Findings of the Abyss

Marianne Janack

From the Oxford English Dictionary

Abyss (noun)

1. The primal formless chaos out of which the earth and the heavens were created.

He created heaven and earth by animating with a warm breath that matter which in the beginning of ages was only a vast abyss without form.

C. Walworth, Gentle Skeptic xviii. 197 1863

The Abyss, or Chaos of the Ancient Cosmogonies.

Universalist Q. & General Review vol. 47 79 1890

A recognition of the primal chaos, of the abyss, would have made him an easy prey to death.

L. J. Halle, Birds against Men 201 1938

The Abyss is thus synonymous with the concept of Chaos.

A. Mason, Necronomicon Gnosis 59 2007

2. In the ancient Hebrew cosmogony of the Old Testament: a vast subterranean body of water, the source of terrestrial water and of the Flood. Also: (in other cosmogonies) a primordial ocean on which the earth floated.

The Waters rising up out of the subterraneous Abyss, the Sea must needs succeed.

J. Ray, Miscellaneous Discourse Dissolution World v. 131 1692

Bring up Springs and Rivers from the great Abyss.

J. Ray, Wisdom of God (ed. 3) i. 90 1702

The existence of an Abyss, or receptacle of subterraneous waters is defended by Dr. Woodward.

Chambers's Cyclopædia Suppl. (at cited word) 1753

The waters of the abyss began to settle too, and the dry land to appear.

Retrospective Review vol. 6 139 1822

It was believed that the abyss, or sea of fathomless waters, encompassed the whole earth.

J. M'Clintock & J. Strong, Cycl. Biblical, Theol., & Ecclesiastical Literature (new edition) vol. I. 39/2 1895

A creative Sophia who equates with the creative Logos without any adaptation to the primordial abyss of waters.

J. M. Robertson, Pagan Christs ii. 218 1903

An ancient myth, well-known in India and Europe, taught that the Creator was born from a cosmic egg which floated on the abyss of primeval waters.

A. E. Haydon, Biogr. Gods i. 15 1941

3. A bottomless chasm; any unfathomable cavity or void space.

His deepe deuouring iawes Wyde gaped, like the griesly mouth of hell, Through which into his darke abysse all rauin fell.

E. Spenser, Faerie Queene i. xi. 12 1590

Were I condemn'd..to fill up..A bottomlesse Abysse, or charge through fire, It could not so much shake me.

P. Massinger, Unnaturall Combat ii. i. sig. D 1639

They view'd the vast immeasurable Abyss Outrageous as a Sea, dark, wasteful, wilde.

J. Milton, Paradise Lost vii. 211   1667

“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. 

So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”

Herman Melville, Moby Dick   1851

“Almost his first words were that he was going down again. The sphere would have to be altered, he said, in order to allow him to throw off the cord if need be, and that was all. He had had the most marvellous experience. “You thought I should find nothing but ooze,” he said. “You laughed at my explorations, and I’ve discovered a new world!” He told his story in disconnected fragments, and chiefly from the wrong end, so that it is impossible to re-tell it in his words….

     It remains only to tell that on February 2, 1896, he made his second descent into the ocean abyss, with the improvements his first experience suggested. What happened we shall probably never know. He never returned.” 

     H. G. Wells, “In the Abyss” in The Plattner Story and Others  1897

Abyss (verb) transitive

1. To swallow up in an abyss, to engulf