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The form of Jewish mysticism known as Cabala is most famous for its speculation on the nature of the Divine emanations, a series of 10 moments of the Divine coming to be, which are also essential aspects of all of reality itself. Those 10 emanations are echoed and mirrored down through all levels of reality, a fractal matrix of being and becoming.
While the concept of the sephirah was more or less settled early on in the development of Cabala, the doctrine settling into pretty profound cohesion by the compositions of the mammoth *Sefer Zohar*, or the Book of Radiance, in the latter half of the 13th century, another theosophical debate raged on for centuries thereafter: the nature and origin of evil.
Those debates would take a wide variety of forms before themselves settling into what has become the standard theory of evil in Cabala, most of us know it. That is, the Cabala developed by Isaac Luria, the Ari, in the theory of the breaking of the vessels, the demonic husks or shells known as the *kipot*, and the generation of an impure, evil, inverse reality of the sephirot known simply as *Sitra Akra*, or the Other Side. It's the Jewish upside down.
But how did speculation around the origin and nature of evil develop in Cabala in the first place? What are the origins of the *kipot* and the horrible *Sitra Akra*? Let's survey the wide range of speculations to find that evil in Cabala may very well have its origins in the Divine itself, in a kind of primordial void, or as an ontologically malevolent shell which precedes the fruit of being itself.
Also, this video is a collaboration with my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Angela Puka, an expert in contemporary occultism. You're going to want to make sure to check out her fantastic video where she'll be describing contemporary occult and left-hand path magic inspired by the concept of the *kipot*. Absolutely go over to check out Angela's channel, make sure to subscribe to her content, and tell her I said hi.
But stick around here, make sure to subscribe also to Esoterica for weekly explorations of topics in esoteric history. And if you want to support work like this, providing evidence-backed, free, and accessible content, I'd hope you consider checking out my Patreon and some of the merch on the channel. If you're new to the study of Western esotericism and you want to kind of get your sea legs, esoteric legs, make sure to check out my study guide. And if you're interested in historical books on topics in the occult and the mystical, check out my website, Esoteric Rare Books. You can find all those links in the description and in the pinned comment, including a link to Dr. Angela Puka's channel.
But now, let's turn to the origins of evil in the Cabala. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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The origins of chaos and evil have been the subject of religious and philosophical speculation since such speculation has been put to writing, and probably very long before the likely fad, fad that is civilization ever reared its head. Many of those speculations are found in the collection of Israelite literature known as the Hebrew Bible, or the Christian Old Testament.
The origins of evil have also fascinated early Judaism and Christianity, and a wide range of etiologies, or origin stories of evil, have been offered by theologians, mystics, and philosophers through the ages. From a radical monotheism where God alone is responsible for all things, including evil; the rapacious desires of angelic beings for the women of Earth; a pride-inspired great revolt of angels led by Satan against God; or the introduction of evil by the violation of the first commandment in Adam's tasting of the forbidden fruit.
A wide variety for the origins of evil were lively topics of discussion in the first few centuries of the Common Era. However, Christianity pretty quickly settled on a very specific set of myths to anchor its theory of evil, those myths, of course, in the service of the soteriological coming of Jesus. Judaism, on the other hand, continued to wrestle with those questions for centuries, and with no central theological authority, there's no Jewish Pope, basically, a truly wide variety of speculations emerged.
Those speculations, perhaps informed with encounters with Zoroastrian theologies in Persia, would reach a truly stunning array in the speculative Cabala that took shape in France and Spain in the Early Middle Ages. But before turning to that range of Cabalistic speculations on the origins and nature of evil, it's worth exploring the more fundamental matrix, the scriptural and historical substructure that actually anchored much of that very speculation.
This is a tradition existed in which God was responsible for evil. God was fundamentally responsible for evil, and this is a position born out of the kind of radical monotheism or monotheistic rhetoric of texts like Isaiah 45:7, in which God famously declares, "I form the light and create darkness; I produce peace and evil." Or at a text like Lamentations 3:38, where we read that, "Out of the mouth of the Most High did not good and evil, did not good and evil proceed?" It's a rhetorical question, the answer is yes, good and evil did proceed.
