​Chapter 10. The Abyss

The diagrams draw a gap above the seven and pass over it as if it were a space to cross. The supernal three are set apart, and between them and what descends runs the break called the Abyss, with the empty station at its center where Daath is named and struck from the count. What happens there is the event the structure turns on, and it is not the mere absence of a station.

Consider what the supernal triad has done by the time it reaches its lower edge. Kether is the readiness to determine, Chokhmah is the undivided content to be determined, and Binah is the division given form, the place where "otherwise" is born and one term is first set against another. At the bottom of Binah the apparatus of cutting is complete. But it has cut nothing beyond its structure. There is no world yet for it to divide; Kether, Chokhmah, and Binah divide only their internal unfolding. The differentiation of the triad is reflexive, a blade honed on its own motion.

The Tree's logic works in Hegel's sense: thought moving in the element of pure thought, the concept unfolding its determinations. His Logic runs a parallel course, being into nothing, becoming and onward, the supernal labor of a reason dividing its content. And Logic passes over into Nature exactly where the Tree crosses the Abyss, the point where the self-enclosed thinking turns outward. The likeness holds all the way to the seam and breaks on it. For Hegel the passage is no encounter: the Idea passes into Nature, but Nature is the Idea in the form of otherness, and so returns to Spirit with no remainder. Nothing foreign enters. The Tree's Abyss marks the same turn outward, but unlike Hegel's passage, it is a genuine encounter.

At the Abyss the finished machine first turns outward. This is a break rather than the next step of the sequence, because between a blade ready to cut and its first stroke lies what the blade does not contain: the material. Chesed is a mercy bearing on objects, the love that sorts the worthy from the needy. Objects of love, things to be sorted, are what mercy works upon. Where did they come from? Not from the triad, which produced only the pure form of cutting and no material for it. What the lower seven work upon does not descend from above, since there is only the form of division there with nothing in it to divide. Therefore, at the Abyss, the Tree first encounters the material it did not produce.

What enters has a name. The Greek temptation is to call it to mē on, non-being, and to hear that as Plotinus fixed it: matter, hyle, the last and faintest emanation where the light gives out, privation at the floor of the descent. That reading places what-enters at the bottom, as a running-out, a deficiency. The inversion is exact. What enters comes in at the seam, beneath the supernal triad, as the reservoir from which the descent is cut. And it is a fullness: the depth before any measure, excluding no form, the unformed reservoir from which the Tree is carved. A plenum before the cut.

This is the depth the older cosmogonies knew before the emanationists renamed it a lack, and its oldest name is Tiamat, the salt chaos of the Babylonian beginning, the undivided water out of which the world was made by her dismembering. The myth carries the thesis: a cosmos cut from a plenum that was there before. She is what enters at the seam, the pre-metric void the Tree reaches into and calls emanation.

This is the only account that lets multiplicity be there at all. Set it against its rival. Either multiplicity enters from outside, or it emanates from the One and is nothing but God dispersed. If the many is the One scattered, then every distinct thing is a fragment of the source in exile, and the Qliphoth are its shed pieces, and there is literally one purpose creation can have: the gathering of all of it back, since what is God's alone has nowhere to go but home. A world made of the One's dispersal has a return built into its marrow and no other end available to it. And the reason given for the making falls with it. Love was the noblest ground, but a beloved cut from the One's substance is still God wearing a second face. With no outside, there is no other to love, only the self estranged on purpose and gathered, and the drama of gift and return is a monologue the One holds with its reflection. Tiamat is what breaks the mirror. An otherness the Tree did not emanate is the only thing that could have been loved without love collapsing into self-address, and it is the one thing the doctrine cannot admit.

The reservoir is not spent in the cutting. Nathan of Gaza posed the question his frame makes unavoidable, asking why the Tehom, the deep of the second verse in Genesis, remains in the world once creation was supposed to have closed over it. His answer keeps the deep at work: from it the worlds go on being emanated, the ordered cosmos drawn from the Abyss it never used up. The seam stays open, the plenum standing at it undiminished, because a cut takes a face from the deep and leaves the deep entire, and every determination the Tree makes reaches into the same undivided reserve. This persistence is read as a lack, the Tehom as the region the light had yet to reach and fill. Read instead as fullness, the Tehom is the reserve outlasting everything drawn from it, the depth that no amount of cutting empties.

A defender of the Tree will say the reservoir is named, and named better. This is Ain Soph, he says, the Without-End, the infinite fullness set above the Crown, reached only by stripping predicates away. You have found our God at the seam and called him by a demon's name. The two do look alike from a distance, both of them fullness, both prior to any determination. What separates them is how each relates to what follows. Ain Soph is a fullness that holds the position of source, inclined toward the overflow, related to what proceeds from it as origin to issue; the earlier chapters showed that the will bent toward pouring is a determined will, so the infinite that emanates is the sealed will. Tiamat appears as the absence of source-position. She has no inclination to pour, no status as a source, for she is the depth before any center has formed in it that could claim origin. The one is a plenum self-enclosed as beginning; the other is a plenum with no beginning in it, holding distinctions unmade and no will to rank them. Whether "Ain Soph" is therefore a second principle or only Tiamat renamed — the depth called a nothing so it could be called a source — is the question the next turn answers.

