10.3: "What is the Abyss?" cont.
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This article is from the magicK kreEePing oOze FAQ, by tyagi nagasiva tyagI@houseofAos.abyss.coM with numerous contributions by others.
10.3: "What is the Abyss?" cont.
And finally, LeGrand Cinq-Mars wrote the following while responding to
Colin Low:
Daath definitely has an "empty" and
"hazardous" quality in the Golden Dawn material (before
the Stella Matutina text-layer): it is, for one thing,
the point to which the head of the serpent rises after
the Fall, the source of the Four Rivers (watering
Chesed, Geburah, Tiphareth and Malkuth), and the
location of the Kerub with the Flaming Sword. By
implication, it would by a stronger version of the
discontinuity of Paroketh, the veil before Tiphareth.
This earlier understanding of Daath as Abyss (the empty
socket from which the corrupted tooth of Malkuth was
plucked?) is echoed in the notions about Choronzon and
so on in "The Vision and the Voice", thus the notion of
the "Babe of the Abyss" to parallel the Portal grade.
Thus too the notions of Daath as the "empty room," the
greater Dark Night of the Soul. In one of his earliest
treatments of his Middle Pillar exercise (in "The
Middle Pillar", in fact) Regardie (using IHVH ALHIM as
the divine name associated with Daath) suggests using
the Enochian angelic names from the Tablet of Union as
the Archangelic names, thus following the line of
apocalyptic imagery.
Knight ("Practical Guide"), however, suggests using the
names of the four archangels of the elements (or
quarters) for Daath, and even though he repeats the by-
then traditional idea of Daath as the Empty Room,
proceeds to load on the symbolism. I don't think this
is completely off-base, for the following reasons.
First, it brings to Daath the "fourfoldness" motif
characteristic of all the other Sephiroth of the Middle
Pillar. Second, Daath already does have an elaborated
(though not exactly sephirotic, since it regards Daath
not as a Sephira is the locus of the fourfold
conjunctio. As these are not mutually exclsive, I find
it hard to reject one or the other body of symbolism
(or non-symbolism)....
[In Daath no one can hear you scream...] This is also
an attribute of a certain mode of the primordial Holy:
the utterly alien Real, the thoroughly uncanny and
appalling presence that somehow enters into a covenant
with those beings who somehow exist on the ontological
margins (or so it seems when this promordial Holy is
encountered). The problem is that, once the covenant
is made, it's easy to slip into a sort of coziness,
treat the Holy as something domesticated, leading to a
complacent, self-satisfied proprietary attitude (our
town, and our family, and our tea-set, and our aunt
Jessie, and our God) , and even a proprietary attitude
toward the sheer alien godawfulness of That Thing.
This suggests an odd, fourfold cycle of initial comfort-
encounter-covenant-smug domestication, the last bit of
which may at some point be shattered by a new
encounter. Empirically, however, what one has is an
oscillation between (2) and (4), with (3) occurring as
a moment of dynamic equilibrium as long as enough
insight exists to sustain it. [The "smug
domestication," by the way, has some connection with
the notions of the "second fall" and the "false garden"
that came up here a while back....
The GD paper "On Obsession, Trance and Death" locates
the human psychophysical Daath "at the nape of the neck,"
and makes it the locus of various kinds of obsession
and possession....
The notion that there is a congruence between Daath
with Yesod is again not recent. For the GD, the station
of Yesod was the station of the "Evil Persona," the
point from which the Candidate is threatened -- but
Yesod is also the location of the "sign of the
covenant," if not the actual coven@i"U"+.Yexists a
mutal resonance between Daath and Yesod, and each has
its particular set of overtones derived from that
resonance....
I think Daath
does (traditionally, in ways that predate the GD, but
which the GD continues) have correspondences, I think
that this correspondence with Chaos (the Gaping Abyss)
is one of them, as the highly structured quaternary
symbolism of the Zohar is another. The over-arching
symbolism that correlates them all, however, may be the
event-horizon described by Nicholas of Cusa -- the
barrier-field of the conjunctio oppositorum. This
conjunctio is not, in his view, God, but the
singularity that blocks the soul (usually, anyway)
from entering into that part of itself in which it directly
participates in God....
"In Daath the Depths are broken up, and the heavens drop down..." Well,
we have all eternity in which to rest. Now let us cultivate our gardens,
giving thanks for all this abundance of fertilizer.
--LeGrand
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