Further, the famous "a time for x and a time for y" of Ecclesiastes, or *Koheleth* 3, also indicates the Divine is responsible for all those times, those of wheel and of woe, those of good and evil. And other sections of the Hebrew Bible, like the scapegoat for a potential demonic being, Azazel, and the Yom Kippur Temple liturgy, also seem to hint at some kind of primordial, quasi-evil Divine being that needs to be appeased.
The mysterious but widely accepted *Sefer Yetzirah*, a mystical text detailing the formation of the *Olam*, or the universe, out of Divine speech, also seems to indicate that God has forged both good and evil, as we read, "And God made the states of opposition, good and evil; good from the good, and evil from the evil."
Finally, a famed midrash, a mythopoetic exegesis of the Bible attributed to Rabbi Tanḥuma, an early 4th-century scholar of the Common Era, that is, hints at a surprising aspect of the history of our cosmos, of this world. That this world, the one that we're currently inhabiting, it wasn't the first. In fact, others had come before and were destroyed by the Divine because they displeased God for various reasons. At least in those early texts, we don't really learn why they displeased God. But speculations on previous worlds would flourish in Cabalistic discussions on the origins of evil.
Thus, the matrix of such speculations on the origins and nature of evil in Cabala are centered on a handful of elements: biblical and rabbinical texts focusing on evil, especially impurity and malevolent beings and characters such as, well, demons like Ashmedai or Lilith, for that matter, or murderous evil people like Cain. Secondly, there's just the historical reality of Jewish existence, an existence, well, that was all cheery and nothing ever bad happened? No, it's one, of course, marked by tragedy, oppression, and, you know, the destruction of the Temple and things.
Finally, there are more specifically metaphysical speculations on the nature of evil, which arose from mystical, philosophical, and religious speculation just more generally, outside of biblical concerns. All of this, given the cradle that much of rabbinical Judaism occurred in, Canaan, Persia, remember we're talking about the Babylonian Talmud, but we should really talk about the Persian Talmud, before spreading to the wider Jewish world. Thus, some degree of Zoroastrian influence, maybe Zurvanism is likely here, but it's often obscure.
Now, I'll be coming back to those possible Zoroastrian or Zurvanist influences in an episode all on its own, so hold on to this idea. But to quickly come back to this question of philosophical speculations on the nature of evil, while much Cabalistic speculation will eventually hypothesize evil was just, just a fancy philosophical way of saying they thought evil was metaphysically real, and thus it had substantial status, ontological status, we would say in philosophy, most Jewish philosophers just rejected that position out of hand. Maimonides is a pretty radical Aristotelian, primarily understood evil a bit like Augustine in the Christian tradition, as a lack, as a privation, a metaphysical lack of inexistence, in the same way that cold or darkness don't really exist.
Others, more Neoplatonically inspired philosophers like Ibn Latif, speculated actually very little on the nature of evil. They just didn't seem to care. But they also understood it as a kind of privation associated with the imperfection of matter, or *hyle*, rather than being evil is a metaphysically substantial thing. Some even went so far as to say that evil was just the influence of an astral being, like Saturn. It was just Saturn emitting astral rays down here that caused things to go badly. It had nothing to do with fundamental philosophical or mystical questions at all. It was just astrological weather.
However, it's important to note that Cabala was often very self-consciously a rejection of those kinds of speculations. It was a kind of anti-philosophy in some ways, especially the rather deflationary Aristotelian metaphysics of someone like Maimonides. And thus, it isn't that surprising that whereas Maimonides would go for a metaphysically minimalist position, Cabala, they, a big note on minimalism of any kind, it would Cabala would exult in positively baroque maximalism, including evil maximalism. That sounds dangerous.
That said, speculations about evil in early Cabala generally take three distinct forms: a naturalistic mode, in which evil is said to emerge prior to goodness, either as a kind of primordial ontological void, by the emergence of evil as a kind of condition for the possibility of the existence of goodness itself. Those speculations center around the Cabalistic dictum that the shell precedes the fruit. Come back to this in a good bit in a minute.
