pole of our particular terrestrial
_volition_, in the universe. What holds the earth swinging in space is
first, the great dynamic attraction to the sun, and then counterposing
assertion of independence, singleness, which is polarized in the moon.
The moon is the clue to our earth's individual identity, in the wide
universe.

The moon is an immense magnetic center. It is quite wrong to say she
is a dead snowy world with craters and so on. I should say she is
composed of some very intense element, like phosphorus or radium, some
element or elements which have very powerful chemical and kinetic
activity, and magnetic activity, affecting us through space.

It is not the sun which we see in heaven. It is the rushing thither
and the rushing thence of the vibrations expelled by death from the
body of life, and returned back again to the body of life. Possibly
even a dead soul makes its journey to the sun and back, before we
receive it again in our breast. Just as the breath we breathe out
flies to the sun and back, before we breathe it in again. And as the
water that evaporates rises right to the sun, and returns here. What
we see is the great golden rushing thither, from the death exhalation,
towards the sun, as a great cloud of bees flying to swarm upon the
invisible queen, circling round, and loosing again. This is what we
see of the sun. The center is invisible for ever.

And of the moon the same. The moon has her back to us for ever. Not
her face, as we like to think. The moon also pulls the water, as the
sun does. But not in evaporation. The moon pulls by the magnetic force
we call gravitation. Gravitation not being quite such a Newtonian
simple apple as we are accustomed to find it, we are perhaps farther
off from understanding the tides of the ocean than we were before the
fruit of the tree fell to Sir Isaac's head. It is certainly not simple
little-things tumble-towards-big-things gravitation. In the moon's
pull there is peculiar, quite special force exerted over those
water-born substances, phosphorus, salt, and lime. The dynamic energy
of salt water is something quite different from that of fresh water.
And it is this dynamic energy which the sea gives off, and which
connects it with the moon. And the moon is some strange coagulation of
substance such as salt, phosphorus, soda. It certainly isn't a snowy
cold world, like a world of our own gone cold. Nonsense. It is a globe
of dynamic substance like radium or ph