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.

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 is grammatically peculiar — it takes no article, as though it were almost a name — and philologists have long noted its kinship with Tiamat, the salt-water ocean and primal mother slain in the Babylonian creation epic. Whether the biblical writers borrowed the figure or inherited a common Semitic inheritance is debated; what the texts share is the sense of a watery chaos that precedes and resists the ordered world. When the Hebrew scriptures were rendered into Greek, tehom became abyssos, the bottomless — and from there the word passed into Christian usage with a second meaning. In the Book of Revelation the abyssos is no longer the deep of creation but a pit, sealed and guarded, the prison of demons and the place from which the destroyer rises. The single word now held both ends of the cosmos.

Later esoteric systems took up the term and gave it a structural place. In the Kabbalah, the diagram of the divine emanations leaves a gap between the highest triad and the powers below it, and a current of later interpretation — much of it nineteenth-century and after, rather than medieval — named that gap the abyss: the discontinuity a soul must cross, where ordinary understanding fails. The most developed version belongs to the modern occult revival, and should be read as its reading, not as the older Kabbalists’ own. Jacob Boehme, the seventeenth-century Lutheran shoemaker and visionary, used a related image he called the Ungrund, the groundless — an unfathomable abyss of will, prior to God’s self-revelation, out of which both light and darkness are eternally born. For Boehme this was not 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, a dark ground to be honored are four distinct ideas. The word holds them together because each, in its own way, points past the edge of what can be stood upon.

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

→ Related: Emanation · Mesopotamia · Gnosis · The One