Figures

A Castilian Kabbalist whose name is tied to the most influential book of Jewish mysticism, “Sefer ha-Zohar”, or “The Book of Splendor”. De León himself claimed he was only copying out an ancient 2nd-century manuscript carrying the teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, while modern scholars, beginning with Gershom Scholem, regard the Zohar as an original composition of de León and his circle, written in stylized Aramaic at the end of the 13th century in Castile.

The Zohar is the foundation of all subsequent Kabbalah, and Luria does not exist without it. The concept of the ten Sephiroth, the dynamics of masculine and feminine, the notion of “Sitra Achra” (the Other Side) are all born or crystallized here. The Shells of the Abyss as a term receive their first developed theological grounding in the Zohar, before becoming for Luria a cosmological catastrophe.

Catalan Kabbalist, contemporary of Moshe de León, who runs a parallel line. His Kabbalah is meditative and ecstatic, while the Zohar's is theosophical. Where the Zohar describes the inner structure of God, Abulafia teaches how to reach the prophetic state through work with the Hebrew letters: rotation, permutation, and the breathing technique that belongs to each letter.

In 1280 he attempted to convert Pope Nicholas III to Judaism. He was arrested and sentenced, and then the Pope died the day before the planned execution. The aura of a prophet around Abulafia only grew from there. His technique of meditation with the letters later influenced Hasidism, and through intermediaries it reached the Western “Kabbalah of letters” practiced by the Golden Dawn.

A student of Abulafia and a friend of Moshe de León, Gikatilla built a bridge between the meditative school and the theosophical one. His “Sha'arei Orah” (“Gates of Light”, 1290s) is the first systematic work on the correspondences between the Sephiroth and the Names of God: which Name corresponds to which Sephirah, which letter, which angel.

Every later table of correspondences goes back to that book, from the Lurianists down to Crowley. When we see “Chesed = El = the archangel Tzadkiel”, we are reading Gikatilla. Without him Kabbalah stays a symphony with no score, and he is the one who wrote the score.

Born in Jerusalem, died in Safed. He spent several years in seclusion on an island in the middle of the Nile, studying the Zohar, and then moved to Safed, which was the center of late medieval Kabbalah. In the two years of teaching he had in Safed before his early death, Luria turned Kabbalah over entirely. His key concepts are tzimtzum (the self-contraction of God that freed up the place for creation), shevirat ha-kelim (the breaking of the vessels of the first creation), and tikkun (the repair of the broken). Together they created a new cosmology in which evil, suffering, and redemption are bound to a single ontological event. With Luria, the Qliphoth are the direct consequence of the catastrophe: shells arising from the shards of broken vessels, and they are more than “evil”, because they hold the sparks of light that call for liberation through tikkun.

Luria did not write, and everything we know of his teaching came down through his students, above all through Chaim Vital.

Safed was his birthplace, and he met Luria there in 1570. He stayed with his teacher for the two years that were left to Luria. Vital became the keeper of the Lurianic teaching and the only one who recorded it systematically. His “Etz Chaim” (“The Tree of Life”) is the principal corpus, thousands of pages working out the cosmology. It carries the most detailed description of the ten Qliphoth, their correlations with the Sephiroth, and the mechanisms by which they act upon the world.

Vital's paradox: he wanted a monopoly on Luria's teaching and hid his manuscripts, and they circulated anyway, because some of the texts were copied secretly while he was ill. Some hundred and sixty years after his death they were printed, and it is through those editions that Lurianic Kabbalah became known to the West.

A German Jesuit polymath working in Rome under the patronage of the Emperor Ferdinand III. He was a linguist, a musicologist, a geologist, an Egyptologist, an inventor and a demonologist, and above all the man who saw in the fragments of all world traditions a single common origin. His “Oedipus Aegyptiacus” (1652–1654) runs to three folios and around two thousand pages. It was an attempt to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs a hundred and seventy years before Champollion.

Linguistically the book is almost entirely wrong, because Kircher read cartouches with the names of pharaohs as elaborate hermetic allegories of the emanations of the One. It was that wrongness that made it one of the chief sources of Western esotericism. Volume II contains the “Cabala Hebraeorum”, the largest Christian presentation of Kabbalah of its day: the Tree of the Sephiroth, gematria, the Shemhamphorash, Adam Kadmon. Twenty years later Knorr von Rosenroth would take from it the basis of his “Kabbala Denudata”. Without Kircher there is no Western magical Kabbalah at all.

Kircher argued for the truth of Christianity by showing that all ancient wisdom led to it, and in doing so he built an arsenal for the people who later rejected Christianity. Lévi, Mathers and Crowley work with a system that Kircher first put together. They scarcely know it.

German scholar, Lutheran theologian, expert in Hebrew, whose “Kabbala Denudata” (1677–1684) is a two-volume Latin translation of the key Kabbalistic texts, including fragments of the Zohar and Lurianic commentaries. Before Rosenroth, Kabbalah was effectively closed to European occultists, who worked with retellings and distortions until he gave them the primary texts.

Mathers, Crowley, and the whole Western Hermeticism of the 19th and 20th centuries rest in one way or another on Rosenroth's translations, either directly or through sources that themselves relied on him. He is the inconspicuous architect of Western magical Kabbalah.

