Golachab is the sixth Qliphothic Order, the shell of Severity that corresponds to the sephirah Geburah. Its bleak name is often broken down as “Ge Chelab” — the Valley of Burning, or “men of war” from the Hebrew gever (man) and chereb (sword). In the unpurified realms, Golachab is a horde of fiery, tyrannical forces: a husk of naked violence, judgment without mercy, and the desolation of sterile conflict.

Position on the Tree of Life

Golachab perches on the 27th path, the infernal vector linking the Qliphothic Binah (Satariel) to the Qliphothic Chesed (Gha’agsheklah). It is the brutal inversion of Geburah’s divine severity: where the sephirah exalts righteous judgment and the courage to cut away the impure, Golachab embodies pure destructive rage and the arrogance of unchecked force. In the throne of its king, the arch-demon Asmodai (or Asmodeus), it directs the martial shell that parodies the divine “Strict Justice.”

Astrological and planetary correspondence

Mars rules Golachab as its planetary key. The red planet’s aggressive, incisive energy, stripped of any higher purpose, is rendered here as carnage, wrath, and war for its own sake. The Qliphoth fix and distort planetary rays into coarse, materialistic expressions; Golachab consumes the Martian current and spews it back as poison, fury, and murder. Its weapon is the chereb — not the sword of discernment, but the blade of the brutish conqueror.

Historical context

The Zohar describes these adversarial systems as the shells of the sephiroth. Golachab is first clearly delineated in later Kabbalistic treatises such as Kitzur Shlomo and in Collegia of the Left Hand. In these works, the Zoharic “Qliphoth of Geburah” are organized into a specific Order — the “Men of the Sword” — ruled by the twice-fallen angel Asmodai. In the 17th-century text The Treatise of the Left Hand, Golachab is explicitly listed as the habitat of the demonic forces that incite cruelty and war. Its arch-demons are terror, fire, and affliction: they form the base of the infernal hierarchy of the left column. Later occult synthesis, especially in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, fixed these Qliphothic correspondences into the schema that Crowley later engraved in Liber 777.

In the table

At scale step 27, Golachab appears as the Qliphothic Order of Path 27, the shell of the Mars sphere. Its number is 6 (since Geburah is the fifth Sephirah, and the Qliphoth invert the Sephirothic count beginning from Malkuth upward — here at the sixth shell). In the table’s sibling cells, Golachab is tied to turbulent forces: the letter Peh (the mouth, as wound and weapon) and the astrological symbol of Mars. This entry in the “Orders of Qliphoth” column warns the practitioner: Golachab is no path for the passive. Those who approach without the binding of Kether’s light will find only the sword-edge and the burning valley.