Another line of speculation is the "Sea of Greater Harmony" or perfectionist line, in which good and evil must exist both at the same time in order for there to be any existence at all. This is kind of like a Leibnizian "best of all possible worlds" business, and thus the presence of evil is necessary for the perfection of the wider universe. This is an extension of the radical monotheism discussed earlier, whereby good and evil are brought into being by God as an essential aspect of the creation of the cosmos. It's like you needing a symphony where everything's there, but if you just heard one instrument at a time, it'd sound terrible. God hears all the instruments, we don't.
Finally, there is the evolutionary or karmic model, by which the coming to be of evil is simply part of the evolution of the Divine and the creation of the universe as well. In this line of speculation, evil is a kind of dross or refuse, kind of trash thrown off in the process of the Divine coming to be and or the creation of the cosmos.
Most early Cabalists will follow one, several, or all of these forms of speculation until they're really systematized by Isaac Luria in the 16th century, becoming, as you probably know, the myth of the breaking of the vessels, the coming to be of the demonic shards of creation, that's the *kipot*, and the generation of the evil and impure side of the sephirot, the Other Side, the *Sitra Akra*, from the sephirah specifically Gevurah, or Divine wrath, unchecked by the sephirah of Chesed.
But to appreciate those Lurianic concepts, indeed concepts that most simply recognize just as Cabala simpliciter, we need to understand the centuries, the centuries of development that led to the Cabala as we understand it now. You're not going to really appreciate those ideas in Lurianic Cabala fully if you don't understand the fact that they're the product of an evolution of ideas, and that evolution is itself fantastically interesting, in my opinion.
An early strata of Cabalistic speculations on evil, which are actually reflected in Christian speculations about Jewish belief, like those reflected in the 9th-century Archbishop of Lyon, Agobard, who indicates that Jews at that time believed that the Divine good and bad thoughts, the thoughts of the Divine, actually gave rise to angels and demons respectively. It also seems to indicate for Jews at that time that the first evil arose in the Divine mind before flowing out as a kind of ontological substance in the emanation of reality.
The 13th-century Rabbi Joseph Hamadan, whose name actually may indicate Persian origin, and that's another hint at all these possible Zoroastrian, Zurvanist connections, we'll come back to those, seemingly agrees with this line of speculation, such that the pure thoughts in the Divine mind become an angel, why the Divine mind contemplating calamity, which is also maybe a translation of *ra'ah*, for demons, specifically the damaging demons, the *mazikim* of the Talmud, and of course, the famous Lilith, the lilim demons.
Importantly, these angels and demons seem to appear on, respectively, on the right and the left side of the Divine mind, whatever right and left mean inside of a mind. But that's an important bit of metaphysical geography, as we'll see in a bit. The left, or the side of Divine evil and impurity, is also understood by the 13th-century Rabbi Moshe De Leon, not a small character in all this, as the origins of the commandments for the biblical sacrifices. Thus, the killing and burning of animals, especially, is meant to satisfy the malevolent regions of the Divine mind, just as acts of loving kindness satisfy the right-hand side of the Divine mind.
Of course, as my Cabala nerds know, De Leon would play a pivotal, though not the only, role. That's a very important development in scholarship and the composition of the *Sefer Zohar*, the Book of Radiance, the most important text in the whole history of Cabala. And unsurprisingly, we find just such an idea, very obscurely developed, in the Zohar itself. There, the *Bina de'ard nuta*, the Lamp of Darkness, so the first occulted light, which is the initial impulse of the Divine will, strikes the Divine thought, which throws off a shower of sparks, but also somehow purifies the Divine mind of some kind of primordial refuse. This is the *imal pilet*, the dross or trash, even of the mind.
