Daath and the Abyss

     "When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you" -
     Nietzsche

     "Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm" -
     Sartre

In modern Kabbalah there is a well developed notion of an Abyss between the
three supernal sephiroth of Kether, Chokhmah, and Binah, and the seven lower
sephiroth. When one looks at the progress of the Lightning Flash down the
Tree of Life, then one finds that it follows the path structure connecting
sephiroth except when it makes the jump from Binah to Chesed, thus
reinforcing this idea of a "gap" or "gulf" which has to be crossed. This
notion of an Abyss is extremely old and has found its way into Kabbalah in
several different forms, and in the course of time they have all been mixed
together into the notion of "the Great Abyss"; the Great Abyss is one of
those things so necessary that like God, if it didn't already exist, it
would have to be invented.

One of the earliest sources for the Abyss comes from the Bible:

     "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon
     the face of the deep."

Kabbalists adopted this view that there was a time before the creation
characterised by Tohu and Bohu, namely Chaos and Emptiness [1]. Another idea
mentioned several times in the Zohar [2] is that there were several failed
attempts at creation before the present one; these attempts failed because
mercy and judgement (e.g. force and form) were not balanced, and the
resulting detritus of these failed attempts, the broken shells of previous
sephiroth, accumulated in the Abyss. Because the shells (Qlippoth) were the
result of unbalanced rigour or judgement they were considered evil, and the
Abyss became a repository of evil spirits not dissimilar from the pit of
Hell into which the rebellious angels were cast, or the rebellious Titans in
Greek mythology who were buried as far beneath the Earth as the Earth is
beneath the sky.

Another theme which contributed to the notion of the Abyss was the legend of
the Fall. According to the Kabbalistic interpretation of the Biblical myth,
at the conclusion of the act of Creation there was a pure state, denoted by
Eden, where the primordial Adam-and-Eve-conjoined existed in a state of
divine perfection. There are various esoteric interpretations of what the
Fall represents, but all agree that after the Fall Eden became inaccessible
and Adam and Eve were separated and took on bodies of flesh here in the
material world. This theme of separation from God and exile in a world of
matter (and by extension, limitation, finiteness, pain, suffering, death -
manifestations of the rigours or evil inherent in God) precedes Kabbalah and
can be found in the Gnostic legend of Sophia exiled in matter. This idea of
separation or exile from divinity mirrors very closely the use of the Abyss
on the modern Tree to divide the sephiroth representing a human being from
the sephiroth representing God.

Isaac Luria (1534 -1572) introduced a new element into the notion of the
Abyss with his idea of "tzimtzum" or contraction. Luria wondered how it was
possible for the hidden God (En Soph) to create something out of nothing if
there wasn't any nothing to begin with. If the En Soph (no-end, the
infinite) is everywhere then how can we be distinct from the En-Soph? Luria
argued that creation was possible because a contraction in the En Soph had
created an emptiness where God was not, that En Soph had chosen to limit
itself by a withdrawal, and this showed that the principle of
self-limitation was a necessary precursor to creation; not only did this
explain why the Creation is separate from the hidden God, but it emphasised
that limitation was inherent in creation from the very beginning.
Limitation, finiteness, the separation of one thing from another, what early
Kabbalists referred to as the severity or "strict judgement" of God (what
modern Kabbalists call "form") was a puzzling quality to introduce into the
Creation given that it is the source of suffering and evil in the impersonal
sense, what Dion Fortune calls "negative evil" [3]. Luria's notion of
tsimtsum suggested that there was no possibility of creation without it, and
provided a rather abstract explanation to one of the most persistent
questions of all time, namely: "if God made the world and God is good, how
come he made mosquitoes?".

Pull together the various ideas of the Great Abyss and one ends up with a
sort of vast, initially empty arena like a Roman amphitheatre where the
drama of the Creation was enacted. The mysterious En Soph played a brief
role as director from the imperial box, only to retire behind a veil at the
conclusion of the performance leaving behind a huge power cord snaking in
from the unknown region beyond the arena, and plugged-in to a socket at the
rear of the sephira Kether. The lights of the sephiroth blaze out and
illuminate the centre of this vast arena; this is Olam Ha-Nekudoth, "The
World of Point Lights". At the periphery of the arena far from the lights of
manifestation there is a deep darkness where all the cast-off detritus and
spoil of the creation was deposited by weary angels and left to rot. A
strange life lives there.