Alphonse Louis Constant was a French priest excommunicated from the Church, and he took the Kabbalistic pseudonym “Éliphas Lévi Zahed”. He is the first author to present Kabbalah, Tarot, ceremonial magic, and alchemy as a single system, which he called “occult philosophy”. His “Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie” (1856) defined the language, the terminology and the imagery for every generation after him, from Papus to Crowley. It defined the very concept of the “occult”.

Lévi was the first to propose a correspondence of the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot with the 22 Hebrew letters. By extension this is a correspondence with the 22 paths of the Tree of Life. From the standpoint of Jewish Kabbalah it is disputable, and it became the basis of the entire Western Hermetic system even so. In 1854 in London Lévi performed an evocation of Apollonius of Tyana, the first documented magical evocation in the new European tradition. By his own account he could neither write nor speak for an hour after the ritual.

Together with William Westcott and William Robert Woodman he founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888), the organization that would define Western occultism for the next hundred years. The system he built for it unified Kabbalah, astrology, Tarot, grimoiric magic, and alchemy into a single course of study. Within that system the Qliphoth were systematically tied to the Sephirothic Tree, and work with them was placed in the context of a magical “ascent”.

Mathers translated the “Goetia”, the “Book of Abramelin” and the “Greater Key of Solomon”, translations that remain the principal ones in the English-language tradition to this day, and he was also Crowley's teacher, though that relationship ended in a break.

The most influential figure of Western occultism in the 20th century, and the most contradictory. He began as a student of the Golden Dawn, broke with Mathers and created his own system, Thelema, founded on “The Book of the Law” (1904). In 1909 came “777”, comparative tables of correspondences that became the standard handbook for anyone working with Western magic. Here the Qliphoth receive developed correspondences with colors, letters, scents, sounds, gods.

In 1909 together with Victor Neuburg, Crowley conducted an operation in the Algerian desert. They passed through the Aethyrs of the Enochian system from the twenty-eighth down to the first. The two lowest, the thirtieth and the twenty-ninth, he had already scried in Mexico in 1900. In the 10th Aethyr (ZAX) the encounter with Choronzon in the Abyss took place, and that event became part of the biographical myth and shaped every later description of the crossing of the Abyss in Western magic.

Artist and occultist who created the Zos-Kia system independently of the grimoiric tradition. Spare did not work with the Qliphoth directly. His system was atavistic instead, an address to pre-personal, pre-human strata of the psyche through sigil magic and trance. His concept of the “atavistic resurgence” means entering into contact with archaic forces while bypassing the rational mediator. It entered Grant's theory all the same, as one of the methods of work with the tunnels.

Spare died in poverty; Grant supported him in his last years and became his literary executor, and his influence on Grant, and through Grant on contemporary magic, is incommensurably greater than his fame during his lifetime.

Violet Mary Firth was an English occultist and a member of the Alpha et Omega order, an offshoot of the Golden Dawn. She underwent personal analysis with Jung's students and brought psychoanalysis into Kabbalah. Her “The Mystical Qabalah” (1935) rethinks the Tree of Life as a map of the psyche: the Sephiroth as states of consciousness, the paths as transitions between them, the Qliphoth as pathologies and fixations.

Before Fortune, Kabbalah in Western magic remained chiefly a ritual technique. After her it became possible to speak of Gevurah as “mature wrath”, of Yesod as “the unconscious”, of the Qliphoth as “the shadow aspects of the personality”. That psychologization is Fortune's principal legacy. It is also her principal limitation, because what she opened up can be used without her metaphysics, and a great many people use it that way.

English occultist who in 1928–1932 served as Crowley's secretary, then broke with him and concentrated on preserving the legacy of the Golden Dawn. In 1937–1940 he published the four-volume corpus “The Golden Dawn”, the complete body of the order's rituals, teachings, and tables, which had until then been kept as a secret and were being lost by degrees as the senior magicians died.

For a beginner there is still no better handbook for work with the Tree of Life than “A Garden of Pomegranates” (1932): clear, systematic, practical. Regardie is the man through whom Western magical Kabbalah passed from the secret of an initiated order to accessible learning. The last members of the Golden Dawn hated him for it. It is also what saved the tradition from disappearing.

Crowley's last secretary and founder of the Typhonian Order, a branch of the O∴T∴O∴, whose nine-volume Typhonian series is the most ambitious attempt anyone has made to build a full-fledged system of the Night Side as a self-standing magical tradition. Grant brought together Crowley, Spare, Lovecraft, and Egyptian and Sumerian mythology into a single synthetic teaching of the night side of reality.

His central contribution to the theory of the Qliphoth is “Nightside of Eden” (1977), where all 22 Tunnels of Set are systematized. Each tunnel gets the name of its entity, a letter, an Arcanum, and a description of the experience. Before Grant the tunnels existed as scattered references. He made a map of them, and the tunnels section of this site works by that map.

Swedish occultist who in 1989 founded the Dragon Rouge order, the first organization to make work with the Qliphoth the foundation of its magical system instead of a peripheral element. Karlsson created a synthesis of Lurianic Kabbalah, Grant's system, and the Goetic tradition, accessible and structured as a practical handbook.

The most widely read contemporary text on the subject is “Qabalah, Qliphoth and Goetic Magic” (2004/2007). It does what neither Grant (too syncretic and opaque) nor academic studies (too far from practice) do, because it explains the system from inside, for the one working. It is through Karlsson that the Qliphoth became accessible to a wide audience outside the traditional orders.