Planetary Orbits Are Perpetually Shifting

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Planetary Rounds and Globes Series · 16 pages

Sixteen pages opened by an abstract and train of thoughts giving each position with its page number, so the study can be used as a reference as well as read through.

The question the file sets itself is why celestial orbits perpetually shift their position and form, and its first move is to survey the answers on offer — speculations, it says, enough for every taste and brain power, on the origin of rotation and on the origin of the planes and comets. The verdict on all of them is that none can escape from the squirrel's wheel, any more than the theory of gravity itself: thirty-nine contradictory hypotheses are counted as having been offered for the self-generated primitive rotatory motion of the heavenly bodies, none of which professed to discover the origin of things but only a stage in an imagined material history. Against that, Count de Maistre and William Herschel are quoted as cutting the Gordian knot by saying that the planets rotate because they are made to rotate — that a will is needed to impart circular motion and another to restrain it under the perturbing influence of the sun. The observational claim at the heart of the file is set out in detail: that the orbits are far from immutable and are subject to perpetual mutation, alternately widening and narrowing, their great axis lengthening and diminishing, oscillating from right to left around the sun, raising and lowering itself periodically while pivoting around itself with a kind of tremor. The point pressed against gravity is a single vivid one — that a comet whose tail defies the law of gravity in the sun's own face can hardly be credited with obeying it. The closing pages turn constructive: spirit as the first differentiation of eternal Be-ness, the causeless cause of the cosmos, manifesting through a plurality of creative and intelligent but contrary forces, centripetal and centrifugal, each possessing inherent powers of its own.

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