This initial clash seems to create a higher thought and a lower one, or a right and a left one, and thus generates evil in some sense, as we know it. The shower of sparks as a Divine residue or refuse, the *pet*. Even more esoteric sections of the Zohar, which is a thing, especially the *Idra Zuta*, link this moment with an even more primordial period of the Divine existence. There, the Divine underwent some kind of symmetry collapse, rotating in upon itself, creating and destroying worlds, and throwing off sparkles or *zikkim*, also throwing off Divine sparks or *netzin* in the tremendous process of becoming, until the Divine became oriented face to face, throwing off a final fiery residue in generating the sephirot and our cosmos, along with evil.
Admittedly, these passages with their profound sexual ontology are among the most, and obscure and the most mysterious in an already difficult text, and frankly, they remain so to this day. Single lines of the Zohar in these sections get pages and pages and pages of mystical commentary in the literature, and 30 seconds of explanation ain't going to do it.
Another line of speculation, or perhaps lines of speculation, is that evil is an expression of an inverse realm of the ten emanations of the Divine, an inverse sephirot. These evil sephirot are sometimes, in the earliest texts, referred to as a *tamura*, or a counterpart. And thus, this sephirah as an inverse sephirah, or denoted as the *urot*. This might be a kind of pun on *tumah*, the Hebrew word for impure, impurity. Exactly where this *tamurot*, or world of the *torot*, is varies a lot. Sometimes it's all said to be contained in the sephirah of Keter. Other have it generated from the backside of Gevurah. And other have it kind of as an inverse upward growth from Malkhut. Regardless, such a concept is the prototype for what would later become the *Sitra Akra*.
However, the *tamurot* is also linked with an equally obscure Cabalistic concept: that of the 10 Kings of Edom, who ruled before a king ruled Israel. This otherwise innocuous, completely passable verse at Genesis 36:31 was long taken as a hint or a *remez* of a more profound ontological process, far more important than just a list of ancient Near East kings. In this interpretation, the 10 Kings of Edom are the metaphysical *tin* *tamurot*, the *kipot* of later Cabala, who existed before the emanation of the ten *sefirot*. Not only that, but they were previous worlds. They were previous universes that were created and destroyed, and became a kind of refuse or *pet*, that's literally the modern Hebrew word for trash, one after the other, like a stack of evil pancakes, and upon which the world of purity was just barely able to be constructed. So our universe is a bit like a city built atop a landfill, composed of the trash of all those worlds that came before. Yeah, we're living in the metaphysical equivalent of Staten Island. Sorry, Staten Island.
In other lines of speculation, the *torot* are simply the backsides of the sephirot. Just as a person in transition from a state of *taharah*, purity, to a state of impurity, *tumah*, so the sephirah can be said to contain both as logical correlatives. On the more philosophical side of the spectrum is a rather strange line of speculation in which Aristotelian concepts are actually hypostasized as if they were Platonic forms, something that would cause both Aristotle and Plato to roll in their graves. Specifically, the Aristotelian concepts of potentiality, actuality, and privation, or *stesis*, all of these are rendered into ontological elements of the primordial Divinity.
Early variants of this thinking, such as the 12th-century Rabbi Jacob ben Ruan, have good and evil tracked to actuality and potentiality, specifically *stesis* themselves, such that both, both are required for the generation and corruption of the entire universe, of the entire *Olam*. However, in the early Cabala of Joseph Gikatilla in Catalonia, potentiality becomes linked with negativity or pure nothingness, *ayin* or *e'in*, such that the first light of "Let there be light," *yahi*, or is born out of a more primordial darkness, emptiness, or void, which is ontologically a rich privation, as strangely contradictory as that might first appear, and frankly, just might be. It's nothingness as a something. This *ayin* is an Aristotelian *stesis*, a privation rendered metaphysically real, a lack made precisely in its lackness of something. This Limitless, endless nothingness becomes the *tohu* of Genesis and Rabbi Azriel of Gerona, from which a *bohu*, or void of somehow less negative nothingness, in that it is bounded, at least, is the structure into which light is drawn forth, leaving behind the *tohu* as *pet*, as refuse.
