Mapping the qlippoth: three schools of interpretation
The Lurianic school, the Hayim Vital school, and late Gothic kabbalism offer three irreducible maps of the qlippothic tree. Where do they meet, and where do they part?
The first school — Lurianic, 16th-c. Safed — defines the qlippoth as "shells" left behind after the shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels. The map here is secondary to the process: the qlippoth are the geography of a catastrophe, not a stable territory.
The Vital school shifts the emphasis. In the Etz Hayim, the qlippoth acquire names, orders, and mutual relations — it becomes possible to speak of the "principality" of each shell, its princes and its servants. This is a map in the ordinary sense.
The third school — late, occult-Gothic (19th c., Lévi, Papus) — overlays the map with a grid of correspondences: planets, metals, colours, weekdays. Original kabbalah barely participates here; this is a European hermetic re-working.
For a researcher handling 17th–19th-century grimoires, the important thing is not to collapse all three maps into one. The names overlap; the structures do not.