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Notes on Kabbalah
The author grants the right to copy and distribute these Notes provided
they remain unmodified and original authorship and copyright is retained.
The author retains both the right and intention to modify and extend
these Notes.
Release 2.0
Copy date: 15th. January 1992
Copyright Colin Low 1992 (cal@hplb.hpl.hp.com)
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Chapter 4: The Sephiroth (continued)
========================
This chapter provides a detailed look at each of the ten
sephiroth and draws together material scattered over previous
chapters.
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
Copyright Colin Low 1991
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