You can begin to see how these ideas are being merged together. The metaphor employed to describe this process is actually a pun taken from Hebrew, where the flower, or the *solet*, is taken from the chaff, or waste, the *peset*. Thus, out of the primordial chaff comes the wheat, and hence the famous Cabalistic dictum that the shell precedes the fruit.
But an even more esoteric dimension attends this very speculation. Not only does the pure *stesis*, privation of the shell, ontologically precede the fruit, metaphysical chaff before the wheat, but it's precisely the violent evil of the chaff of that *tohu* that protects the wheat or fruit from the evolution of the system itself. Remember those 10 worlds that have come before? Thus, the evil primordial period was necessary precisely to protect the seedling *sephirah* during the birth and death of those prior 10 worlds, before the 10 emanations of the Divine could unfold as our world. Again, the *pet* of darkness and evil becoming the foundations for the *pet*, the life-giving wheat of our reality.
As Cabala began to take shape in Spain, especially in Castile, focus on the origins and nature of evil took an even more frantic and speculative dimension, from absolutely dizzying texts like the "Treatise on the Emanations of the Left Hand Side," which I've covered in a previous episode, to more specifically philosophical treatments. The Cabalists of Castile did more to contemplate evil than I think any Cabalists before or since. The focus of these texts is often upon the process that we've hinted at earlier, whereby purity is achieved through impurity. *Mithamed*, in Aramaic, it means something like to emerge from the filth of gold, the rubbish of gold.
In these cases, the process is likened to how Cain and Esau gave rise to Abel and Jacob, as dross is purged by the goldsmith, as garbage is purged from a stately house, or as waste is excreted from the human being. These forces of primeval *tumah*, or impurity, are forged as necessary parts of the Divine coming to be in the creation of the sephirot and the cosmos as such. But just as the blow of the blacksmith's hammer throws off sparks of waste to forge metal, so too does the violence of becoming throw off waste, *pet*, dross. And out of the impurity of all of that emerges the pure world, the sephirot, the shells or husks preceding the fruit.
There is a sense in these texts, however, that our world, the final world after the 10 worlds of impurity, the so-called Kings of Edom, is just so barely beyond the world of evil impurity, so close is our realm to those that sickness, foulness, death, and the source of ritual impurity, or *tumah*, constantly threaten our world. In fact, the Torah itself was given, in part, according to the texts of this period, to appease, to appease those forces of impurity. As I mentioned earlier, the biblical sacrifices appease such forces that otherwise threaten to overwhelm our tiny little holdout of light and life.
Further, the negative commandments, the "Thou shalt not," are directly commanded in order that we not empower the forces of *tumah*, that will become the *Sitra*. When one violates those commandments, it's as if one is taking garbage back from the street and just tossing it all over your house, or adding dross back to pure gold. The purgation of the *pet*, the detritus of coming to be, has simply played its role and only serves to infect our realm with ontological *tumah*. And thus, the commandments are about separating the worlds from the world of *tumah* to the world of *taharah*, the world of purity.
In our realm, all of these lines of speculation would eventually converge in the Lurianic center at Safed, the crucial in which Cabala as we know it would come to be forged. The existence of primeval privation, impurity, and purgation as an act of Divine perfection via the formation of the sephirot in the cosmos would there come to be radically systematized. In as early as 1545, such systematizing texts would emerge, but it would be in the works of Shlomo Alkabetz, Joseph Caro, and Moshe Cordovero, my hero, that would set the stage for the final synthetic development of the breaking of the vessels, the *kipot*, and the *Sitra Akra* in the writings of these three great titans of Cabala.
All three lines of speculation on the origins and nature of evil come together, though they are often discussed purely speculatively, though as strongly received traditions. In Alkabetz and Caro, in fact, the *Mishnah* made angelic teacher, the *Maggid* – yes, the *Mishnah* is transformed into a kind of disembodied angelic teacher in this period – this known as the *Maggid*, expounds to Alkabetz and Caro how the shell precedes the fruit. It is hinted at in scripture as to why the holy *taharah* and the impure, the *tumah*, are mixed in our world, but distinct in the supernal Divine realms and in the demonic reaches of the concrete darkness. Because they are mixed in our realm, the task of human beings is to fully separate, to sift through the world of *tumah*, impurity that infects our world through the engagement with Cabalistic theology. Hence the development of so many Cabalistic rituals at this time, including the most famous of all, the Friday evening *Kabbalat Shabbat* service, developed precisely by Alkabetz and Caro. They developed the ritual as a kind of sifting tool to separate our worlds from the world of *tumah* and the world of *taharah*, so that we become part of the *taharah*, pulling down the purity of the supernal realms.