The situation was more-or-less as described above when in 1909 Aleister
Crowley decided to "cross the Abyss" and added to the mythology of the Abyss
with the following description [4]:

     "The name of the Dweller in the Abyss is Choronzon, but he is not
     really an individual. The Abyss is empty of being; it is filled
     with all possible forms, each equally inane, each therefore evil
     in the only true sense of the word - that is, meaningless but
     malignant, in so far as it craves to become real. These forms
     swirl senselessly into haphazard heaps like dust devils, and each
     chance aggregation asserts itself to be an individual and shrieks
     `I am I!' though aware all the time that its elements have no true
     bond; so that the slightest disturbance dissipates the delusion
     just as a horseman, meeting a dust devil, brings it in showers of
     sand to the earth."

I was struck when reading this by the similarity between Crowley's
description above and the section on Hod and Netzach in which I described
the chaos of a personality under the control of the "hosts" or "armies" of
those two sephira, where a host of forms of behaviour compete for the right
to be "me". Crowley's experience has far more in common with the rending of
the Veil of Paroketh separating Yesod and Tiphereth, and further comments by
Crowley add weight to this:

     "As soon as I had destroyed my personality, as soon as I had
     expelled my ego, the universe to which it was indeed a frightful
     and fatal force, fraught with every form of fear, was only so in
     relation to the idea `I'; so long as `I am I' all else must seem
     hostile. Now that there was no longer any `I' to suffer, all these
     ideas which had inflicted suffering became innocent. I could
     praise the perfection of every part; I could wonder and worship
     the whole."

This is a very recognisable description of someone who has been released
from the demon of the false self and the imprisoning triad of Hod, Netzach
and Yesod, and moved through the Paroketh towards Tiphereth. Crowley's
experience is valid as it stands, but what it might mean to "cross the
Abyss", and the absurdity of Crowley's belief that he had achieved this,
will be examined in the following section on Binah and Chokhmah.

A twentieth-century Kabbalist who did succeed in adding something useful to
the ever-expanding notion of the Abyss was Dion Fortune, in her theosophical
work "The Cosmic Doctrine" [3]. The form of this work appears to have been
inspired by Blavatsky's "The Secret Doctrine", and certainly lives up to
Fortune's claim that it was "designed to train the mind, not to inform it."

Fortune describes three processes arising out of the Unmanifest (i.e. En
Soph). Ring Cosmos is an anabolic process underlying the creation of forms
of greater and greater complexity. Ring Chaos is a catabolic process
underlying the destruction and recycling of form. Ring-Pass-Not is a limit
where catabolism turns back into anabolism. She visualised this as three
great rings of movement in the Unmanifest, with the motion associated with
Ring Cosmos spiralling towards the centre, the movement of Ring Chaos
unwinding towards the periphery, and the dead-zone of Ring-Pass-Not defining
the outer limit of Ring Chaos as an abyss of unbeing, a cosmic compost heap
where form is digested under the dominion of the Angel of Death and turned
into something fertile where new growth can take place.

The similarity between Fortune's description of Ring Chaos and what in
programming is called a "reference-counting garbage collector" is
remarkable, given that she was writing in the 30's. Many programming
languages allow new programming structures to be created dynamically, thus
allowing the creation of more and more complex structures. At the same time
there is a mechanism to reclaim unused resources so that the system does not
run out of memory or disc space, and the normal scheme is that if a
structure is not referenced by any other structure, recycle it. In Fortune's
language, if you want to destroy something, you "make a vacuum round it
(i.e. remove all references). You prevent opposition from touching it. Then,
being unopposed, it is free to follow the laws of its own nature, which is
to join the motion of Ring Chaos."

