The hidden sephirah
דעת
Daath
Knowledge
Correspondences
- Number
- Not numbered: “ten and not eleven”
- Meaning
- Knowledge
- Pillar
- Middle Pillar, in the Abyss
- Triad
- The Abyss between the Supernal and Ethical Triads
- World
- The gulf between Briah and the worlds below
- Divine name (Atziluth)
- 777 gives Daath no divine name; later writers combine YHVH Elohim, or leave it silent
- Archangel (Briah)
- no archangel is traditionally assigned
- Mundane chakra (Assiah)
- moderns variously assign Sirius, Uranus or Pluto
- Colours
- King: Lavender · Queen: Grey-white · Prince: Pure violet · Princess: Grey, flecked gold
- Magical image
- A head with two faces, looking both ways (Gareth Knight)
- Spiritual experience
- The Vision across the Abyss (Gareth Knight)
- Virtue
- Detachment; perfection of the personality turned towards the Supernals
- Vice
- Apathy, inertia, cowardice; and, in Thelema, pride that refuses to cross
- Titles
- The Invisible Sephirah; the Hidden Sephirah; the Abyss; the Eleventh Sephirah; the Upper Room
- Symbols
- The empty room; the prism; the condemned cell; the absence of symbol
- Tarot
- None: it is not one of the ten
- In the body
- The throat (in the Middle Pillar exercise)
- Grade
- Babe of the Abyss (Crowley’s A∴A∴, the momentary grade between Adeptus Exemptus and Magister Templi)
- Qliphoth
- The Abyss itself, the realm of dispersion; arch-demon(s): Choronzon, the demon of dispersion (Crowley, The Vision and the Voice, 10th Aethyr)
- Gods (777)
- Moderns associate Janus, and Thoth as knowledge
Ten and not eleven
The Sepher Yetzirah insists: “Ten sephiroth of nothingness: ten and not nine, ten and not eleven.” Daath is therefore not a sephirah in the full sense. It is the place where Chokmah and Binah meet, the union of Wisdom and Understanding which produces Knowledge, and the gap through which the Lightning Flash descends from the Supernals.
In Jewish Kabbalah
Da’at appears in the Zohar as the hidden link between Abba and Imma, sometimes described as the “key” that contains the six lower sephiroth. In Luria’s system and in Chabad Hasidism, when Keter is regarded as too hidden to count, Da’at is counted in its place, giving the intellect Chokhmah-Binah-Da’at (ChaBaD). The word is the one used in Genesis 4:1, “Adam knew Eve”: knowledge as union.
In the Golden Dawn and Thelema
In the Golden Dawn diagram of the Garden of Eden after the Fall, the seven-headed red dragon rises from the Qliphoth to Daath, cutting the Supernals off from the lower Tree. Daath therefore marks the Abyss. For Crowley, the Abyss is the desert of Choronzon, the demon of dispersion, whom he and Victor Neuburg evoked in the Algerian desert in 1909 (the 10th Aethyr of The Vision and the Voice). Only the adept who gives up every last attachment, every “drop of blood”, can cross it; one who clings to the ego becomes a “Black Brother”, shut in a tower of self.
Modern writers
Fortune barely mentions Daath; it was Gareth Knight and later writers who developed it as a full station on the Tree. Kenneth Grant made it the gateway to the “Tunnels of Set” on the reverse side of the Tree, the doorway to the Qliphoth. Many modern authors associate it with the throat centre (where the Word is spoken) and with the knowledge of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the knowledge that was the cause of the Fall and is also the way back.
Paths from Daath
Read further
- Daath on Wikipediaoverview of the Jewish and Hermetic sources
- 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).