituality, beyond myth, beyond devotion.
But human beings are not built that way.
We crave meaning.
We crave connection to something larger than the isolated self.
Planetary practice can reinvigorate that sense of faith, rhythm, and belonging.
Synchronicity, devotion, ritual repetition, and lived relationship with the planets create a tether to meaning in a disconnected world.
Planetary magic becomes not just a tool, but a way of living.
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Okay, hello. Welcome to another episode of The Seven Living with the Planets. I am Lucy Baldwin and this episode is all about why planetary magic? Because I've created a whole podcast around it and I want to make sure that I clarify. Well, actually what happened was I was guesting on somebody else's podcast today and it was podcast about manifestation and she was asking me questions about
manifestation, kept talking about planetary magic. And at one point she was like, okay, but do you need planetary magic? Like, what if we're not doing planetary magic? Is it necessary? And to which I responded, absolutely not. It is not necessary. This is not the only way to do things. But bear with me because I have a lot to say on this. But I thought, you know, it would be good to make an episode where I talk about why this, why this framework.
And the thing is that I've been around for a while. I've been doing, I've been into personal development, personal growth, spirituality, philosophy, all of this forever, for my whole life. And I have gone through periods where I've gotten really into certain methods, certain paradigms where I thought, this is the tool, this is the thing that everybody needs. And I got really gung ho and really intense about it and kind of puritanical.
And I've just realized that that's not how it works. There's numerous tools and some work for some people and others work for other people and you might be receptive to a whole lot of different things. And some of them though are really nice and really good. And what I love about planetary magic is that it's extremely comprehensive and ⁓ it's extremely effective and it's relatively low cost of entry.
So working with the planets, you don't have to fly to the jungle. ⁓ You don't have to pay thousands of dollars. You can just start making offerings. And it works really, really well. And it can get really intense. And you can have really intense, high-potency experiences. And you can feel incredible.
amounts of profundity and growth and change and you can shift your identities and you can change your beliefs and you can really see amazing synchronicities and magic happens and it's real and we can feel connected to something greater than ourselves and each other by doing this and working with the planets and so there's so much here and also I haven't even started getting into the meat of this episode. So the thing is that
The planets let us get in touch with parts of ourselves that we otherwise might not even realize we have, right? Because these are energies, these are archetypes, these are flavors of being, colors of being, frequencies of being that already exist within all of us.
It's already in you. You already have like a masculine force and a feminine force and a solar force and a lunar emotional landscape. you know, time is Saturn and we are bound by time. It's a huge part of what it even means to be a human. we all have the capacity for incredible things. Like we have infinite potentials available to us as people. And the planets,
help us meet potentials, new potentials that were previously unavailable to us because they awaken those sides of us, those frequencies within us, those archetypes within us that we previously maybe weren't tapping into, didn't even know we had or were shoving away or hiding from or we were out of balance. so these archetypes represent
the entire spectrum of reality, certainly the human experience. you know, it's like anything that is, any way that a thing is, it falls somewhere into the rainbow. It's sort of like how the rainbow has all the frequencies of light. The planets are the full rainbow. It's the full spectrum of the human experience. And so,
There's always a planet that can help us with whatever it is that we're trying to do or whatever it is that we're facing. There's always an ally there. And that's the thing is that they're allies. I like to think of them as allies, but they're also, they're parts of ourselves. They're these external bodies. They're these literal huge masses flying through space.
that are having an effect on us physically in ways that we can't even begin to comprehend. ⁓ so it's just an amazing, incredible, powerful framework to engage with these frequencies and these sort of flavors of reality that already exist. And within the seven that I talk about here, we can access any frequency. Like we can access, like I said, the full rainbow.
So we can pull them in, we can communicate with them, we can harness them, we can gather wisdom, ⁓ we can move in new directions, we can find balance. I'll be talking about balance more as we go on. In episode two, I talked about why magic is so powerful. there, I mentioned how there's sort of symbols and
structures. And so we use structure and symbol to communicate to our unconscious. And that's why magic is so powerful. certain symbol sets hold a weight. They have, ⁓ I like to say, deep think I actually got that from my dear friend and collaborator, Layla Matthews, who I've done a lot of courses with.
I think that languaging came from her, but it's like there's these archetypes, know, these planets have deep grooves associated with them. So when we work with this particular symbol set, there's so much our unconscious can pull from that because, know, we've been as a species, we've been studying the planets and the movements of the planets for at least 5,000 years.
