Aha! Thanks.
On Oct 10, 2004, at 12:32 PM, s-p & m-m Sirag wrote:

Jack,

On the "Sun behind the Sun":

This idea is not in Mike Murphy's novel, *An End to Ordinary History* (1982,
a follow-up to *Jacob Atabet*). The exotic idea (one of several) in that
book that is closest to this idea is the "Earth of Hurqalya."

In the "Author's Note" Mike writes:

"Kirov, around whom this story revolves, was an initiate of a mystic
school in Central Asia and an agent of the KGB. He introduced Fall to his
school's secret doctrine that our planet is part of a 'larger Earth," the
'Earth of Hurqalya,' in which the human body becomes a lunminous form of the
soul."

The idea of a "sun behind the sun" is perhaps implicit in the Gurdjieffian
idea of the "Sun-Absolute" that John G. Bennett attributes to Gurdjieff in
his biography: *Gurdjieff: Making a New World* (1973).

Also this idea is reminiscent of the Pythagorean model of the solar system
in which there is both a "central fire" around which the sun, the earth, and
a counter earth (called "Antichthon") revolve. For details see, "The
Development of the Pythagorean Doctrine" by Theodor Gomperz in *Theories of
the Universe: from Babylonian Myth to Modern Science (edited by Milton K.
Munitz (1957).

BTW: in a previous email you speculated that the name Atabet in Mike
Murphy's novel *Jacob Atabet* (1977) was based on the Hebrew letters Aleph
and Beth. (Of course, our word "alphabet", based on Greek letters goes back
to the Phoenecian/Hebrew alphabet.) Actually, Mike told me that Atabet was
the name of his maternal grandfather who was Basque.

All for now ;-)

Saul-Paul