imho The main difference sphiroth v. Qlipoth is that the tree of life is 1 unit with god/universe/source whatever while the Qlipoth are each like separate bodies within separate bodies, like fractals & their geometry.
No matter whether you go with Qliphoth or Sephiroth, you'll meet Jewish and Christian culture, thus their god or his mirrored reflections in the rebellion of the Qliphoth. And you'll even meet gods of other cultures, spoofed and distorted to demons. Since I had my issues with religion and mysticism in general, I didn't go for Kabbala or Qabalah at all for a long time, but rather stuck to my very own magical research through dreams, trance, divination and such. I knew I would become angry both at the falsehood in the robe of moral on the one hand and at the distortion of this same moral in the mirror of the evil on the other hand.
Since recently I don't have these issues anymore, so I started reading the Zohar a few days ago. And I realize that much of what I've found out by myself, can also be found in the reflections of the Kabala (and elsewhere). There is still the theology and the mysticism of course, which force all knowledge into their patterns and abuse them for their religious purposes. Yet I have much fun in detecting these patterns, seeing what they're doing there, transforming their ideas into broader, archetypal views and then back into my own individual magical system. And I have a lot of fun with the kabalistic way of exegesis, which often resembles the understanding of dreams in a certain way - not that I am really interested in biblical texts per se, actually they could do their kabalastic stuff on any text and it would be the same fun for me.
In the Sefer Yetzira - if I remember right - good and evil both reside in the Sephiroth. This at least is the way I always looked at the tree of life, thus I never saw a need for the Qliphoth. Yet I understand, that there was a need in the middle ages, when the Sephiroth became an expression of the pure good, for a new place where the evil should reside, still being a spark of god concealed in the shells of matter (or the like) of course, since their god has to rule them all, right? So they added the Kliphoth to the Kabala.
Well, now we have the Qabbalah with all the angels and demons and so on, where the mages climb around, often from bottom to top, to find whatever they seek. And it's fun, many find parts of their magic in there, both in the Sephiroth and Qliphoth. And when you follow the Sephiroth from top to bottom, you will follow the path of creation, because it originally was meant this way in Kabala.
Now why do I write all this stuff? Yes, the Sephiroth were all meant as parts of god, there you are right, Jk666. Yet the Qliphoth, although today often understood as independent opponent to Jewish and Christian religion and god, are much more a counterpart, still tightly interwoven with the views of those religions and their mysticism. If you do magic with the Qliphoth, you will still have to deal with their god in a subliminal way, especially when you do it in rebellion against him.
Which doesn't mean of course, that you can't find valuable inspirations for and understandings of magic. But in the end - if you really want to be independent from this god and his kin - you have to do your work for your individual magic through understanding the underlying patterns and extracting and transforming the knowledge into its essences. Well, at least that's my opinion ...
