Words

The Abyss

the uh-BISS
Bottomless depth, from Greek abyssos, a (without) plus byssos (depth), the word that names the Watchers' prison and your screen time.
Documented

Abyssos, the bottomless

Greek abyssos translates Hebrew tehom, the primordial deep of Genesis 1:2. In 1 Enoch it becomes the prison of the fallen Watchers; in Revelation, the pit under lock and key. English abyss kept all three jobs: the deep sea, the theological pit, and Nietzsche's gaze that returns.

Assessment: Documented: the Septuagint's word choice and the Enochic usage are textual.
Stories

The gaze that gazes back

Nietzsche's aphorism (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886) did more to populate the abyss than any theology: modern usage is 90 percent Nietzsche, 10 percent geology, and the pit of angels has become a motivational poster.

Assessment: Stories: the citation drift is real; Nietzsche knew exactly which depths he was quoting.
Interesting claims

Tehom under everything

The older layer: tehom is cognate with Babylonian Tiamat, the salt-water goddess split to make the world. The abyss may be the corpse of a goddess, the deep as the body of what creation killed. Enoch's prison, in this reading, reuses the oldest crime scene.

Assessment: Interesting: the tehom-Tiamat link is standard Assyriology; the corpse framing is the myth's own.
Sources and further reading
  1. Septuagint Genesis 1:2, abyssos for tehom
  2. 1 Enoch prison passages; Revelation 9, 11, 20
  3. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 146 (1886)
Worth asking

Why did one word get assigned to geology, theology, and psychology all at once?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+