A while ago I got Thomas Karlsson’s book, “Qabalah, Qliphoth and Goetic Magic,” which I very much enjoyed and which I have been meaning to post about. It inspired me enough that for a while I thought about doing work with the klippot as part of the Abramelin operation. In the end, that seemed like biting off way more than I could chew. The klippot thing keeps coming back, though.

Recently I had the idea of doing some klippotic talismans and so began trolling around various sources for information about this not-much-discussed aspect of the Kabbalah. Online, lots of people in lots of forums had lots to say about them, but not much of it was very helpful. One individual kept insisting that first, the klippot are a recent invention–which is not so–and then that the klippotic Tree, or Tree of Death, as some call it, is a recent invention. I wasn’t sure about that. It seemed like I remembered an inverse to the Tree of Death being discussed either by a Hasidic group or perhaps the Sabbataians. Another poster mentioned this tree was in the Zohar. (Btw, the image to the right is taken from the Dragon Rouge site. I am not pimping that group; they were just the only ones who had this image, and I want to acknowledge that. They call it the Tree of Knowledge, though, instead of the Tree of Death.)

The Zohar is a book I have avoided, since every time I have ever picked it up, I have been taken aback by its kookiness and misogyny. I have never understood why so many people are attracted to it. I even bought a couple of the volumes of the new Pritzker edition of the Zohar, hoping that perhaps the problems I was having with it could be somewhat addressed by helpful footnotes and good translation, but I haven’t made any headway with them either. The other day, though, I looked around for a searchable Zohar online and found this one. Now, I know it’s part of the money-grubbing, New Age stinking Kabbalah Center bunch, originators of magic Torah water, red string wearing, and claiming people who got killed in the Holocaust did so because they did not use Kabbalah (actually, a lot of them DID). Nevertheless, this html Zohar and its search function is a good tool. It was very helpful in finding all the mentions of klippot in the Zohar. And what do you know, a number of them talk about various sephirot appearing on the klippotic level. So for instance, in the Zohar’s commentary on the verse “and the betrothed maiden cried out, but there was none to save her” from the parsha Ki Tetze:

“For Her garments in exile are dark, and when she wears them she says, “Do not gaze upon me, because I am black” (Song of Songs 1:6). They [the garments of the Shekhinah in exile] are the Klipot, Destroyer, Anger and Wrath, which are Chesed, Gvurah and Tiferet of the Klipot, namely the male of the Klipah that includes them. His evil female is an evil maidservant. She is Shabtai (Saturn), of whom it says, “and a handmaid that is heir to her mistress” (Proverbs 30:23), who is Queen Shabbat. Destroyer, Anger and Wrath, which are Chesed, Gvurah and Tiferet of the Klipah, surround the three patriarchs, who are Chesed, Gvurah and Tiferet of Holiness.”

This is just one example of a number I found that show that the Zohar is referring to a parallel Tree of Life that is located in the world of the klipot or that is composed of klipot.

One of the reasons why the Tree of Life has never appealed to me much as a way of apprehending the world is because it seemed too dualistic and too symmetrical. An effect of reading a lot of alchemical texts was that I began to see how very limiting a dualistic perspective is (alchemy usually adopts threes instead of twos as the fundamental grouping). When I read Karlsson’s book, although I liked some of the ideas, I thought that a mirror-image of the Tree of Life that is instead composed of klipot and is a Tree of Death was taking the errors of the Tree of Life model and compounding them–exponential symmetry. It reminded me of something I’d written about years ago in relationship to, of all things, horror novels–that the typical Satanist of horror novels (and sometimes in the real world) can be said to be completely bound to the Catholic Church in the reversal of things like the Our Father prayer or the Catholic Mass. And if Satan is just a negative duplicate of God, why bother with either of them? I argued then and I believe now that this kind of overturning is not positive or creative but instead keeps one trapped in a paradigm created by what one would like to overturn. It doesn’t allow for real change. You can be right-handed or left-handed, but in both cases you are using your hand. Re the Tree of Life/Tree of Death thing, I wondered if instead perhaps the klipot were a part of each sefirah and the Tree of Life was not quite so simple or straightforward (and limiting) as it seemed. I actually found some support for this idea in the Zohar.

Throughout the Zohar, the klipot are compared to parts of an almond–the dry exterior husk and the inner covering, which adheres to the nut and is difficult to remove–in contrast to the nutritious nut. Much is made of the metaphorical meanings of those coverings–how an individual, for instance, is always having to try to remove the klipot around him/herself, for instance, and how it sticks to what it surrounds. So the shells or husks that are the literal meaning of klipot seem pretty evil and very much something to be thrown away, the equivalent of garbage. And yet, in vol 1, BereshitA, section 110, it says, “Without a shell, no fruit can be had.” It seems that separation, which is the quintessence of klipah, is not all bad. Without separation, there can be no definition.

Likewise, the klipot are not separate from God, because, as the Zohar quotes repeatedly as a proof text, “Elohim has made the one as well as the other” (Ecclesiastes 7:14), meaning that God/Elohim created the klipot also. There are no klipot in the highest level of creation, where angels live, but then, there are no human beings there either. Klipot seem to be woven through our experience.

The attitudes towards the klipot remind me in many ways of the attitudes towards the “darker” planets or forces, Saturn being a good example (and which the Zohar actually mentions in the same context). I disagree with modern-day representations of Saturnian deities like Hekate that depict them as smiling and friendly. I think there are definitely awesome, terrifying streams in the divine and that we are better off not trying to pretend they are otherwise. You can’t make a puppy out of a shark. At the same time, however, let us not demonize sharks. Saturn is often considered to be a highly negative influence, limiting and drying, concerned with boundaries, but I have found this particular planetary influence to be one of the most helpful. Good fences make good neighbors. And this is in many ways in line with the image of the klipot we get from the Zohar.

Of course, there are plenty of bits in the Zohar that have the “here there be monsters” attitude towards the klippot. Okay. But I think these bits and pieces–about the necessity of the klipot, the good effects of separation, and the insistence that the klipot are also a creation of the divine–can perhaps indicate some other ways to work with these forces.

I have been thinking of them more and more not as husks but more as the dark side of the Moon, and that their relationship to the ordinary Tree of Life is not as a mirror reflection but as perhaps inextricably linked with each sefirah. Without the Moon’s dark side, there would be no Moon, after all.