Demonic Rulers

This is the only Qlipha with two rulers, and the twinning is a definition and not an accident. Thaumiel means “Twins of God”: where Keter is the inconceivable unity, Thaumiel is its twin, split into irreconcilable duality. Satan (שָׂטָן, “adversary”, “accuser”) carries the principle of opposition as a force that stands on its own. Moloch (מֹלֶךְ, “King”) carries the principle of devouring demand, the god who needs sacrifices, who takes children and does not give them back. Together they make no unity at all; they make a conflict that has no resolution, and that is Thaumiel, a crown split in two and unable to become whole.

Tradition at large treats Satan as a function and not as an evil being: the “accuser” in the heavenly court, the one who points out imperfections. Inside Thaumiel that function is taken to the absolute, so that accusation turns into a self-sufficient reality which needs neither trial nor verdict.

Baal-Zebub (בַּעַל זְבוּב), literally “lord of flies”, is one of the central images of Semitic demonology, and the Book of Kings already names him. In the Western occult tradition Beelzebub becomes the archon of Ghagiel, the dark double of Chokmah, of wisdom as the first emanation. Chokmah is the flash of primal knowledge descending from Keter; Ghagiel is that flash deflected and left to rot. Flies stand for decomposition, for swarming, for wholeness lost in countless separate motions, and Beelzebub carries wisdom that has fallen into fragments and lost its direction.

Among the three supreme spirits of the Grand Grimoire Beelzebub stands second, after Lucifer, and that rank matches the position of Chokmah: second from the top of the Tree.

The name “Lucifuge” comes from the Latin lucem fugiens, “fleeing the light”. He rules Sathariel, the dark double of Binah, the great Mother, understanding, the force that gives form. Binah organises the chaotic energy of Chokmah into structure and form; Sathariel takes the same force and turns it toward concealment, so that understanding hides instead of revealing. Lucifuge flees every source of light, and that flight is the principle of hiding taken as a method.

In the Grand Grimoire (18th c.) Lucifuge appears as Lucifer's first minister, put in charge of the riches of the earth and of everything hidden in its depths. The link with Binah is no accident, because Binah governs time and death, and Sathariel is what remains when understanding turns its back on the light.

Astaroth is often identified with Astarte / Ishtar, the Near Eastern goddess of love, war and fertility, but that reading does not come from the grimoire. The Lemegeton speaks of him as a male spirit, the Great Duke of Hell commanding forty legions. His shell is Gha'agsheblah, the dark double of Chesed, of mercy without bounds. Here love and attraction run without banks, and what was Chesed, generosity and expansion and kindness, becomes a formless all-consuming. Attraction without structure builds no relation at all, because what it touches it dissolves.

Iconography shows Astaroth riding a dragon with a viper in the right hand, an image that joins the feminine principle to the chthonic forces of the earth.

Asmodeus belongs to the most ancient stratum of Semitic demonology, and the Book of Tobit already mentions him. His name is derived either from the Avestan Aeshma-daeva (demon of wrath) or from an Old Hebrew root for “to destroy”. The shell he governs is Golachab, the dark double of Gevurah, of force and severity. Where Gevurah holds force under discipline, calls it justice and makes its destruction necessary, Golachab lets the same energy become fire without aim, and what Asmodeus carries is destruction that serves neither justice nor necessity, a principle sufficient to itself.

Rank matters here: the Lemegeton calls Asmodeus a king, and that stands among the highest titles the demonic hierarchy has. Tradition links him with lust and wrath, two impulses that destroy by excess. Inside Golachab the wrath weighs more, and the wrath there consumes without anything righteous in it.

Belphegor took his name from Baal-Peor, the Moabite god of fertility who was worshipped on Mount Peor. Western demonology made him the archon of sloth, of inventions, of seduction through lazy enjoyment. Thagirion falls to him, the dark double of Tiferet, the centre and the harmony. Tiferet is the point at which opposites are reconciled and light is organised into beauty, while Thagirion is a centre that reconciles nothing and holds everything in endless waiting without resolution.

Seduction here works in two ways: through inert bliss, which kills the will, and through false inventions, which promise a solution without giving one. What remains is a centre suspended between the poles, capable neither of synthesis nor of an honest admission of the rift.

Baal stood for “lord” or “master”, a common Semitic term for local gods that the Old Testament turned into the name of Yahweh's chief rival. In the Lemegeton Baal opens the list of the seventy-two spirits as king of the East, commanding sixty-six legions. What he governs is Harab Serapel, “the ravens of dispersion”, the dark double of Netzach, the sphere of victory, beauty, passion and creative will. Netzach gathers force and drives it toward a goal; Harab Serapel is the same force scattering at the moment that it is applied.

The name of the Qlipha, “The Ravens of Dispersion”, says what Baal is in this context: he is a destroyer of forms and not a great god, and the force that he carries neither creates nor wins; it only scatters. The Lemegeton credits him with invisibility, and that is disappearance, not manifestation.

2 Kings mentions Adramelech as an Assyrian deity to whom the people of Sepharvaim sacrificed children, and Western demonology made him Great Chancellor of Hell and keeper of Satan's wardrobe. Samael belongs to him, the dark double of Hod, the sphere of intellect, language, quicksilver and precision. Hod is thought working as the instrument of understanding, and Samael is the same intellect turned to poison: knowledge that accuses, language that destroys, an argument whose aim is victory and not truth.

In this context Adramelech is the demon of vanity and of administrative evil, the evil that hides behind procedure, that frames destruction as order, that uses precision as a weapon. Hod itself governs the Mercurial qualities of dexterity, speech and exchange, while Adramelech is those same qualities with the conscience taken out.

Lilith is one of the central images of Jewish demonology, and her story runs from the Sumerian Lilu through the Book of Isaiah (34:14) to the Alphabet of Ben Sira (9th to 10th c.), where she first appears as Adam's first wife, fashioned from the same earth, refusing to submit and leaving for the Red Sea. Gamaliel is hers, the dark double of Yesod, the lunar sphere, the channel of the unconscious and the foundation of the manifest world. Light passes into Malkuth through Yesod while the channel stays pure; through Gamaliel the same passage carries the impure.

Inside Gamaliel, Lilith is the force of the dark moon: eroticism without reproduction, desire without fulfilment, night without dawn. She kills infants and she seduces men, and both acts interrupt continuation, because each refuses a productive transmission. In Grant's Typhonian tradition Lilith holds to Gamaliel and stays the key figure of all lunar work.

Naamah counts among the most archaic female demons of the Jewish tradition. The Zohar calls her Lilith's sister, and the later demonological tradition places her among the four “mothers of demons”, beside Lilith, Agrat bat Mahlat and Eisheth Zenunim. Her name means “the pleasant” and “the gentle”, which makes her danger different in kind from Lilith's, because Naamah seduces through beauty and softness and not through open desire. Nehemoth answers to her, the dark double of Malkuth, the Kingdom, the lowest Sephirah, the earthly world.

Malkuth marks the point at which everything from above takes on concrete material embodiment, and Nehemoth is that same point seen from the side where matter turns out to be a trap, a surface without depth, a pleasant face over emptiness. Naamah rules the lowest layer, and the reason is proximity and not weakness: the lowest is the nearest, and she is here, in the fabric of the ordinary.