The Three Veils of Negative Existence

Ain · Ain Soph · Ain Soph Aur

Veil 1 · 0

אין Ain

Nothing

Ain is absolute nothingness: not empty space, which is still something, but the absence of anything that could be named, thought or said. Hebrew ayin is the ordinary word for “there is not”. It is written with three letters, and the Golden Dawn counts it as the first and outermost veil.

Veil 2 · 00

אין סוף Ain Soph

Without limit

Ain Soph is the Limitless: nothing becoming infinite. Of the three veils it is the one with the oldest Jewish roots. Ein Sof (“without end”) first appears as a name for the hidden God among the Kabbalists of Provence and Gerona, in the circle of Isaac the Blind and his students around 1200. In the Zohar, Ein Sof is the God who has no attributes, cannot be named and is not counted among the sephiroth. Its six letters make the second veil.

Veil 3 · 000

אין סוף אור Ain Soph Aur

Limitless light

Ain Soph Aur is the Limitless Light, the last veil before manifestation, and it concentrates into the single point of Kether. Its Jewish source is the Or Ein Sof, the “light of the Infinite” of Isaac Luria’s Kabbalah (16th century). In Luria’s account, God first withdrew to leave an empty space (tzimtzum, contraction). A single ray of the infinite light (the kav, or line) then shone into that space, and the worlds were formed along it. Its nine letters make the third and innermost veil.

Negative existence

The Golden Dawn called the three veils negative existence: what is before anything exists, and is not a thing at all. They stand behind Kether in the way the night sky stands behind a single star. Mathers set out the scheme in the introduction to The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887). There, Ain, Ain Soph and Ain Soph Aur are three stages by which the Unmanifest condenses into the first point of being. Kether is that point, which the Zohar calls the “Primordial Point” and the “Smooth Point”.

In Jewish Kabbalah

Jewish Kabbalah does not list three veils; that tidy scheme is a Hermetic arrangement. The pieces are older, though. Ein Sof is the standard name for God beyond the sephiroth from the 13th century onwards. Kabbalists such as Gikatilla and Cordovero identify Ayin (nothing) with Keter, the divine will, which is so far beyond thought that it can only be called nothing. Luria’s Or Ein Sof, the infinite light, supplies the third veil. The Zohar opens its account of creation with the mysterious “spark of darkness” that flashes within the hidden One.

In the Golden Dawn and Thelema

On Golden Dawn diagrams the three veils are drawn as arcs or concentric shells above Kether, as on this page. Crowley wrote them as the numbers 0, 00 and 000, and made Nothing the root of his whole philosophy. Thelema’s formula 0 = 2 says that nothing equals the pair of opposites, plus and minus, which cancel back into nothing. On this view the universe is Nothing dividing itself into two in order to know itself. In The Book of the Law, Nuit, the infinite star-goddess, is the circumference without limit, and Hadit is the point at its centre: “every man and every woman is a star.” Crowley put the Fool, the trump numbered 0, at the head of the paths as the image of the Ain Soph flowing into Kether.

Dion Fortune

In The Mystical Qabalah, Fortune devotes an early chapter to the Negative Existence. She warns that the mind can only point towards it, never picture it. She describes the veils as the root of manifestation, a limitless sea of potential, which becomes actual for the first time in Kether. Her advice to the student is not to try to visualise the veils but to rest the mind on the idea of a reality that is before all form.

Where the veils lead

כתר Kether (1)

Read further

Ein Sof on Wikipediathe Jewish sources and their history
Sepher Yetzirah and the 32 Paths of WisdomW. Wynn Westcott, trans., 1887
The Kabbalah UnveiledS. L. MacGregor Mathers, from Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata, 1887
Liber 777 RevisedAleister Crowley, 1909/1955
The Book of ThothAleister Crowley, 1944
The Golden DawnIsrael Regardie, ed., 1937–40
A Garden of PomegranatesIsrael Regardie, 1932
The Mystical QabalahDion Fortune, 1935
The Pictorial Key to the TarotA. E. Waite, 1910
The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the AgesPaul Foster Case, 1947
A Practical Guide to Qabalistic SymbolismGareth Knight, 1965

Also in the background throughout: Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (1974) and Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), for the Jewish tradition as historians understand it; Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah (1990); Kenneth Grant, Nightside of Eden (1977), for the Qliphoth; Robert Wang, The Qabalistic Tarot (1983).