The Abyss - Down in a hole

I bought the collected works of Promethea by Alan Moore, which is like a Qabalah primer, and unfortunately upon delivery it was made clear that book number four was no longer available. This book is apparently only available second hand now and at pretty high prices. So I had to read a downloaded version and ironically this book also handles Daath, the ‘false Sephira’.

While trying to cross the abyss they mention “It’s like a black hole”, meanwhile I was listening to Alice in Chains on a whim. I had never really listened to their albums, so I decided to listen to the album Dirt while reading as I had the amazing song Would in my head before I started reading. When I got to the Black Hole part in the comic the song ‘Down in a Hole’ was playing. 

At first I thought the song was called Sickman, which I thought was apt as I am suffering from chronic illness, but it appeared my album mp3 tags were mislabeled. The song Sickman played a track later and had these lyrics:

Daath, the so-called “false sephira” of the Tree of Life, is often described as a paradox. It is not a stable sphere like Chesed or Geburah but a kind of hollow gate: a place of knowledge without wisdom, a point where intellect severs itself from the living current of the Tree. It is the Abyss that divides the supernal triad above from the rest of the Tree.

To fall into Daath is not merely to stumble into error but to become sick in the soul. It is the fever of alienation, the madness of sterile intellect, the despair of being cut off from the flow of life. Qabalists sometimes speak of the Abyss as a place of annihilation. Crossed wrongly, it leads to delusion, madness, or spiritual death.

“Down in a Hole” speaks of isolation and entombment, of being buried away from light. “Sickman” is about corruption and decay, a body or mind turning against itself. Both are Abyss imagery: the hole is Daath as the pit of separation, while the sickness is Daath as pathology of the soul. The mislabeling was not just a tech error but a symbolic echo of what Daath represents, the sickness of false knowledge, the wound of disconnection.

In Promethea, Daath features a black hole, the circle or Pi 3.14… , between Sephira 3 Binah and Sephira 4 Chesed. The sephira that “is not there.” It is a cosmic ulcer in the Tree. And yet, as in all myths, the wound is also a gate. The Abyss is terrifying because it exposes the fragility of our meaning-making, but it is also the threshold that must be crossed to move beyond.

The sync between “Sickman” and Daath reminds me that even error, even sickness, has a voice. Mislabeling becomes oracle. The Abyss is not avoided by ignoring it, but by naming it, enduring it, and walking through.

Daath is called Knowledge, and that name itself is a paradox. It is not book learning or accumulated facts, but experiential knowledge, gnosis that floods the soul with direct encounter. Without understanding or wisdom to balance it, this kind of raw knowing can become a trap. In the Tree, Daath sits at the crossing point between the supernal triad (Kether, Chokmah, Binah) and the lower sephirot. It is the “bridge” that is not really a bridge, the throat that does not breathe, the hole that mimics a gate.

In Promethea, Daath is associated with Pi, the infinite number that begins 3.14 and stretches on forever. Pi is the key to the circle. A perfect circle is never fully knowable, it requires an endless calculation. In this sense, Pi stands as the unbridgeable gap between the perfect world above and the imperfect reflections below. The supernal triad rests in the realm of the archetypal, the pure forms. The lower seven sephirot live in the realm of expression, manifestation, and limit.

Daath lies exactly on that line. To approach the Abyss is to try to cross from the finite to the infinite. To mistake Daath for a real sephira is to think you can close the circle perfectly, when in truth the calculation never ends. Pi shows us that the circle always slips beyond full containment. The supernals are the perfect circle; the lower sephirot are the broken or incomplete attempt to mirror it. Daath is the illusion that you can “solve” that gap with knowledge alone.

That is why it is sickness, and why it is also initiation. To encounter Daath is to meet the limit of human knowing. It shows that intellect alone cannot take you across the Abyss. Only when knowledge is surrendered into understanding and wisdom can the circle become whole again.

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