[Note: This article refers to disagreements upon a certain theosophical idea on the nature of Mars and Mercury and their relation to the Earth. For background see The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, p. 152 etc., section titled: “A Few Early Theosophical Misconceptions Concerning Planets, Rounds, and Man”.—ED.]
The solution of the difficulty about Mars and Mercury may possibly be this. These two Planets may very well belong to our “System of Worlds” without belonging to our “Planetary Chain” as that expression is used in The Secret Doctrine; that is, to our Earth with it six higher companions, corresponding to the six higher principles. Our total evolution may be concerned with seven such “Planetary Chains,” as The Secret Doctrine calls them, or “Septenary Worlds,” as they would be called in Esoteric Buddhism; and this set of seven Planetary Chains may be “our system of worlds,” in the words of the letter quoted. Of these seven Planetary Chains or Septenary Worlds, which are, as it were, seven chains of pearls hung side by side, our Earth, Mars, Mercury, and four other planets unknown to Science may be the fourth members or Planet D. So that our total evolution in this period may be carried on over seven sets of Septenary Worlds, for undoubtedly we have affinity with the whole sum of the starry children of space; otherwise they could never be related to our consciousness at all; or, to speak more simply, we could not see them.
Whether the Chain or Septenary System of Mercury is to be concerned in our evolution after we have entirely done with our present Septenary World. or whether we are to circle round a system of interwoven Chains, is a question which does not press for immediate solution. We had better agree to wait and see.
As this will give us a breathing space of from fifty to five hundred million years, during which the Planet we are aiming at will have changed as completely as our faculties of perceiving it, it does not matter much what we call it, in the meantime. We may postpone the question of names till we get there, and meanwhile discuss the problem with that “quiet, calm deliberation” which, we are assured, “will disentangle every knot.”