Is the Sun a Mere Cooling Mass?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Planetary Rounds and Globes Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages built on a specific exchange: two questions put by F.W.H. Myers in July 1883, arising from Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism, printed in full, followed by the reply from Blavatsky Collected Writings volume V. The epigraph on the title page states the position in advance — that beyond the cosmic veil the heart and head of our solar system rotates and beats, while what is spread outside is not matter solid, liquid or gaseous, but vital electricity condensed and made visible.

Myers asks two things: whether the adepts deny the nebular theory as generally held, since it is hard to conceive of planets evolving alternately from the sun's central mass, some visible and heavy and others invisible and apparently without weight; and whether the time needed for the manvantara of even one planetary chain does not far exceed the time a sun could retain heat if it were merely a cooling mass receiving no accession from outside. The reply seizes on the phrase in the question. Science says the sun derives no important accession of heat from without; the adepts answer that the sun needs none — being as self-dependent as it is self-luminous, the heart of its system, a heart which will not cease its throbbing until its hour of rest comes. The consequence of the opposite view is put plainly: were the sun a cooling mass, the great life-giver would have grown dim with age by now and would have trouble keeping his watch-fires burning for future races to accomplish their cycles, leaving no hope for evoluting humanity. What follows is largely demolition before reconstruction, and it is set out as a list of denials — that the sun is in combustion in any ordinary sense of the word, that it is incandescent or even burning although it is glowing, and that its luminosity has begun to weaken. A sharp aside notes what passes for science in missionary school astronomy, where the sun has an orbital journey of a hundred million years before it while the system is yet only seven thousand years old.

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