Qliphoth

In Qabalah, the qliphoth are structures and systems which have ceased to function as vessels for the aspects of universal Consciousness that once gave birth to them, but which remain animated in a dead, automatic way, running on autopilot through the same endlessly repeating and self-perpetuating patterns, maintaining their own existence and even propagating themselves further in a grotesque parody of their original functions.

The zombies portrayed in horror movies like Night of the Living Dead are a perfect metaphor for the qliphoth: dead husks, no longer serving as vessels for human souls, mindless but still lurching along, keeping themselves going by eating people’s brains, propagating the system by turning their prey into more zombies.

Let’s look at a more mundane example of a qliphotic system. Take a human services organization – the kind of benevolent organization that employs a bunch of social workers to help, say, abused children or homeless families or some such clientele. Such an organization is a system whose animating force is the intent to help people. In order to facilitate its mission, this organization adopts various bureaucratic procedures. Gradually the procedures become more and more complex and less and less immediately relevant to the original intent of the organization, and the organization hires more people whose primary qualification is that they’re well-adapted to environments that follow such procedures.

Maintaining the self-propagating bureaucratic procedures increasingly becomes, in practice, a higher priority than the organization’s original intent, and increasingly becomes less of a support for the original intent and more of a hindrance. Indeed, if the organization can set itself up as the “official channel” for the services it was originally intended to provide, then not only does it increasingly fail to provide those services efficiently, it also blocks others from providing those services, unless those others interface with it by adopting their own self-propagating bureaucracies. A system that once was animated by a healthy and conscious intent is now a shambling husk, running on autopilot, stifling that which it was intended to serve and instead serving only to endlessly duplicate and spread its dysfunction, like a virus.

When one considers that the process described above has swallowed up, among other things, nearly all public education, healthcare, social services, and government, suddenly the image of contagious brain-eating zombies doesn’t seem nearly so outrageously grim or far-fetched. Easy to see why many traditional Qabalists chose to portray the qliphoth as demonic spirits, fallen angels: beings that once served God but have now lost their connection with the divine and run amok. Possession by evil spirits is actually a pretty good working analogy for contemplating all manner of qliphotic manifestations, from the walking dead to inefficient bureaucracy. For all I know, it may be not only a good analogy, but the literal truth.