The Holy One, blessed be his name, has successively formed and destroyed sundry worlds before this one[1659].... Now this refers both to the first races [the “Kings of Edom”] and to the worlds destroyed.[1660]
“Destroyed” means here what we call “obscuration.” This becomes evident when we read the explanation given further on:
Still when it is said that they [the worlds] perished, it is only meant thereby that they [their humanities] lacked the true form, till the human [our] form came into [pg 745]being, in which all things are comprised and which contains all forms ...—it does not mean death, but only denotes a sinking down from their status [that of worlds in activity].[1661]
When, therefore, we read of the “destruction” of the Worlds, the word has many meanings, which are very clear in several of the Commentaries on the Zohar and in Kabalistic treatises. As said elsewhere, it means not only the destruction of many Worlds which have ended their life-career, but also that of the several Continents which have disappeared, as also their decline and geographical change of place.
The mysterious “Kings of Edom” are sometimes referred to as the “Worlds” that had been destroyed; but it is a “cloak.” The Kings who reigned in Edom before there reigned a King in Israel, or the “Edomite Kings,” could never symbolize the “prior worlds,” but only the “attempts at men” on this Globe—the Pre-Adamite Races, of which the Zohar speaks, and which we explain as the First Root-Race. For as, speaking of the six Earths (the six “Limbs” of Microprosopus), it is said that the seventh (our Earth) came not into the computation when the six were created (the six Spheres above our Globe in the Terrestrial Chain), so the first seven Kings of Edom are left out of calculation in Genesis. By the law of analogy and permutation, in the Chaldæan Book of Numbers, as also in the Books of Knowledge and of Wisdom, the “seven primordial worlds” mean also the “seven primordial” races (sub-races of the First Root-Race of the Shadows); and, again, the Kings of Edom are the sons of “Esau, the father of the Edomites”;[1662] i.e., Esau represents in the Bible the race which stands between the Fourth and the Fifth, the Atlantean and the Âryan. “Two nations are in thy womb,” said the Lord to Rebekah; and Esau was red and hairy. From verse 24 to 34, chapter xxv of Genesis contains the allegorical history of the birth of the Fifth Race.
Says the Siphra Dtzenioutha:
And the Kings of ancient days died and their chiefs [crowns] were found no more.
And the Zohar states:
The Head of a nation that has not been formed at the beginning in the likeness of the White Head: its people is not from this Form.... Before it [the White Head, the Fifth Race or Ancient of the Ancients] arranged itself in its [own, or [pg 746]present] Form ... all Worlds have been destroyed; therefore it is written: and Bela, the Son of Beor, reigned in Edom [Gen., xxxvi. Here the “Worlds”stand for Races]. And he [such or another King of Edom] died, and another reigned in his stead.
No Kabalist who has hitherto treated of the symbolism and allegory hidden under these “Kings of Edom” seems to have perceived more than one aspect of them. They are neither the “worlds that were destroyed,” nor the “Kings that died”—alone; but both, and much more, to treat of which there is no space at present. Therefore, leaving the mystic parables of the Zohar, we will return to the hard facts of materialistic Science; first, however, citing a few from the long list of great thinkers who have believed in the plurality of inhabited Worlds in general, and in Worlds that preceded our own. These are, the great mathematicians Leibnitz and Bernouilli, Sir Isaac Newton himself, as may be read in his Optics; Buffon, the Naturalist; Condillac, the Sceptic; Bailly, Lavater, Bernardin de St. Pierre, and, as a contrast to the two last named—suspected at least of Mysticism—Diderot and most of the writers of the Encyclopædia. Following these come Kant, the founder of modern Philosophy; the poet Philosophers, Goethe, Krause, Schelling; and many Astronomers, from Bode, Fergusson and Herschel, to Lalande and Laplace, with their many disciples in more recent years.