What she is, taken precisely, is to heteron: the other, in the sense Plato gave it in the Sophist and against the sense Plotinus later imposed. Heteron is not ouk on, not sheer nothing; it is difference itself, that which is not this because it is something else. The material entering through the Abyss is heteron, the otherness on which the blade has yet to fall, a difference before the determination divides it into a kept side and a dropped one. The same otherness appeared inside the Tree as Binah, the dividing power; but there it stood after the division, put to the work of return, while here it is primordial, the reservoir the dividing will reaches into.

One kabbalistic strand traced evil to that very power. Isaac ha-Kohen, in his Treatise on the Left Emanation, set down what Joseph Dan counts as the first comprehensive kabbalistic account of evil, one that Scholem read, in a reading later scholarship has contested, as frankly gnostic, close kin to the Marcionites and the Manichaeans. Isaac drove the root of evil past Gevurah to Binah, the dividing force, and told a coherent myth in which the powers of evil predate creation: worlds of dark emanation arise and are destroyed before our world, while darkness contends with light before the first vessel is formed. Here that strand names difference as such, the power that draws distinctions, as the seat of the dark, and dates the war to a point before the beginning. It reaches, in its idiom, what we hold. The heteron is no wreckage that befell a finished Tree; it stands before the Tree and is coeval with the unity that would gather it. Isaac lays two seals on the insight. He houses the divider inside the Sephirotic order, a potency of Binah gone destructive, and he codes the primordial plurality as a moral evil ranked beneath the good, the left emanation set under the right. Strip both seals and the reading becomes clear: the heteron precedes the cut that ranks either side and assigns good and evil to its poles; the Other Side is as old as the One.

The name of Tiamat is not borrowed from Babylon and pressed onto the Kabbalah from outside. Kabbalistic material carries this figure within its account of the primordial as a buried countercurrent to its official monism. It is an old pattern in the myths that the powers of chaos precede the powers of ordering: Tiamat before Marduk, the giants before the Aesir, the formless water before the God who divides it. Kabbalah keeps the pattern where it thinks no one is looking. Rachel Elior, reading the sixteenth-century treatise Galya Raza, draws out its ontology of precedence: evil goes before good as darkness goes before light and as absence goes before presence, and the shared origin of all being lies in the dark, in the Sitra Achra that reigned alone before creation.

Idel follows a line of commentary that finds the same pattern in the opening of Genesis, in the darkness on the face of the Tehom the text sets before the first word calling light. Ibn Abi Zimra reads that order as ontological, the undivided preceding what is drawn from it, the creation account opening upon the formless deep. The Tehom named there is the water the Babylonians called Tiamat, one figure under two tongues, set at the threshold of the cosmos in the tradition's scripture.

The Edomite kings precede the kings of Israel; Cain is born before Abel; tohu, the chaos, precedes bohu and is the first vessel from which the rest is drawn. Under the doctrine that sets the One first and the dark second, the texts themselves confess an order the system forbids: the primordial dark that Babylon named the salt chaos dismembered to make a world and that the Kabbalist, in these buried passages, calls by the name of the Other Side.

The reading we lean on has its strongest challenger. Idel in Primeval Evil in Kabbalah has taken apart the old consensus that Scholem and Tishby held, the account that traced the dark left emanation to Iranian dualism by way of Gnosticism and called what reached the Kabbalah an attenuated version of it. Idel answers that no Gnostic source has ever been shown to have touched the Kabbalah, that the derivation rests on assertion and not on any text, and that the Kabbalistic material, looked at closely, shows no dualism at all, not even a softened one. What it portrays is a subordinated pseudo-symmetry, a pairing in which the left is never an equal of the right but a rank set beneath it, with no second god opposed to the first. He is correct. A genuine dualism is exactly what the tradition could not hold. The Tree gathers difference under unity and ranks the Other Side below the One; a symmetry that is subordinated is a difference that has been mastered, a two bent back under a one. Idel describes the demiurgic operation and takes its result as proof that no duality was ever present. Here that pseudo-symmetry is read instead as the trace of a duality subordinated. Those strands reached the primordial two in Isaac, Nathan, and the buried strata read by Elior, but the tradition could not let the two remain equal, so it subordinated the second principle it found, filed the left under the right, and produced the pseudo-symmetry Idel finds in place of the dualism.

