Judge on the Earth Chain of Globes

William Quan Judge · Planetary Rounds and Globes Series · 17 pages

Seventeen pages in *four numbered parts, opened by an abstract and train of thoughts which gives each part its own heading and page number. The first three parts were published in The Path between February and April 1893 and republished in Dara Eklund's Echoes of the Orient*; Drawing 1 of this series, Our Planetary Chain of Seven Rounds, is reproduced part way through. The frontispiece is by Ilene Meyer.

Part 1 states the central correction: the six companion globes of our Earth are not separate bodies but interblend with one another — united by growth, in the term used here co-adunition, yet not of the same dense substance as our Earth, which is what consubstantiality would mean. What they represent is different states of consciousness. Part 2 sharpens that against a common misreading: the globes are not phases of each other but evolutionary stages of consciousness, and their nature can be apprehended only from a high metaphysical standpoint. Part 3 sets out the movement — from the Circle of Light, life unfolds along seven planetary bodies in seven rounds, from unconsciousness to self-consciousness, each body being the focus and locus of ascending states of monadic consciousness from the inorganic to the organic. Part 4 answers the question that most often attaches to this subject, and answers it in the negative: neither Mars nor Mercury belongs to the Earth chain, both being septenary units in the great host of chains in their own right. The reasoning given is an analogy with man's own sevenfold constitution — the body represents the Earth in her septenary chain, and just as we cannot see our own other principles objectively, we cannot see the principles of other planetary bodies unless they stand on the same plane of development as our Earth does now. Two questions are then raised and deliberately left open — to which principle Mars and Mercury correspond, and which of the Earth's principles is correspondingly in obscuration — with the flat statement that it is neither necessary nor allowed for us to know.

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