And also, and this is important, our culture was born out of a culture that revered these planets as gods. it's already, we're primed to be able to receive that. We're primed to be able to understand it, at least our unconsciouses. So when we call on these energies, we don't have to know everything consciously because there's deep grooves already and
I think I used in that episode too, a sledding metaphor. it's like you can sled downhill those grooves. You can sled down the grooves to get to where you're trying to go. Whereas if you're working with a symbol set that doesn't have the collective, say, weight, then those symbols don't have the same...
clarity and And, you know, these are known entities. So we know what we're getting. We kind of, we have a sense of them. Even if you're new to planetary magic and the planets and you don't even know anything about astrology, unconsciously, we all know.
what these things mean. We all know that Venus is girls and Mars is boys, Mars is war. Like we just know. And so it's sort of baked into our culture. It's baked into our lineage. It's baked into our unconscious. And can use that because that makes those symbols really strong. It makes them powerful. It makes them effective.
There's also a certain safety in them ⁓ because they're known. So I'm never scared working with the planets. I'm not afraid of them. They're known. There's a certain benevolence to them. ⁓ Even planets that are considered more like malefic or that people think of as bad planets or planets that ⁓ like Saturn, I'm always talking about Saturn, but...
know, it's the planet of limitation and people think of Saturn as like a mean planet, mean daddy, bad daddy planet. And it's just, that's so not how it is. I would rather think of it as like, you know, if there's a scary dude, I want him to care about me. Like I want to be the one that he cares about, right? I want the scary dude to protect me. ⁓ But also time is just
change and death That's a reality. These realities exist no matter whether we avoid them or not. Like they're kind of inevitable. Well, they're completely inevitable. We can't escape death. We can't escape time. And trying to avoid it actually makes our situation worse. you know, these, each of these energies, each of these planets represents things that are inevitable. They're acting on us. They're forces that are just completely
universal and and in having seven of them, and this is really cool, is you can reference them in terms of how they relate to each other in terms of balance. You can kind of look at them and say, ⁓ I have a lot of Mars, I would like to have more Venus or
I'm really in my head, I want to get more into my body. And so you might think like, maybe I work with Saturn or maybe I work with Venus ⁓ or I feel emotionally disconnected. Maybe I'll work with the moon. And so you can kind of ⁓ diagnose yourself using the planets and then
You can make offerings. You can call in the planets yourself. You can work with them. You can form your own relationships with them because they're inside of can touch into them and see Where are you strong? Which archetypes do you bring forward and which ones do you kind of tend to avoid? And this can tell you so much.
And it can show you where there's opportunity. So it's not just about, you know, fixing or healing or anything like that. It's also about showing us where opportunity is for us. Because when you're trying to get things or create things or do things or have new things happen that haven't happened before, ⁓ a lot of times it's very helpful to try a new way of doing things, right? If what you've been doing hasn't been working, maybe it's time to try something else, right? And so the planets...
kind of show us what those other something else's might be and help us tap into those parts of ourselves.
Yeah, so balance is a really big part of this and just getting into balance with yourself and getting into balance with reality. And would say one of the best cases that I have
one of my favorite answers to this question for all my astrology dorks, astrology weirdos out there, this is the answer to challenging placements. astrology placements that are challenging
this is the answer. You work with those planets, you petition them, ask them for help, ask them for guidance. You don't even have to go that far. You can just, take on some of that archetype, try to sort of wake it up from within you. This is the obvious and immediate answer to that. you know, people will talk about different...
placements that they have that they're like, ⁓ my Saturn is in a really bad situation and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just do magic. Just do magic. Because this is, I would say this is my number one complaint about astrology is that it can diagnose us and say like, you've got this problem. Okay, but what do we do about it? You know, sometimes I feel like in the astrology world, people are always a victim to their challenging placements. And I would say, you don't have to be. Just work with the planets.
Just take ownership, take it on, it's yours. You get to work that relationship into something that works for you, that feels good for you. So these are just some of the reasons that came to me today for why I like working with the planets and why I think planetary magic is such an amazing system. know, mostly that it just lets us tap into parts of ourselves that we might not even realize are there.
brings us potentials that we might not have otherwise had available to us. So that's really fun. it's also, the full spectrum. I like the spice of life, you know, I like to experience a lot of different things and I want to have a relationship with each of these archetypes so that I can have a lot of
diversity and excitement and newness and change and, you know, just like different kinds of rich things happening in my life and feel into those different energies and you can really connect with them. That's what's so cool about it is you can really connect with them and you can see things start to change around you. it feels like a relief. it's balm for
a society where we feel so disconnected and we've kind of lost touch with spirituality because the planets are so powerful that when you work with them and you feel them, it kind of reinvigorates that sense of faith. And the last thing that I want to say here, ⁓ and because I think that faith is important for people, I think that faith keeps us faith in something.