"Cosmic Doctrine" is a valiant attempt to say something quite profound; at
an intellectual level it fails "abysmally", and I cannot read it without
squirming, but it still has more raw Kabbalistic and magical insight at an
intuitive level than just about anything else I have read. The idea of a
cosmic reference-counting garbage collection process and an abyss of unbeing
which is not so much a state as a process of unbecoming is something not
easily forgotten once touched.

A final example of an abyss is one which differs from the previous examples
in that it brings to the fore the relationship between us, the created, and
the Unmanifest, the En Soph itself. Kabbalistic writers agree that the
Unmanifest is not nothing; on the contrary, it is the hidden wellspring of
being, but as it is "not manifest being" it combines the words "not" and
"being" in a conjuction which can be apprehended as a kind of abyss. Scholem
[6] discusses this "nothingness" as follows:

     "The primary start or wrench in which the introspective God is
     externalised and the light that shines inwardly made visible, this
     revolution of perspective, transforms En Soph, the inexpressible
     fullness, into nothingness. It is in this mystical "nothingness"
     from which all the other stages of God's gradual enfolding in the
     Sefiroth emanate, and which the kabbalists call the highest
     Sefira, or the "supreme crown" of Divinity. To use another
     metaphor, it is the abyss which becomes visible in the gaps of
     existence. Some Kabbalists who have developed this idea, for
     instance Rabbi Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona (1300), maintain
     that in every transformation of reality, in every change of form,
     or every time the status of a thing is altered, the abyss of
     nothingness is crossed and for a fleeting mystical moment becomes
     visible."

It should be clear by now that the Abyss is a metaphor for a number of
intuitions or experiences. I do not know how many different kinds of abyss
there are, but there are some distinctions which can be made:

   * the Abyss of nothingness
   * the Abyss of separation
   * the Abyss of knowledge
   * the Abyss of un-being (or un-becoming)

The perception that being and nothingness go hand-in-hand is something
Sartre studied in great depth [7], and many of his observations on the
nature of consciousness and its relatationship to negation or nothingness
are among the most perceptive I have found. His arguments are lengthy and
complex, and I do not wish to summarise them here other than to say that he
viewed nothingness as the necessary consequence of a special kind of being
he calls "being-for-itself", the kind of being we experience as
self-conscious human beings.

The Abyss of separation can be experienced as a separation from the divine,
but it can also be experienced quite acutely in one's relationships with
others and with the physical world itself. Much of what we perceive about
the world and other people is an illusion created by the machinery of
perception; strip away the trick, Yesod becomes Daath, and a yawning abyss
opens up where one is conscious less of what one knows than of what one does
not; it is possible to look at a close friend and see something more alien,
remote and unknown than the surface of Pluto. This experience is closely
related to the Abyss of knowledge, which is discussed in more detail in the
discussion on Daath below.

The Abyss of un-being is the direct perception that at any instant it is
possible to not-be. This perception goes beyond the contemplation or
awareness of physical death; it is the direct apprehension of what Dion
Fortune calls "Ring Chaos", that un-being is less a state than a process,
that at every instant there is an impulse, a magnetic attraction towards
total self-annihilation on every level possible. The closer one moves
towards the roots of being, the closer one moves towards the roots of
un-being.

Daath means "Knowledge". In early Kabbalah Daath was a symbol of the union
of Wisdom (Chokhmah) and Understanding (Binah). The book of Proverbs is rich
mine of material on the nature of these three qualities, material which
forms the basis of many ideas in the Zohar and other Kabbalistic texts; e.g.
Proverbs 3.13:

     "Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth
     understanding....She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon
     her: and happy is every one that retaineth her. The Lord by wisdom
     hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he founded the
     heavens. By his knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds
     drop down the dew"

And Proverbs 24.3:

     "Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding is it
     established: And by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with
     all pleasant and precious riches."

