Gha'agsheblah

Gha'agsheblah is the fourth Qlipha, the shadow of Chesed, the sphere of Mercy. Read as "the smiters" or "the disturbers", it is mercy and abundance corrupted into devouring greed and excess, also given as Gamchicoth or Agshekeloh.

In the scheme followed here it is ruled by Astaroth, whose name descends from Ashtoreth, the Phoenician and Canaanite goddess of fertility and war worshipped as Astarte across the ancient Near East and denounced repeatedly in the Hebrew Bible (Judges 2:13, 1 Kings 11:5); by the medieval grimoire period the goddess had been recast as a male demon, listed among the principal spirits of the Ars Goetia. The shift from a widely venerated ancient goddess to a demon of a Christian and later Kabbalistic underworld is itself a documented pattern across several of the qliphothic rulers, in which older Near Eastern deities were progressively demonized as the religions that had opposed them gained dominance. Spellings and rulers of the shells vary by source; the material is presented academically.

Chesed is attributed to Jupiter, the planet of expansion and generosity, and Gha'agsheblah's smiting and disturbance are read as that same expansive force with no limiting counterpart, mercy grown so unchecked it consumes rather than gives.

Sources Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd editionMichael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.) with The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the KingSamuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (trans.); Aleister Crowley (ed. and publisher), The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie

The concept of the qelippot is a genuine part of classical Kabbalah, but the tidy scheme of ten named "shadow sephiroth", each with an assigned ruling demon, is largely a later construction. It was elaborated by Christian Kabbalists, given systematic form in the ceremonial magic of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and developed further in twentieth and twenty-first century "Left-Hand Path" and Thelemic writing. The demons named as rulers, such as Astaroth for Gha'agsheblah, are drawn from earlier Jewish, Christian and grimoire demonology and mapped onto the scheme after the fact.

Luria's own kelippot, as set out in Hayyim Vital's Etz Chaim, number four rather than ten: three described as "completely impure" and a fourth, kelippat nogah, a translucent or glowing shell understood as a mixture of good and evil rather than pure evil, through which the ordinary permitted things of the world are said to pass. A one-to-one shell for every sephirah, with Gha'agsheblah as Chesed's specific opposite, does not appear in that Lurianic material in this form; it is the later systematizers, working chiefly from S. L. MacGregor Mathers's unpublished paper on the Qlippoth, who built the fully sephirothic ten-fold tree the modern list now presents. The system is presented here as a documented strand of esoteric thought, described in historical terms; the demons are not asserted to be real, and nothing here is offered as instruction or as the teaching of any single religion.

Sources Major Trends in Jewish MysticismGershom Scholem with The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic FellowshipLawrence Fine