Ghagiel

Ghagiel is the second Qlipha, the shadow of Chokmah, the sphere of Wisdom. Where Chokmah is the first outflowing of divine force, Ghagiel, also spelled Ogiel or Chaigidel and read as "the hinderers", is that force turned to obstruction and false pride.

In the scheme followed here it is ruled by Beelzebub, a name with a longer history than the qliphothic list: it derives from Ba'al Zevuv, "lord of the flies," a mocking Israelite corruption of the Philistine god Ba'al Zevul, "exalted lord," named at 2 Kings 1:2-3, and by the New Testament period the name had become a byword for a chief of demons (Matthew 12:24). Spellings and rulers of the shells vary considerably by source; where the demon lists were largely assembled from older biblical and grimoire demonology mapped onto the sephirothic scheme after the fact, the shell names themselves, Ghagiel among them, are the later Kabbalistic layer, built from Hebrew roots read as describing a state of obstructed or misapplied force rather than a person or being. The material is presented academically, as a documented strand of esoteric thought rather than as a claim about any actual entity.

In the Golden Dawn's modern planetary attribution, Chokmah corresponds to Uranus, the outer planet of sudden, revolutionary force discovered only in 1781; Ghagiel's hindering and false pride are read, on this attribution, as that same expansive force turned erratic and self-important rather than genuinely illuminating.

Sources Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd editionMichael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.) with 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 Beelzebub for Ghagiel, 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 Ghagiel as Chokmah'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