Thaumiel

Thaumiel is number 1 of the ten Qliphoth (Hebrew qelippot, "shells" or "husks"), the "adverse" or shadow counterparts of the ten sephiroth of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. It is treated as the dark reflection of Kether, and in the demonological lists of this tradition its ruling spirits are given as Satan and Moloch. The underlying idea of the qelippot, the shells that surround and conceal the divine light, is developed at length in the Zohar, which more often uses the broader term Sitra Achra, "the Other Side," for the demonic realm as a whole, and above all in the sixteenth century Lurianic Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, where the "breaking of the vessels" scatters divine sparks that become trapped in the shells.

The two ruling names carry their own older history. Moloch is a Canaanite deity named in the Hebrew Bible in connection with child sacrifice (Leviticus 18:21, 2 Kings 23:10) and long predates any qliphothic scheme; Satan begins in the Hebrew Bible as ha-satan, "the accuser," a courtroom role rather than a proper name, and only later Jewish and Christian literature reads it as a single adversarial figure. Their pairing at Thaumiel, "the twins of God," is read as fitting Kether's own unity split into contending duplicate crowns. This entry describes Thaumiel as a figure of that documented esoteric tradition.

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in that Lurianic material in this form; it is the later systematizers, working chiefly from S. L. MacGregor Mathers's unpublished paper on the Qlippoth, who built the fully sephirothic ten-fold tree the modern list now presents.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