11. When these masses were now carried round the sun into their first periods, and by quick and short circuits accomplished their annual spaces, according to the perpetual gyrations of the heavenly bodies, in the manner of a running spiral or winding line, they also cast themselves outwards into new circumferences, and thus by excursions resembling a spiral, removed themselves from the centre, and at the same time from the very heated and burning bosom of their father, but slowly and by degrees; 1 being thus as it were weaned, they began to move in another direction.
(How the earth and the planets, with their satellites, receded from their parent, the sun.)
There were a seven foetuses brought forth at one birth, equal in number to the planets which revolve in the grand circle of the world; each of these being balanced in its sphere according to the proportion of its mass to its weight, receded by a quicker or slower pace from its natal centre. The brothers being thus separated, every one moved with a velocity resulting from open space, and while flying off into gyrations gradually also gyrated into circumferences stretching out into the ether.
[3] Some of them also brought along with them from the palace of their parent little orbs, some more and some fewer, like servants and satellites, received within the spheres that were in gyration around them; but our earth brought as a handmaid only one, which is called the moon, to reflect into the face of the interposed earth, her mistress, especially in the night time, the luminous effigy of the sun received in herself as in a mirror. Thus whithersoever they went, and in whatsoever direction they turned themselves, they nevertheless acted under the view, and in the presence of their parent.
Mga talababa:
1. The spire which the novitiate orbs formed in their excursion from the solar centre, cannot be conceived intellectually unless the supreme forms of nature above mentioned are unfolded in their order; then it will be manifest that the fluxion of the orbs with their spheres round the centre, was like that of a spire round an axis, and afterwards like a projection from its vertical point into a larger curve, of which we shall speak presently. This circumgyration may be especially deduced and confirmed from the solar spots, which are also so many globes wandering proximately around the sun, some of which have quicker periods of revolution, but some slower, altogether according to their distances from the sun as from their centre the same may also be concluded from the orbits of the planets compared with each other.
(The spire of the excursion of the planets from the sun is described.)
Such gyrations, marked according to superior forms, are in no wise determined without respect to poles and greater circles, the equator and the ecliptic; the very nature of the form involves this. Both the declinations and the inclinations of the magnet, as well as its attractions, which are so many visible effects of the determination of that ether, confirm also the same [conclusion].
