The Visible Sun Glows but Does Not Burn

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 36 pages

Thirty-six pages with a full abstract and train of thoughts. Its long title states a claim about physics that was contrary to the science of its day and remains so: *the visible sun is a ball of electromagnetic forces, glowing but not burning.* What the file is really about, though, is the relation between the sun we see and one we do not.

The visible sun is described as a veil of the invisible Central Spiritual Sun of Truth — the ever-concealed central point of all universes and solar systems, from which all emerged and toward which all gravitates. The polemical passage that follows is aimed at theology rather than astronomy, and it is a sharp formulation of a complaint made throughout this library: the extra-cosmic God has killed the belief in intra-cosmic intelligent forces, which govern the rotatory motion in the infinitudes of space. In other words, putting God outside the universe emptied the universe of everything but mechanism — which is offered as the shared root of both bad religion and bad science. The physical half of the argument then rests on the formula that gives another file in this library its title: the atoms of science are the vibrations of occultism, and they are what keep the wheels of life going. The mechanism proposed is that the Central Sun's passive emissions of creative light impart motion and awaken life in the numberless solar systems of the infinite Kosmos — passive being the word to notice, since the claim is that the source does not act on anything but simply radiates, and that motion arises in what receives it. A reader coming to this file for astronomy will find metaphysics; one coming for the doctrine of the sun in this system will find it set out more fully here than anywhere else in the section.

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