Sun
Article
Sun is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between February 21, 2025 and March 27, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Earth orbits sun in an ellipse""; “one thinks to see a dark blue disk in front of the sun”; “various references to looking at the sun and associated phenomena”. It most often appears alongside ACX, Ethan Muse, Fatima.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: February 21, 2025
- Last seen: March 27, 2026
Appears In
- Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe
- The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
- Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
- A Buddhist Sun Miracle?
Related Pages
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- ACX (3 shared issues)
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- Ethan Muse (3 shared issues)
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- Fatima (3 shared issues)
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- Medjugorje (3 shared issues)
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- Substack (3 shared issues)
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- Virgin Mary (3 shared issues)
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- A Ordem (2 shared issues)
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- Abraham Lincoln (2 shared issues)
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- Alburitel (2 shared issues)
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- Almeida (2 shared issues)
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- Antonio de Paula (2 shared issues)
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- Benin City (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
1650: why does the Earth orbit the Sun the way it does? Of course, because it's a mathematically consistent possibility, ellipses are nice, and we'd be dead if it didn't! What more is there to say? But actually it was Newton's law of gravity.
1875: why has the Sun been able to burn for billions of years, when gravitational energy would only power it for millions? It must be because otherwise, we wouldn't have had time to evolve! But actually it was nuclear energy.
I think this is false. Tegmark's version of the anthropic principle says things should be as simple as possible, preferably fit on a chalkboard. If you tried to put "Earth orbits sun in an ellipse" to something that on a chalkboard, you'd run into trouble defining "Earth" and "Sun", and if you tried to do it rigorously you would end up with something like gravity. Or even if you didn't, explaining orbits and tides with the same thing would be simpler than using an equation for both of them.
Since then, the Sun Miracle of Fatima has gained a reputation as the final boss of paranormal experiences, the ultimate challenge for would-be skeptics and debunkers. It’s not hard to see why. The witnesses included journalists, atheists, prominent scientists, and people who freely admitted that they had only attended in order to laugh at everyone else when nothing happened. There are far too many of them to dismiss, and their reports are surprisingly close to unanimous. People in nearby towns who knew nothing about the miracle claimed to have seen the same thing, seemingly ruling out mass hallucination. There are photographs - too low-tech to clearly visualize the sun, but clear enough to show a crowd pointing at the sky in astonishment. For one hundred eight years, believers and skeptics have written magazine articles, scientific papers, and at least a dozen books on the topic, mostly without progress.
Now its fame has reached Substack. Ethan Muse presents the case in favor, and Evan Harkness-Murphy the case against, with additional commentary from Dylan and Bentham’s Bulldog. I don’t think any of them have risen to the occasion. Ethan observes the formalities of good debate, but presents such a neatly-packaged story that readers are liable to miss the thousand little threads that trail off the bottom and lead places that are, if anything, even stranger than the original miracle. Evan puts admirable effort into arguing that child-seers could have non-veridical visions, but by the time he gets to the sun miracle itself, he has only a few potshots about crowd psychology and “optical phenomena”. Other skeptics are even worse, barely gesturing at Evan’s piece before redirecting their attention to boasts about how they have totally demolished the credulous fundies, or laments about how cosmically unfair it is that they must take time out of their busy schedules to respond to such idiocy. The final boss of the paranormal deserves more respect!
Inline links: Ethan Muse presents the case in favor, Evan Harkness-Murphy the case against, Dylan, Bentham’s Bulldog
Finally, at many points in this discussion, you will feel tempted to stare at the sun. Do not stare at the sun. By the end of this discussion, I hope you will not only have re-derived the usual reasons not to stare at the sun, but maybe even discovered some new ones you didn’t know about.
In the original post, I cited ambiguous later examples of sun miracles which didn’t seem to affect everyone equally and in some cases were unconnected (or barely connected) to religious phenomena, concluding that they must be some kind of very unusual illusion. My main hangup with this conclusion was the wild implausibility of an illusion that nobody had ever noticed before, outside of this one 1917 miracle and a few copycats, despite plenty of people staring at the sun throughout history for various (bad) reasons. Surely there must be somebody else, somewhere, discussing how if you stare at a bright light long enough it will spin and change color.
During this solar occurrence, the air took on successively different colors. While looking at the sun, I noticed that everything around me darkened. I looked at what was nearby and cast my eyes away towards the horizon. Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground. Fearing impairment of the retina, which was improbable, because then I would not have seen everything in purple, I turned about, closed my eyes, cupping my hands over them, to cut off all light. With my back turned, I opened my eyes and realized that the landscape and the air retained the purple hue.
Continuing to look at the sun, I noticed the environment had brightened. Soon after, I heard a country bumpkin nearby saying in an astonished voice, “That lady’s yellow.” Indeed, everything had changed, near and far, taking on the color of old, yellow apricots. People looked sickly and jaundiced. I smiled, finding them downright ugly and unattractive. Laughter rang out. My hand was the same shade of yellow.
In 1917, some Portuguese children started seeing visions of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin told them she would enact a great miracle on a certain day in October, and a crowd of 100,000 gathered to witness the event. According to eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, etc, they saw the sun spin around, change colors, and do various other miraculous things. At least a hundred separate testimonies of the event have come down to us, with only two or three people saying they didn’t see it. Catholics continue to bring this up as one of the best-attested miracles and strongest empirical proofs of the faith - including here on Substack, where there was a spirited debate about the event last fall.
I did my best to research the event, and the results were The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know and Highlights From The Comments On Fatima. The main thing I was able to add to the Substack discussion, if not the broader worldwide one, was a survey of similar events. There were apparent sun miracles at various other Catholic sites and apparitions of the Virgin, including a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Italy, and a small town in Bosnia where they seem to happen regularly. But also, people who “sungaze” - a weird alternative medicine practice where people stare at the sun in the hopes that maybe this will help something and they won’t go blind - report sometimes seeing the sun spin and change color in similar ways. And Buddhist meditators report that concentrating very hard on any bright light will cause similar things to happen.
Inline links: The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
Still, the Catholics - especially original Fatima-Substacker Ethan Muse - were not convinced. The other Catholic sightings could have been other real miracles, equally attributable to the Virgin. The sungazers were staring at the sun for a long time, unlike the Fatima pilgrims who just happened to glance up at it. And the meditators were doing sophisticated contemplative exercises, again different from the Fatima pilgrims who just looked up and saw it. These were suggestive, but there was no record of a miracle exactly like Fatima happening within a non-Catholic religious tradition.