The shells of the inverse tree

The qliphoth (or klippot) are the shells or husks of Kabbalah: in Lurianic teaching the residue of a prior, failed creation whose vessels shattered, treated as the source of impurity and evil, the dross clinging to the sparks of holiness that the work of tikkun seeks to redeem. In the Jewish sources they are chiefly a way of accounting for evil, not a system to be cultivated.

Later Western occultism arranged the qliphoth into an inverse Tree of Life with ten qliphothic spheres mirroring the ten sephiroth, each with a ruling demon, and made this "shadow tree" a subject of study and, in some left-hand-path currents, of deliberate practice.