The Abyss

On the kabbalistic tree, between the three Supernal Sephiroth (Keter, Chokmah, Binah) and the remaining seven, there is a rupture: the Abyss. In most diagrams its place is occupied by Da'at (דַּעַת, “knowledge”), the Sephirah that is not, a quasi-Sephirah, the appearance of an emanation where no true emanation exists. Da'at belongs to neither the upper triad nor the lower seven. It hangs in the gap as the mark of that division.

The Abyss is more than an empty space between levels of the tree: an ontological fracture, the place where the link between the Infinite (Ein Sof) and the finite world fundamentally breaks. No force, no quality, no understanding can cross the Abyss directly. The light descending from the Supernals must somehow leap across it. In that leap something happens that Kabbalah has never quite described with full clarity.

Da'at and the Dark Tree

On the Dark Tree the Abyss occupies a particular position. Where the bright tree separates the Supernals from the rest, the dark tree separates the three upper Qliphoth (Thaumiel, Ghagiel, Sathariel) from the seven below. The Tunnel of Gimel (Gargophias) crosses the Abyss along the middle pillar of the Dark Tree; it is the longest and the most dangerous of the paths, because it passes through the very place where the structure of the Dark Tree ruptures.

In the dark schema, Da'at is not “non-existent knowledge” as on the bright tree: its nature on the Other Side is knowledge that destroys whoever receives it. That knowledge is dangerous precisely because it is true, not because it is false, and it carries content the human being cannot hold without being broken by it. The Abyss does not guard against ignorance. It guards against knowledge.

Choronzon: the Demon of the Abyss

The name Choronzon is inseparable from the Abyss in the Western magical tradition. Aleister Crowley, in 1909, together with Victor Neuburg, performed in the Algerian desert of Bou Saâda a ritual of invocation whose result, by his own account, was the appearance of Choronzon: the Dweller in the Abyss, its inhabitant and embodiment.

Choronzon's number is 333, half of 666, and the fraction matters: he is a half, not a great demon or the ruler of an entire sphere. His nature is fragmentation, chaotic mutation, the incapacity for unity. In Crowley's records Choronzon takes many forms and many voices; he contradicts himself, lying and telling the truth within the same sentence. He is a principle deprived of principle.

The Crossing of the Abyss

In the system of the Golden Dawn and Grant's Typhonian tradition, “the Crossing of the Abyss” denotes a specific mystical experience in which the individual renounces the personal “I.” That renunciation is not an illusion in the Buddhist sense but a limit that prevents one from advancing above Chesed on the bright tree. The crossing demands the sacrifice of everything that makes a human being a particular “someone.” Those who cannot do this, or who do it wrongly, become “Black Brothers”: beings stuck in the Abyss, clinging to the remnants of “I” and so turning into closed systems, unable either to return or to advance.

Within the Dark Tree, the crossing of the Abyss means something else. The tunnels connecting the upper and lower Qliphoth pass through it; the path of Gargophias (Gimel) is the most direct of them. The one who descends along the Dark Tree meets the Abyss as a place where the very possibility of a road becomes uncertain, rather than as a trial on the road to the light. Here Choronzon is neither an enemy nor a guardian: he is a property of the space, fragmentation meeting the traveller midway.

The position of Da'at on both trees

A last thing to say about the Abyss: it is neither evil nor good. It is a rupture. In that rupture there exist possibilities that exist nowhere else on the tree, precisely because here there are no rules about which possibilities may exist. But this same feature makes it the place of maximum risk. Where there are no rules, there is no protection either. Choronzon does not wait. He is already here, because “here” is his nature.