Abyss

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The abyss is the name given, across several traditions, to a fathomless depth at or before the beginning of things — the formless water over which creation begins, or the bottomless gulf into which what is lost descends. The image is older than any one doctrine, and it carries two charges at once: origin and oblivion, the womb of the world and the place of no return. The word it travels under belongs to a single family — tehom, abyssos, Bythos, Ungrund — and that family keeps lending its depth to whatever a tradition most needs to place beyond the reach of standing ground.

Its oldest layer in the Western scriptures is the Hebrew tehom, the deep that in the opening verses of Genesis lies dark and unformed while the spirit of God moves over the waters. The word recurs some three dozen times in the Hebrew Bible, almost always in the singular, and it cuts both ways: it is the fountain of springs and the blessing of the deep that crouches beneath, and it is the “fountains of the great deep” that break open in catastrophe and the waters the sea is made to swallow. Yet it never acts on its own — in the Hebrew text it is passive, under the sovereignty of God, the chaos-monster already half tamed. The word is also grammatically peculiar: it takes no article, as though it were almost a name, a point Gunkel read as a fossil of the personal name behind it. Philologists have long noted the kinship of tehom with Tiamat, the salt-water ocean and primal mother of the Babylonian creation epic; the soundest reading makes this a cognate rather than a loan — the same ancient Semitic word for the sea, shared with the Akkadian tiāmtu and the Ugaritic form, and not a figure imported from Babylon. The Hebrew has kept the root and stripped the combat. Whether the biblical writers borrowed the figure or inherited a common Semitic deep is debated, with John Day arguing that the surviving traces of the sea-and- dragon struggle reached Israel through Canaanite myth rather than directly from the east. What the texts share, across the dispute, is the sense of a watery chaos that precedes the ordered world.

That chaos has an older home upstream. The Babylonian Enuma Elish opens with nothing but undifferentiated water, which parts into two: Apsu, the sweet fresh water beneath the earth, and Tiamat, the bitter salt sea, drawn as a serpent. From their mingling the first gods are begotten, and when the young god Marduk at last slays Tiamat he splits her body to make the sky and the earth — chaos not merely defeated but worked into cosmos. The fresh-water deep keeps its own name, the abzu or apsu, the reservoir beneath the world where the god of wisdom dwells, the Mesopotamian “deep” proper. The waters of that epic are also the waters of the deluge in the flood traditions of the region, but the abyss inherits them in their other office, as the formless source out of which order is made; the deluge reading belongs to the comparative study of flood myth.

The Greeks reached the same edge by another road. Hesiod’s Theogony declares that “at first Chaos came to be” — the first thing of all, before earth, before the underworld, before love. The word chaos does not in its origin mean disorder; it means a gap, a gaping void, a chasm, from a root meaning to yawn or gape open, kin to the English yawn. The primordial state, in Greek, is literally a gaping abyss. Beneath it lies Tartarus, the cavernous pit where the defeated Titans are sealed away — so the origin-and-oblivion pairing reappears inside Greek myth itself, the gaping mouth of beginnings above and the bottomless prison below. And the Greek adjective for that bottomlessness, abyssos — a without a byssos, a depth without a floor — is the very word the Septuagint translators chose when they came to render tehom. There the two streams met: the Hebrew deep and the Greek void joined under one Greek name.

From there the word passed into Christian usage with a second, darker meaning. In the Book of Revelation the abyssos is no longer the deep of creation but a pit, sealed and guarded — a shaft opened with a key, from which a plague of locusts pours, ruled by “the angel of the abyss,” named Abaddon in Hebrew and Apollyon in Greek, the destroyer. The beast ascends out of it; the dragon is bound and shut within it for a thousand years; the legion of demons begs not to be cast down into it. The deep that had been the womb of the world was now its dungeon, the chthonic source of the last enemy. The single word held both ends of the cosmos.

The Gnostics took the depth in the opposite direction, lifting it above everything rather than burying it below. In the Valentinian systems the source of all things is Bythos, the Depth — the unknowable Father, silent and unfathomable, before whom there is nothing. Paired with Silence, after long ages of contemplation, Bythos puts forth the chain of Aeons that fill the divine realm, the Pleroma or fullness; and yet the Depth itself stays beyond reach, so that the fall of Sophia is bound up with her longing toward the unattainable and unknowable source. Here the abyss is not a chaos to be ordered nor a pit to be feared but the divine ground itself, the fathomless origin from which the worlds of light descend — and the kinship is in the very word, for Bythos and abyssos share the same root for depth. This is the abyss as unknowable source, and it stands beside the saving knowledge that the Gnostic currents prized; the fuller picture of that knowing belongs to the entry on gnosis.

Later esoteric systems gave the term a structural place on a map. In the Kabbalah, the diagram of the divine emanations leaves a gap between the highest triad — Crown, Wisdom, Understanding — and the seven powers below it, and the descending “lightning flash” of emanation has to leap that divide. A current of interpretation, much of it nineteenth-century and after rather than medieval, named that gap the abyss and set within it the hidden non-sephirah Da’ath, Knowledge, which appears to bridge the gulf so that the highest influx may descend. The most developed version of this belongs to the modern occult revival and should be taken as the revival’s own elaboration, not the older Kabbalists’ teaching. In the system Aleister Crowley built on the Golden Dawn, “crossing the abyss” became the supreme ordeal of the soul’s ascent: the passage into the grade of Master of the Temple, the entry into Understanding, which demands the dissolution of the ego itself. Its guardian is Choronzon, the demon of dispersion, in whose presence all things appear scattered and meaningless. This is the abyss in its fourth office, a gulf to be crossed — the bottomless gap of the cosmologists turned into a stage of the inner path, set at the furthest distance from the watery deep where the word began.

Jacob Boehme, the seventeenth-century Lutheran shoemaker and visionary, reached the depth without any diagram at all. He called it the Ungrund, the groundless — an unfathomable abyss of will, prior to God’s self-revelation, neither light nor darkness, neither love nor wrath, out of which both are eternally born. In his depth, Boehme wrote, God himself does not know what he is, for he knows no beginning and nothing like himself and no end; and out of that groundless will the dialectic of wrath and love, dark and light, comes ceaselessly to birth. For Boehme this was not a chaos to be escaped but the dark root of everything, divinity before it became anything definite.

What recurs through these uses is a single intuition rendered in different vocabularies: that beneath or before the ordered, nameable world lies something without floor or form, and that this groundlessness is bound up with both where things come from and where they can be lost. The traditions do not mean the same thing by it — a chaos to be ordered, a pit to be feared, a gulf to be crossed, an unknowable source to be approached, a dark ground to be honored are distinct ideas, and the same word serves them only because each, in its own way, points past the edge of what can be stood upon. One word-family, drawn taut over the whole arc from cosmos to soul, keeps naming the place where the ground gives out.

→ In the library: Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) · Steiner — Mystics of the Renaissance (incl. Boehme) (1910)

→ Related: Gnosis · Kabbalah · Comparative Flood Myth · Hexameron