Golachab

Golachab is the fifth Qlipha, the shadow of Geburah, the sphere of Severity. Read as "the burning bodies" or "the flaming ones", it is just severity turned to cruelty and wanton destruction, also spelled Golab.

In the scheme followed here it is ruled by Asmodeus, whose name is thought to derive from the Avestan Aeshma daeva, a Zoroastrian demon of wrath, and who appears under that borrowed name in the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit as the demon who kills Sarah's bridegrooms before being driven off by Tobias and the angel Raphael. Asmodeus is thus one of the qliphothic rulers with the clearest continuous textual history, running from Persian religion through Second Temple Jewish literature and into medieval grimoire demonology before being attached to Golachab by the later ceremonial-magic systematizers, a chain considerably longer and more documented than the ten-fold shell scheme itself. Spellings and rulers of the shells vary by source; the material is presented academically.

Geburah is attributed to Mars, the planet of force and judgment, and Golachab's burning bodies and flaming cruelty are read as Mars's disciplined severity stripped of the restraint that, on the balanced tree, keeps it just rather than merely destructive.

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 Asmodeus for Golachab, 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 Golachab as Geburah'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in that Lurianic material in this form; it is the later systematizers, working chiefly from S. L. MacGregor Mathers's unpublished paper on the Qlippoth, who built the fully sephirothic ten-fold tree the modern list now presents.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