What are the Qlippoth?
----------------------

The word "qlippah" or "klippah" (plural "qlippoth") means "shell" 
or "husk".

The idea of a covering or a garment or a vessel is common in 
Kabbalah, where it used, at various times and with various 
degrees of subtlety, to express the manner in which the light
of the En Soph is "encapsulated". For example, the sephiroth,
in their capacity of recipients of light, are sometimes referred to 
as kelim, "vessels". The duality between the container and the
contained is one of the most important in Kabbalistic explanations
of the creative moment.

The word "qlippah" is an extension of this metaphor. A qlippah is
also a covering or a container, and as each sephira acts as a shell 
or covering to the sephira preceding it in the order of emanation, 
in a technical sense we can say the qlippoth are innate to the 
Tree of Life. Cut a slice through a tree and one can see the growth
rings, with the bark on the outside. The Tree of Life has 10 concentric
rings, and sometimes the qlippah is equated to the bark.
The word is commonly used to refer to a covering which contains no 
light: that is, an empty shell, a dead husk.

It is also the case that the qlippoth appear in Kabbalah as demonic
powers of evil, and in trying to disentangle the various uses of the
word it becomes clear that there is an almost continuous spectrum
of opinion, varying from the technical use where the word hardly
differs from the word "form", to the most anthropomorphic sense, where
the qlippoth are evil demonesses in a demonic hierarchy responsible
for all the evil in the world.

One reason why the word "qlippah" has no simple meaning is that it
is part of the Kabbalistic explanation of evil, and it is difficult
to explain evil in a monotheistic, non-dualistic religion without
incurring a certain complexity....

If God is good, why is there evil?

No short essay can do justice to the complexity of this topic. I will
indicate some of the principle themes.

The "Zohar" attributes the primary cause of evil to the act of separation.
The act of separation is refered to as the "cutting of the shoots".
What was united  becomes divided, and the boundary between one 
thing and another can be regarded as a shell. The primary separation
was the division between the Tree of Life (Pillar of Mercy) from
the Tree of Knowledge (Pillar of Severity). 

In normal perception the world is clearly characterised by divisions
between one thing and another, and in this technical sense one could
say that we are immersed in a world of shells. The shells, taken by 
themselves as an abstraction divorced from the original, unidivided
light (making another separation!) are the dead residue of manifestation,
and can be identified with dead skin, hair, bark, sea shells, or shit.
They have been refered to as the dregs remaining in a glass of wine,
or as the residue left after refining gold. 
According to Scholem, the Zohar interprets evil as "the residue or refuse of 
the hidden life's organic process"; evil is something which is dead, but 
comes to life because a spark of God falls on it; by itself it is simply 
the dead residue of life.

The skeleton is the archetypal shell. By itself it is a dead thing, but
infuse it with a spark of life and it becomes a numinous and instantly
recognisable manifestation of metaphysical evil. The shell is one of 
the most common horror themes;
take a mask, or a doll, or any dead representation of a living thing,
shine a light out of its eyes, and becomes a thing of evil intent. 
The powers of evil appear in the shape of the animate dead - skulls, bones, zombies,
vampires, phantasms.

The following list of correspondences follows the interpretation that
the qlippoth are empty shells, form without force, the covering
of a sephira:

Kether       Futility
Chokhmah     Arbitrariness
Binah        Fatalism
Chesed       Ideology
Gevurah      Bureaucracy
Tipheret     Hollowness
Netzach      Routine, repetition, habit
Hod          Rigid order
Yesod        Zombieism, robotism
Malkut       Stasis          

A second, common interpretation of the qlippoth is that they represent
the negative or averse aspect of a sephira, as if each sephira had a Mr.
Hyde to complement Dr. Jekyll. There are many variations of this idea. One
of the most common is the idea that evil is caused by an excess of the
powers of Din (judgement) in the creation. The origin of this imbalance
may be innate, a residue of the moment of creation, when each sephira
went through a period of imbalance and instability (the kingdoms of
unbalanced force), but another version 
attributes this imbalance to humankind's propensity for the Tree of 
Knowledge in preference to the Tree of Life (a telling and precognitively
inspired metaphor if ever there was one...).

The imbalance of the powers of Din "leaks" out of the Tree and provides
the basis for the "sitra achra", the "other side", or the "left side" 
(referring to pillar of severity), a quasi or even fully independent
kindom of evil. This may be represented by a full Tree in its own
right, sometimes by a great dragon, sometimes by seven hells. The most
lurid versions combine Kabbalah with medieval demonology to produce 
detailed lists of demons, with Samael and Lilith riding at their head as
king and queen.

A version of this survives in the Golden Dawn tradition on the qlippoth.
The qlippoth are given as 10 evil powers corresponding to the 10
sephiroth. I refered to G.D knowledge lectures and also
to Crowley's "777" (believed to be largely a rip-off of Alan Bennett's
G.D. correspondence tables), and found several inconsistencies in
transliteration and translation. Where possible I have reconstructed
the original Hebrew, and I have given a corrected list.

