Excerpts from ‘The Six Enneads’ by Plotinus (vegetarian) – The Light Within, Part 1 of 2

“That the circuit of the stars indicates definite events to come but without being the cause direct of all that happens, has been elsewhere affirmed, and proved by some modicum of argument: but the subject demands more precise and detailed investigation for to take the one view rather than the other is of no small moment. The belief is that the planets in their courses actually produce not merely such conditions as poverty, wealth, health and sickness but even ugliness and beauty and, gravest of all, vices and virtue and the very acts that spring from these qualities, the definite doings of each moment of virtue or vice. […] Since these opinions and others of the same order are prevalent, it will be well to examine them carefully one by one, beginning with the fundamental question.”

“Are these planets to be thought of as soulless or never given a soul? Suppose them, first, to be without Soul. In that case they can purvey only heat or cold- if cold from the stars can be thought of- that is to say, any communication from them will affect only our bodily nature, since all they have to communicate to us is merely corporeal. This implies that no considerable change can be caused in the bodies affected since emanations merely corporeal cannot differ greatly from star to star, and must, moreover, blend upon Earth into one collective resultant: at most the differences would be such as depend upon local position, upon nearness or farness with regard to the center of influence. This reasoning, of course, is as valid of any cold emanation there may be as of the warm. Now, what is there in such corporeal action to account for the various classes and kinds of men, learned and illiterate, scholars as against orators, musicians as against people of other professions? […]”

“[…] we cannot think of them as grieving at all or as being cheerful upon occasions: they must be continuously serene, happy in the good they enjoy and the Vision before them. Each lives its own free life; each finds its Good in its own Act; and this Act is not directed towards us. Like the birds of augury, the living beings of the Heavens, having no lot or part with us, may serve incidentally to foreshow the future, but they have absolutely no main function in our regard.”