Now the empty station can be read as more than the absent harmony of identity and difference. The tenfold count leaves Daath unnumbered, and many diagrams either omit it or mark it as a ghostly station. What would occupy that place is knowledge of the otherness the Tree encounters at the seam. The supernals split into two modes. Chokhmah is intuition that takes the whole at once; Binah is discursion, the power that parts it into terms. Knowledge here would hold both together, the grasp that unifies and the cut that divides, kept level, neither one resolved into the other. But the place where identity meets difference is precisely this seam, where the Tree's forming meets the heteron upon which it works. Daath would be the Tree's knowledge of its contact with the heteron. To hold that is to know the incoming otherness as a principle in its own right, coordinate with the unity that cuts it.

When the tradition did at last give the station a name, it named it in a form that proves the point. Scholem in his Kabbalah records that from the end of the thirteenth century a complementary Sephirah called Daath, Knowledge, appears between Chokhmah and Binah as a harmonization of the two, and that it was counted as "the external aspect of Kether," introduced so each triad could be read as a synthesis that finally resolved its opposing terms. The wording confirms the reading and completes it. Daath is the harmony of Chokhmah and Binah, exactly what the empty station required. And the theologians, forced to place it, set it inside the Crown and made it a resolution, the opposition dissolved upward into the unity that Kether is. A synthesis that resolves difference into unity is the only harmony the Tree can bear, the kind already licensed in Tipheret. What it cannot encompass is the harmony that resolves no opposition, identity and difference held level with neither one sublated, and that is the Daath we mean.

To build Daath is to know that beneath every cut lies the non-Tree, that unity works on what is given to it from outside and calls it emanation. The Tree cannot contain that knowledge and remain the principle of unity. The station is the one place where the Tree would cease to be the Tree.

What Daath would harmonize is identity and difference themselves — or, at the level of count, the one and the many. Chesed and Gevurah are powers, and Tipheret strikes a proportion between them. Identity and difference answer to no such proportion. They are unity and multiplicity in bare opposition, and nothing rises above the one and the many to gather both, since neither is prior enough to hand the other its measure.

The instinct rebels, wanting the one first. Unity looks like the brick and multiplicity the house: set down units and they sum, one added to one producing the many, so the one must come before what is built from it. The brick can exist without the house, and the house cannot be built without the brick, and the ranking feels like the order of being. It is the order of a habit. A brick is a thing on its own; a one is not. To say "one" is already to hold it apart from the two and the none it is told against, so the one is grasped only through its difference from the many, and the many are ones held apart. Two contains its ones, and a one is legible only where a second could face it. What both are built from is the difference that lets either be counted at all, and that difference lies beneath both, belongs to neither, and precedes the pair it makes possible. There is no senior term. The one and the many are coeval, each legible only through the other.

The Nightside practitioners mark this station as the gate, even while the daytime diagrams leave it blank. Kenneth Grant, whose Nightside of Eden maps the Tree's reverse face, sets at Daath "the Eighth Head of the Stooping Dragon, raised up when the Tree of Life was shattered," the serpent that climbed to strike at the heart of godhead and slipped behind the Tree at this point. He reads its knowledge as "the secret of Duality," and binds Daath to Death, "that other gateway which opens upon the void of personal extinction."

Asenath Mason, in her Qliphothic Meditations, marks the two faces of the point. Daath is taken, she writes, "not as a Sephirah at all, but rather all ten Sephiroth united as one," and from the lip of the Abyss that unity comes apart, "all that we have experienced so far dissected and divided into all possible parts, infinite and limitless." The one gathered at Daath, the many loosed in the Abyss below it, the station where unity and multiplicity touch and come apart: the practitioners found the seam.

Daath is the station no one can occupy and stay intact; the reason is the same antinomy, now seen from the side of whoever enters it. Thinking runs by taking one mode at a time, grasping the whole or parting it into the distinct, settling on one and letting it govern. Consciousness cannot occupy a station that demands both at once and lets neither win without coming apart. The current that crosses the Abyss records this, the dissolution at the gap, and reads it as the price of passage.

What the practitioners place at the gate is the death of the one who would cross it. Grant sets Choronzon there, the dweller in the Abyss, the power of dispersion that meets whoever enters Daath and scatters the self into parts. Mason describes the passage as the "ecstatic destruction of the ego-self," the single seat of identity broken until what was held as one comes apart into the many it was built upon. Read through the antinomy, this is not a trial imposed upon the crossing from outside; it is the crossing. To stand at Daath is to be asked to hold intuition and discursion at once, and a self is a self because it holds one mode and calls it "I." The station undoes that self, and the unified knower is what cannot survive.

This fixes the count. The sealed Tree has ten stations, Daath struck from it so the supernals never know the outside they touch. The Tree with its cuts unsealed has eleven. The crossing of the Abyss begins here, at the recovered eleventh, and the dissolution it costs is the first of two thresholds the ascent has to pass.

What the Tree encounters at the Abyss, then, is not the husks and impurity heaped below Malkuth. That layer is the Tree's Qliphothic sediment. At the seam, the Tree meets Tiamat.