Qliphoth

A Castilian Kabbalist whose name is tied to the most influential book of Jewish mysticism — «Sefer ha-Zohar» («The Book of Splendor»). De León himself claimed merely to be copying out an ancient 2nd-century manuscript — the teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. 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. Luria does not exist without the Zohar: the concept of the ten Sephiroth, the dynamics of masculine and feminine, the notion of «Sitra Achra» (the Other Side) — all of this is 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.

A Catalan Kabbalist, contemporary of Moshe de León, representing a parallel line: not theosophical (like the Zohar), but meditative and ecstatic. Where the Zohar describes the inner structure of God, Abulafia teaches how to attain the prophetic state through work with the Hebrew letters — rotation, permutation, breathing techniques associated with each letter.

In 1280 he attempted to convert Pope Nicholas III to Judaism; he was arrested and sentenced, but the Pope unexpectedly died the day before the planned execution. This only intensified the aura of a prophet around Abulafia. His technique of meditation with the letters later exerted an influence on Hasidism and — through intermediaries — on the Western «Kabbalah of letters» practiced by the Golden Dawn.

A student of Abulafia, friend of Moshe de León. Gikatilla built a bridge between the two schools — the meditative and the theosophical. 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.

«Sha'arei Orah» is the principal source for all subsequent tables of correspondences: from the Lurianists down to Crowley. When we see «Chesed = El = the archangel Tzadkiel», this comes from Gikatilla. Without him, Kabbalah remains a symphony without a score — he wrote the score.

Born in Jerusalem, died in Safed. Spent several years in seclusion on an island in the middle of the Nile, studying the Zohar, then moved to Safed — the center of late medieval Kabbalah. In the two years of teaching in Safed before his early death, Luria turned Kabbalah over entirely. His key concepts — 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) — 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. They are not merely «evil» — they hold the sparks of light, which call for liberation through tikkun.

Luria did not write. Everything we know of his teaching came down through his students — above all through Chaim Vital.

Born in Safed, where he met Luria in 1570. He spent two years with his teacher — up to Luria's death. 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, including 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. They circulated nonetheless. Some of the texts were copied secretly while Vital was ill. A hundred years after his death they were printed — and it is through these editions that Lurianic Kabbalah became known to the West.

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

Linguistically — almost entirely wrong: Kircher read cartouches with the names of pharaohs as elaborate hermetic allegories of the emanations of the One. But it was precisely this wrongness that made the book 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 this the basis of his «Kabbala Denudata». Without Kircher there is no Western magical Kabbalah at all.

Kircher's paradox: a Jesuit who argued for the truth of Christianity by showing that all ancient wisdom led to it — he built an arsenal for those who subsequently rejected Christianity. Lévi, Mathers, Crowley work with a system that Kircher first put together. They scarcely know this.

German scholar, Lutheran theologian, expert in Hebrew. His «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: they worked with retellings and distortions. Rosenroth gave them the primary texts.

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

Alphonse Louis Constant — a French priest excommunicated from the Church, who took the Kabbalistic pseudonym «Éliphas Lévi Zahed». The first author to present Kabbalah, Tarot, ceremonial magic, and alchemy as a single system — «occult philosophy». His «Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie» (1856) defined the language, the terminology, the imagery, and the very concept of the «occult» for all subsequent generations — from Papus to Crowley.

Lévi was the first to propose a correspondence of the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot with the 22 Hebrew letters (and, by extension, with the 22 paths of the Tree of Life). This correspondence — disputable from the standpoint of Jewish Kabbalah — became the basis of the entire Western Hermetic system. 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, for an hour after the ritual he could neither write nor speak.

Together with William Westcott he founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888) — the organization that defined Western occultism for the next hundred years. Mathers created a synthetic system that unified Kabbalah, astrology, Tarot, grimoiric magic, and alchemy into a single course of study. Within this 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», the «Greater Key of Solomon». His translations remain the principal ones in the English-language tradition to this day. He was also Crowley's teacher, though their relationship ended in a break.

The most influential figure of Western occultism in the 20th century — and the most contradictory. 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). «777» (1909) — 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, passing through all thirty Aethyrs of the Enochian system. In the 10th Aethyr (ZAX) the encounter with Choronzon in the Abyss took place — an event that became part of the biographical myth and that influenced all subsequent descriptions 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 rather atavistic — an address to pre-personal, pre-human strata of the psyche through sigil magic and trance. His concept of the «atavistic resurgence», however — a means of entering into contact with archaic forces, bypassing the rational mediator — entered Grant's theory 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. Spare's influence on Grant — and through Grant on contemporary magic — is incommensurably greater than his fame during his lifetime.

Violet Mary Firth — English occultist, 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». This psychologization is Fortune's principal legacy, and at the same time her principal limitation: what she opened up can be used without her metaphysics, and so many use it that way.

English occultist who in 1928–1932 served as Crowley's secretary. He then broke with Crowley 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 gradually being lost with the passing of the senior magicians.

«A Garden of Pomegranates» (1932) is the best existing handbook for work with the Tree of Life for a beginner: clear, systematic, practical. Regardie is the man through whom Western magical Kabbalah passed from the secret of an initiated order to accessible learning. For this he was hated by the last members of the Golden Dawn, and for this the tradition was saved from disappearing.

Crowley's last secretary, founder of the Typhonian Order (a branch of the O∴T∴O∴). His nine-volume Typhonian series is the most ambitious attempt to create 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.

«Nightside of Eden» (1977) is Grant's central contribution to the theory of the Qliphoth: here all 22 Tunnels of Set are systematized, each with 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. It is by this map that the tunnels section of this site works.

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, rather than a peripheral element. Karlsson created a synthesis of Lurianic Kabbalah, Grant's system, and the Goetic tradition, accessible and structured as a practical handbook.

«Qabalah, Qliphoth and Goetic Magic» (2002) is the most widely read contemporary text on the subject: it does what neither Grant (too syncretic and opaque) nor academic studies (too far from practice) do: 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.