In the "Bahir" [8] and "Zohar" [e.g. 2] Daath represents the symbolic union
of wisdom and understanding, and is their offspring or child. As the
Microprosopus, often symbolised by Tiphereth, is also the symbolic child of
Chokhmah and Binah, there is some room for confusion. According to the Zohar
however, Daath has a specific location in the Microprosopus, namely in one
of the three chambers of the brain, from where it mediates between the
higher (Chokhmah and Binah) and the lower (the six sephiroth or "chambers"
of the Microprosopus - see the reference to Proverbs 24.3 above).

I have often puzzled as to why knowledge is the natural outcome of wisdom
and understanding. It was only recently when I read Proverbs that I realised
that wisdom was being used in the sense of something external, something
which is received from someone else. As children we were told "do this" or
"don't do that", and often couldn't question the wisdom of the advice
because we lacked the understanding. I once had a furious row with my father
about building a liquid fuel rocket engine in the house using petrol and
hydrogen peroxide. He flatly refused to let me do it. I couldn't understand
the problem - I was going to be careful. I now know, because I understand
the stupidity of what I was trying to do, the wisdom of his refusal.
Received wisdom cannot be integrated into oneself unless there is the
capacity to understand it, and having understood, it becomes real knowledge
which can be passed on again as wisdom to someone else. For early Kabbalists
the ultimate wisdom was the wisdom of God as expressed in the Torah, and by
attempting to understand this wisdom (and that is what Kabbalah was) they
could arrive at the only knowledge truely worth having. Knowledge of God was
the union between the higher and lower, and perhaps this is why Daath was
never a sephiroth, something which manifests positively; since the Fall that
knowledge has been lost. One of the unattributable pieces of Kabbalah I was
taught was that Daath is the hole left behind when Malkuth fell out of the
Garden of Eden. If you examine my derivation of the Tree of Life in Chapter
1. closely you will see that I have based some of it on this very astute
observation.

The notion of Daath as a "hole" appears to have originated this century.
Gareth Knight, for example [9], provides a complete set of correspondences
for Daath, many of which happen to be negative Tiphereth correspondences or
misplaced correspondences borrowed from other sephiroth, but one at least is
appropriate: he gives the magical image of Daath as Janus, god of doorways.
Kenneth Grant [10], with his usual florid imagination, sees Daath as a
gateway through to "outer spaces beyond, or behind, the Tree itself"
dominated by Qlippothic forces.

There is a deep correspondence between sephiroth in the lower face of the
Tree and sephiroth in the upper face: look at the symmetry of the Tree and
you should see why Malkuth, Tiphereth and Kether are linked, why Hod and
Binah are linked, why Chokhmah and Netzach are linked, and most importantly
for the purposes of this discussion, that there is a correspondence between
Yesod and Daath. These are not just simple geometric symmetries; they
express some important relationships which are experientially verifiable,
and in terms of what makes most sense in Kabbalah and what does not, these
relationships are important. Daath and Yesod, at different levels, are like
two sides of the same coin. Jam the machinery of perception I said above,
and Yesod can become Daath. The following quotation is taken from an
bona-fide anthropological article [11] attempting to explain some of the
characteristic features of cave art:

     "Moving into a yet deeper stage of trance is often accompanied,
     according to laboratory reports, by an experience of a vortex or
     rotating tunnel that seems to surround the subject. The external
     world is progressively excluded and the inner world grows more
     florid. Iconic images may appear on the walls of the vortex, often
     imposed on a lattice of squares, like television screens.
     Frequently there is a mixture of iconic and geometric forms.
     Experienced shamans are able to plunge rapidly into deep trance,
     where they manipulate the imagery according to the needs of the
     situation. Their experience of it, however, is of a world they
     have come briefly to inhabit; not a world of their own making, but
     a spirit world they are privileged to visit."