connection to something, you know, it gives us a sort of a meaning, a sense of meaning and purpose. And I think that that is something that we yearn for and probably something that we actually need. know, humans have tended towards religion and religiosity and even superstition forever, for as long as we can know. Like we've never found a culture or a society or a group of people that didn't have something like that, that didn't need this
larger meaning. And I think that it's weird how as a society, we've kind of think that we're post-religion or that we're post-spirituality and we don't need it because we have all the answers because we have science and we know better. As if science gives us answers to any of the meaningful questions, first of all. And second of all, science is and can be its own religion when treated thus, and it often is treated thus because we are humans. as much as we want to
think that we can outsmart ourselves, outsmart our nature, our innate animals. can't escape what we are. We can't escape that. And so no amount of studying things and measuring things and doing little experiments ⁓ is going to make us not yearn for this connection to something greater than ourselves. And the planets
I mean, they certainly give me that and I feel like they give that to a lot of the people who join my courses and are in my programs because when synchronicity start to happen, when you perform magic and then you see things so clearly changing and happening or you see little signals or symbols or just if, you know, when it works,
the gratitude and sense of fulfillment that comes from that is hard to describe, it's hard to explain. And you just kind of have to experience it. And this is the thing that I believe that people are getting from religion that makes them feel good and makes them feel, you know, it's kind of a sense of security in knowing that we're not just flying around space on a dead planet and that...
there's something, there's underlying rhythms and cycles and meaning. And I guess all of this is just to say, I feel like it gives us meaning. ⁓ And I had one last thing, which is that, ⁓
Devotion, so kind of on a similar note to what I was just on, is devotion, you know, doing something regularly in a devotional way is incredibly powerful. So that also gives us that sort of hit of meaning, of connection ⁓ that we so deeply crave.
but we can also use it really practically in a really practical way so we can work with magic and work with the planets in a devotional way and have a devotional relationship with them. So instead of feeling devotion to myself or devotion to, you know, God or Jesus, I could have, ⁓ because that doesn't feel aligned for me, ⁓ I can have devotion towards these planetary deities.
and I can work with them in a way that helps me and supports me and my needs, but doesn't and sort of keeps the authority with me, but it's also an external thing that I can relate to. so it's sort of this as within, so without with the planets. And that's really beautiful and it's really helpful and it can help us grow and show up for things and change because sometimes motivation just isn't going to get you there.
And we need that sort of sense of devotion to something greater than ourselves that gives us that tether, that sort of holds us accountable and keeps us doing the things that we need to do to support ourselves and to foster, you know, a good life. Because having a good life is like, what is the point of all of this? What is the point of... There's so much suffering and pain in the world and...
I think we owe it to ourselves and to everybody who's suffering to live the best life that we possibly can. So with that, I'm going to sign off. Thank you so much for watching another episode of The Seven. I do want to let you know that I have a free community where I host live rituals every month and also connection calls, so calls where we play games.
and can join by clicking the link in the description. And I hope to see you there. It's really fun. You know, come check it out. At least come join a ritual and see what it's all about. And maybe you'll start to experience some of the synchronicity and magic and sense of connection for yourself. I'll see you there.
New to this work?
Start with Lucy Baldwin’s complete Planetary Magic overview
Episode 6 is one of the foundational teachings of The Seven and a central orientation to the entire planetary system.
Frequently Asked Questions (Why Planetary Magic)
What is planetary magic?
Planetary magic is the practice of working with the seven traditional planets as archetypal allies through ritual, devotion, and psychological-spiritual relationship.
Do I need planetary magic to manifest or grow spiritually?
No. Planetary magic is not the only path. It is simply an unusually comprehensive and effective framework for transformation.
Why are the planets so powerful as symbols?
Planetary archetypes have been studied and revered for thousands of years. They carry deep unconscious meaning, making them potent tools for ritual and inner change.
How does planetary magic help with difficult astrology placements?
Instead of remaining a victim of challenging placements, planetary magic invites relationship, petition, and conscious engagement with the planet involved.
What is the deeper purpose of this practice?
Planetary magic offers meaning, devotion, balance, and connection to something greater than the isolated self, while also supporting practical life change.
Next Steps
If this episode resonates, you are invited to begin simply:
Choose one planet
Make a small offering
Practice consistently
Notice what changes
Lucy hosts live monthly rituals and connection calls through her free Inner Circle community, and new episodes of The Seven are released weekly.