Kether    Thaumiel    Twins of God    (TAVM, tom - a twin)
Chokmah   Ogiel       Hinderers       (? OVG - to draw a circle)       
Binah     Satariel    Concealers      (STR, satar- to hide, conceal)
Chesed    Gash'khalah Breakers in Pieces (GASh Ga'ash - shake, quake
                                         KLH, khalah - complete destruction,
                                         annihilation)
Gevurah   Golachab    Flaming Ones    (unclear)
Tipheret  Tagiriron   Litigation      (probably from GVR, goor - quarrel)
Netzach   Orev Zarak  Raven of Dispersion (ARV, orev - raven 
                                          ZRQ, zaraq - scatter)
Hod       Samael      False Accuser    (SMM, samam - poison)
Yesod     Gamaliel    Obscene Ass      (GML, gamal - camel? alt. ripen?)
Malkut    Lilith      Woman of the Night (Leilah - Night)

Most  of these attributions are obvious, others are not. The Twins of
of God replace a unity with a warring duality. The Hinderers block the
free expression of the God's will. The Concealers prevent the mother
from giving birth to the child - the child is stillborn in the womb.
The Breakers in Pieces are the powers of authority gone bersek - Zeus
letting fly with thunderbolts in all directions. The Flaming Ones refer
to the fiery and destructive aspect of Gevurah. Lilith is the dark
side of the Malkah or queen of Malkuth.

Why Samael is placed in Hod is unclear, unless he has been christianised
and turned into the father of lies. In Kabbalah he is almost always
attributed to Gevurah, sometimes as its archangel. Yesod is associated with
the genitals and the sexual act, but why Gamaliel is unclear to me.
I could easily concoct fanciful and perhaps even believable explanations
for the attributions to Tipheret and Netzach, but I prefer not to.

In "777" Crowley also gives qlippoth for many of the 22 paths. If the
transliterations and translations are as accurate as those for the
sephiroth, I would be tempted to reach for my lexicon.

The G.D. teachings on the qlippoth are minimal in the material in
my possession, but a great deal can be deduced from those fascinating
repositories of Kabbalistic myth, the twin pictures of the Garden
of Eden before and after the Fall. There are so many mythic
themes in these pictures that it is difficult to disentangle them, but
they seem strongly influenced by the ideas of Isaac Luria, and it is now
time to describe the third major interpretation of the qlippoth.

Luria's ideas have probably
received more elaboration than any others in Kabbalah. The man left
little in a written form, and his disciples did not concur in
the presentation of what was clearly a very complex theosophical system - 
this is a subject where no amount of care will ensure consistency with
anyone else.

Luria made the first step in the creation a process called "tzim tzum"
or contraction. This contraction took place in the En Soph, the limitless,
unknown, and unknowable God of Kabbalah. God "contracted" in a process
of self-limitation to make a space (in a metaphorical sense, of course)
for the creation. In the next step the light entered this space in a
jet to fill the empty vessels of the sephiroth, but all but the first
three were shattered by the light. This breaking of the vessels is called
"shevirah". The shards of the broken vessels fell into the abyss created
by contraction, and formed the qlippoth. Most of the light returned to
the En Soph, but some of it remained in the vessels (like a smear of
oil in an empty bottle) and fell with the qlippoth.

Scholem describes the shevirah and the expulsion of the qlippoth as
cathartic; not a blunder, an architectural miscalculation like 
an inadequately buttressed Gothic cathedral, but as a catharsis. Perhaps
the universe, like a new baby, came attached to a placenta which had
to be expelled, severed, and thrown out into the night.

One way of looking at the shevirah is this: the self contraction of
tzim tzum was an act of Din, or Judgement, and so at the root of the
creative act was the quality which Kabbalists identify with the source
of evil, and it was present in such quantity that a balanced creation
became possible only by excreting the imbalance. The shevirah can be
viewed as a corrective action in which the unbalanced powers of Din,
the broken vessels, were ejected into the abyss.

Whether cathartic or a blunder, the shevirah was catastrophic. Nothing
was as it should have been in an ideal world. The four worlds of
Kabbalah slipped, and the lowest world of Assiah descended into the
world of the shells. This can be seen in the G.D. picture of the
Eden after the Fall. Much of Lurianic Kabbalah is concerned with
corrective actions designed to bring about the repair or restoration
(tikkun) of the creation, so that the sparks of light trapped in the 
realm of the shells can be freed.

The final word on the shells must go to T.S. Eliot, who had clearly
bumped into them in one of his many succesful raids on the inarticulate:
 
"Shape without form, shade without colour,
 Paralysed force, gesture without motion;"

"Those who have crossed 
 With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
 Remember us - if at all - not as lost,
 Violent souls, but only
 As the hollow men
 The stuffed men."