DiotimosReading Desk

Creation and the images of the world

Double abyss

Abyssus Duplicata, “double abyss”; Abyssus Superior, “upper abyss”; Abyssus Inferior, “lower abyss”.

The double abyss names the paired upper and lower depths displayed in a preliminary plate.

From the book

The Golden Chain of Homer

Anonymous (traditionally attributed to Anton Joseph Kirchweger) · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordThe double abyss names the paired upper and lower depths displayed in a preliminary plate.
  • In the Golden ChainThe plate places volatile above and fixed below; the accompanying poem explains their reciprocal conflict and transformation.
  • TranslationThe Latin labels belong to the historical illustration. “Abyss” here must be read with its upper-lower organization, not only as a place beneath earth.
  • A place to readPRE00S002 and PRE02S001 give the image and its verbal account of reciprocal reversal.

Meaning

The double abyss is a visual name for nature considered through its two opposing directions or conditions. The preliminary plate labels an upper abyss and a lower abyss, with Volatile at the top and Fixum at the bottom. Animals, plants, minerals, sea and earth appear within the same arrangement. The title therefore gathers a differentiated natural order into an upper-lower polarity (PRE00S002).

The poem that follows supplies the dynamic reading. The volatile must become fixed and heavenly become earthly; the fixed must become volatile and earthly rise to heaven. Neither abyss is a self-contained world permanently isolated from the other. Their opposition is productive because they can exchange conditions and thereby disclose quintessence (PRE02S001).

Use in the book

The plate should first be read as a plate. Its short labels are not a continuous sentence and cannot carry every detail of the later theory by themselves. “Double” groups the upper and lower, while the words “volatile” and “fixed” identify the clearest endpoints. The book’s prose then supplies intermediates, degrees and agents that the compressed image does not spell out. The visual pair and the four-element account therefore have complementary, rather than competing, tasks (PRE00S002; B1C04S001–B1C04S003).

The poem dramatizes the same process as a bitter fight and as the mutual killing of volatile and fixed dragons. Its endpoint is not simple victory for one unchanged pole: heaven must enter earth, earth rise, and both undergo the reversal their initial opposition seems to forbid. Read beside the prose, this is a compressed account of fixation and volatilization, not evidence that the author has abandoned gradual natural operations for an unexplained battle of supernatural beings (PRE02S001; B1C07S003).

The cosmology carefully keeps such changes below the Empyrean, the heaven in which God dwells. Its natural heaven is the subtlest created condition, capable of becoming terrestrial through air and water. Thus the upper abyss should not be equated without qualification with the divine dwelling, and the lower abyss is not automatically a moral hell. The paired image organizes the book’s changing material world; its meaning must stay within the boundaries expressly given to natural transformation (B1C09S001; B1C09S005).

Places to read

  1. Title and Diagrams · §2The plate supplies the attested double, upper and lower abyss labels, with volatile and fixed endpoints.
  2. Double-Abyss Poem · §1The poem interprets opposition as reciprocal fixation, volatilization and the emergence of quintessence.
  3. Book I · Ch. 4 · §2The prose requires intermediates between the most volatile and most fixed extremes.
  4. Book I · Ch. 7 · §3Heaven and earth exchange conditions while retaining their common first matter.
  5. Book I · Ch. 9 · §1The unchanging divine Empyrean is expressly excluded from the natural heaven under discussion.

Translation in this edition

Abyssus Duplicata is the printed Latin label translated as “Double abyss.” Its form should be reported rather than silently replaced with a reconstructed classical title. Abyssus Superior and Abyssus Inferior are similarly location-words inside the illustration (PRE00S002).

The vocabulary of depth is paired with reversal: what is highest becomes lowest, and what is lowest highest. That local movement explains the image more securely than an external catalogue of abyss symbolism. The edition’s translated labels and poem allow the reader to verify the interpretation directly (PRE02S001).