From: cal_hplb_hpl_hp_com@hms.com
Newgroups: alt.magick
Subject: 04:Kabbalah FAQ
scene where a Jewish sholar is in the hospital dying and his son is
reciting a Jewish prayer. The words are almost identical to the LBRP
attributes of the Archangels, except the attributes are reversed. Sir
Adam Sinclair, the hero, thinks how close it is to that used in his
tradition. Its on page 40.
"Shema Yisrael, Adonail Elohenu, Adonai Achad. Hear O Israel, the
Lord is our God, the Lord is One...Go since the Lord sends thee; go,
and the Lord will be with thee; the Lord God is with him and he will
ascend."
"May the Lord Bless thee and keep thee; May the Lord let his
countenance shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee; May the Lord
lift up his countenance upon the, and give the peace."
"At thy right hand is Michael, at thy left is Gabriel, before thee is
Uriel, behind thee is Raphel, and above thy head is the divine
presence of God. The angel of the lord encampeth around them that
fear Him, and He delivereth them. Be strong and of good courage; be
not affrighted, neither be thou dismayed, for the Lord thy God is with
thee, withersoever thou goest."
-------------------Robert's contribution ends--------------------------
Q2.4 : 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."
Q.2.5: Why is Gevurah feminine?
-------------------------------
There is a common belief that certain sephiroth are "masculine" and
other sephiroth are "feminine". This belief causes many problems in
comprehending the Tree of Life, and is a source of questions.
For example, why is Gevurah, a martial and aggressive sephira,
depicted as feminine, and why is Netzach, the nurturing, caring,
emotional and aesthetic sephira, depicted as "masculine".
No convoluted explanations are required. The difficulties occur
because of a carelessness in choosing words, and a misunderstanding
about planetary correspondences. In other words, the above depictions
are innaccurate.
Masculine and feminine are acquired behaviours which have changed over
time, and many people are learning their Kabbalah from books written
several decades ago. These stereotype views of masculine and feminine
were not shared by Jewish authors, who not only did not use these
terms, but placed an entirely different meaning on the terms they did
use. If you take "feminine" to imply emotional, caring, and passive,
and "masculine" to imply active, aggressive, and intellectual, then
not only do you risk offending a large number of people who find this
insulting, but you will also have great difficulty in reconciling
various correspondences for the sephiroth.
A more appropriate characterisation of the difference between sephira
is that of "giving" and "receiving". Kether is a sephira that only
gives, and Malkuth is a sephira which only receives, and all other
sephiroth are both giving and receiving, so that Binah receives from
Chokhmah but gives to Chesed. [Things are not so simple; there is a
tradition that when a current reaches Malkuth, it reflects and travels
back up the Tree again, so that even Malkuth and Kether play a part in
giving and receiving. When human beings carry out simple acts in
their daily life with full consciousness, then this results in a small
"tikkun" or restoration in the upper worlds - in other words, it is
our own actions which cause the reflection within Malkuth, and by
doing so cause the "spiritualisation of matter"]
Kabbalists have used a sexual metaphor for this giving and receiving;
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