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has read Michael Harner's "The
Way of the Shaman" [5]. There on page 103 (plate 8) is a beautiful picture
of the tunnel vortex, complete with prisms. When I first saw this picture I
was astonished and recognised it instantly, prisms and all; when I showed it
to my wife her reaction was the same. The tunnel vortex appears to be one of
the constants of magical/mystical experience, and it appears in a very
precise context. In Kabbalah the shamanic tunnel would be attributed to the
32nd. path connecting Malkuth to Yesod; this path connects the real world to
the underworld of the imagination and the unconscious, and is commonly
symbolised by a tunnel [eg.9]. However, using the symmetry of the Tree, this
path also corresponds to the path at another level connecting Tiphereth
across the Abyss, through Daath, to Kether. The tunnel/vortex at this level
is no longer subjective, because this level of the Tree corresponds to the
noumenal reality underpinning the phenomenal world, and links individual
self-consciousness to something greater. Just as Yesod represents the
machinery of sense perception, so Daath can flip over to become the Yesod of
another level of perception, not sense perception, but something completely
different that seems to operate out of the "back door" of the mind; this is
objective knowledge, what used to be called gnosis.

To conclude this section on Daath and the Abyss, it is worth asking what the
relationship between the two ideas is. As I programmer I am continually
aware of the gulf between abstract ideas, such as the number two and its
physical representations in the world: 2, II, .., two etc. The number two
can be represented in an infinite number of ways, and it is only when you
share some understanding of my language that you can begin to guess that a
particular mark in the world represents the number two. The situation is
even worse than it might seem; a basic theorem of information theory states
that the optimum way of expressing any piece of information is one where the
symbols occur completely randomly. I could take this paragraph, pass it
through an optimal text compressor and the same piece of text would be
indistinguishable from random garbage. Only I, knowing the compression
procedure, could extract the original message from the result. Whatever we
call information appears to exist independently of the physical world, and
uses the world of chalk marks, ink marks, magnetic domains or whatever like
a rider uses a horse. To me, the gulf is irreconcilable; between the
physical world and the world of the mind is an abyss, and I am not indulging
in "new physics" or anything vaguely suspect - this is meat and drink to the
average progammer, who spends most of his or her time transforming
abstractions from one symbol set to another.

To take a slightly different approach, there is a mathematical proof that
there is no largest prime number. I know that proof. No dissection of my
brain will ever reveal the proof to someone who does not know it. I am
prepared to bet a large quantity of alcohol that it is theoretically
impossible to discover; the proof that there is no largest prime number will
never be extracted even if you assume a neurologist capable of mapping every
atom in my brain. Evolution tends towards optimality, and I think the proof
will be encoded optimally to look like random garbage. There is an abyss
here; there is knowledge which can never be attained. In Kabbalah this
particular abyss is called the abyss of Assiah; it is the first in a series
of abysses. The next abyss is the abyss of Yetzirah, and it is this abyss I
have been discussing for most of this section. There are further abysses,
and this should be clearer when I discuss the Four Worlds and the Extended
Tree. The Abyss and Daath go together because the Abyss sets a limit on what
can be known from below the Abyss; the abyss is an abyss of knowledge, and
Daath is the hole we fall into when we try probe beyond. Can the nature of
God be expressed in terms of anything human? No. God is as human as a
cockroach, as human as a lump of stone, as human as a star, as human as
empty space. So how can you know anything about God? Only when Daath flips
over to become the Yesod of another world can you know anything, but
unfortunately the fiery speech of angels is like leprecaun's gold: by the
time you've taken it home to show to your friends, you've nothing but a
purse of dried leaves.

  1. Robert Graves & Raphael Patai, "Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis",
     Arena 1989
  2. Mathers, S.L., "The Kabbalah Unveiled", RKP 1981
  3. Fortune, Dion, "The Cosmic Doctrine", Aquarian 1976
  4. Crowley, Aleister, "The Confessions of Aleister Crowley", Bantam 1970
  5. Harner, Michael, "The Way of the Shaman", Bantam 1982
  6. Scholem, Gershom G., "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism", Schocken 1974
  7. Sarte, Jean-Paul, "Being and Nothingness", Routledge 1989
  8. Kaplan, Aryeh, "The Bahir Illumination", Weiser 1989
  9. Knight, Gareth, "A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism", Vols 1 &
     2, Helios 1972
 10. Grant, Kenneth, "Cults of the Shadow", Muller 1975
 11. Lewin, Roger, "Stone Age Psychedelia", New Scientist 8th. June 1991

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