Lilith

Lilith is the tenth and lowest Qlipha, the shadow of Malkuth, the sphere of the Kingdom. It is the "night specter", the corrupted reflection of the material world, the outermost husk of the shadow tree, also given as Nehemoth.

In the scheme followed here it is ruled by Naamah, a name shared with two figures in the Hebrew Bible, a daughter of Lamech at Genesis 4:22 and a wife of Solomon at 1 Kings 14:21, neither demonic; the demonic Naamah is a later rabbinic and Kabbalistic development, named in the Zohar alongside Lilith and Agrat bat Machlat as one of a group of female demons associated with the night and with the seduction of men. That the lowest and outermost shell of the entire ten-fold list bears the same name, Lilith, as the ruler of the ninth shell above it is treated by commentators on the scheme as fitting its position: the material world is the point at which the Lilith figure's older Jewish literary identity, the demon of the outside and the night, is most fully at home. Spellings and rulers of the shells vary by source; the material is presented academically.

Malkuth carries no planet of its own in the classical sevenfold scheme, standing instead for the four elements and the manifest world entire; some Kabbalistic readings identify Malkuth with the Shekhinah, the divine presence dwelling in the world, which makes Lilith, its shadow, a particularly charged inversion of that indwelling presence rather than a simple absence of it.

Sources Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd editionMichael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.) with The ZoharTraditionally attributed to Moses de Leon

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 Naamah for Lilith, 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 Lilith as Malkuth'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