The Book of the Damned

But our data: Of vast worlds that are orbitless, or that are navigable, or that are adrift in inter-planetary tides and currents: the data that we shall have of their approach, in modern times, within five or six miles of this earth-- But then their visits, or approaches, to other planets, or to other of the few regularized bodies that have surrendered to the attempted Entity of this solar system as a whole-- The question that we can't very well evade: Have these other worlds, or super-constructions, ever been seen by astronomers? I think there would not be much approximation to realness in taking refuge in the notion of astronomers who stare and squint and see only that which it is respectable and respectful to see. It is all very well to say that astronomers are hypnotics, and that an astronomer looking at the moon is hypnotized by the moon, but our acceptance is that the bodies of this present expression often visit the moon, or cross it, or are held in temporary suspension near it--then some of them must often have been within the diameter of an astronomer's hypnosis. Our general expression: That, upon the oceans of this earth, there are regularized vessels, but also that there are tramp vessels: That, upon the super-ocean, there are regularized planets, but also that there are tramp worlds: That astronomers are like mercantile purists who would deny commercial vagabondage. Our acceptance is that vast celestial vagabonds have been excluded by astronomers, primarily because their irresponsibilities are an affront to the pure and the precise, or to attempted positivism; and secondarily because they have not been seen so very often. The planets steadily reflect the light of the sun: upon this uniformity a system that we call Primary Astronomy has been built up; but now the subject-matter of Advanced Astronomy is data of celestial phenomena that are sometimes light and sometimes dark, varying like some of the satellites of Jupiter, but with a wider range. However, light or dark, they have been seen and reported so often that the only important reason for their exclusion is--that they don't fit in.