Thagirion

Thagirion is the sixth Qlipha, the shadow of Tiphareth, the sphere of Beauty. Read as "the disputers" or those who make ugliness where beauty should be, it is imaged as a blackened sun, also spelled Tagaririm.

In the scheme followed here it is ruled by Belphegor, whose name derives from Ba'al Pe'or, the Moabite god at whose shrine the Israelites were said to have joined themselves at Numbers 25, an episode read there as a grave apostasy. Later Christian demonology, including one influential seventeenth century classification of demons by the sin each tempts toward, cast Belphegor specifically as a demon of sloth or of false discovery, a considerably narrower role than the biblical fertility god the name began as. The pairing with Tiphareth, whose beauty and harmony are said to curdle into a blackened, dissonant sun in this shell, is a later Kabbalistic reading with no equivalent in the older material about Ba'al Pe'or itself. Spellings and rulers of the shells vary by source; the material is presented academically.

Tiphareth is attributed to the Sun, and the blackened sun imagined for Thagirion is read as that same solar harmony eclipsed, beauty's ordering center gone dark rather than radiant, a corruption fitted precisely to the sephirah it shadows.

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in that Lurianic material in this form; it is the later systematizers, working chiefly from S. L. MacGregor Mathers's unpublished paper on the Qlippoth, who built the fully sephirothic ten-fold tree the modern list now presents.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