But it would be Moshe Cordovero, the greatest of the systematizers of Cabala in my opinion, they will bring together all these strings together, but not for whatever reason, he wouldn't tie them in his vast literary output. Cordovero would introduce and develop near every line of speculation for the origins and nature of evil that we've discussed so far, however, always with a more philosophical rather than mythological bent. Well, nearly always. The fact that Cordovero is thought of as more philosophical than mythological has been overstated. For instance, in his discussion of the primeval nothingness, the nothingness he links that void to a kind of pure potentiality of thought, which is then expressed via the eternality of Divine activity, Divine activity being thought, thinking itself in the classic Aristotelian sense. God's primeval knowledge of the sephirot as potentialities does constitute a sense of a world before being, but that world is purged as mental refuse through the process of emanation of just those potential sephirot as actual sephirot, just as the mental note is forgotten when the task is actually completed.
This trend is typical of Cordovero. Previously more mythological elements are reinterpreted within a more specifically philosophical framework. I also think this is why Luria ultimately won over Cordovero. I think people often just like grandiose myths in their religion as opposed to critical philosophy. It's also why I think Maimonides didn't win. However, Cordovero does by no means abandon the language of mythopoesis, especially in the language of the inner sexual polarity in the generation of the sephirot. There, the hidden male and female rise and fall within the occult light of Keter, Mercy and Judgment, tossing and turning in violent sexual delight before bursting out in ecstasy of the sephirotic reality. Cordovero also retains the concept of the shell preceding the fruit, though he places that process much later in the ontological development of reality, down in the sephirah of Malkhut, down in our realm, to explain the existence of evil prior to goodness, the *shedim* or demons prior to the souls of the righteous, on the Sabbath came before Abel, the flawed Kings of Israel before the good ones, the rule of Edom prior to that of the Messiah, of course.
All of this vast and wonderful machinery would be brought to bear on the greatest mythological development in all of Jewish theological and mystical history, that of the system of Isaac Luria, the Ari, the Arizal. It's just Cabala, basically. And with his myth of the breaking of the vessels, the *kipot*, and the *Sitra Akra* from the sephirah of Gevurah, and the theological process of redemption through *Tikkun Olam*, Luria would forge Cabala as all of us know it, rolling all of this into one vast, baroque, and sometimes incoherent system. Though Luria did by no means forge his system from nothing, it was a result of a complex and amazing history of philosophical and mystical speculation, a history well worth studying on its own for all kinds of profound insights.
And if you want to dive into those texts, as much as one can in English, basically nothing of this is translated from Hebrew with a few exceptions. Nearly all of this material remains in Hebrew, unfortunately. Scholem's essays on evil in Cabala, the on the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, still one of the best places to start, frankly. And Tish's wonderful *The Doctrine of Evil in the Shell and Lurianic Kabbalah* has actually finally gotten an expensive English translation. It's like $80 if you can find it, but it's a magisterial text and it's just sort of ground floor for this kind of information. Moshe Idel's *Primeval Evil in Kabbalah* is also just breathtaking scholarship, and this episode is profoundly indebted to the work of Moshe Idel. That's a great book and well worth checking out.
But don't forget to check out Dr. Angela Puka's companion video focusing on how all of this business of the *kipot* has actually been reimagined and reinvented, in some sense, to be used in sort of modern contemporary cult practices of the left-hand path in the form of codic magic. So that's fascinating stuff in the contemporary period, well worth checking out. Again, head over to Dr. Puka's channel, give her a subscribe, let her know I sent you. And thank you, thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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