Learning Japanese with Berserk: Sephirah

There are few words in Berserk that have intrigued and confused readers more than this one. In volume 26, when the Skull Knight asks Slan about her kindred's whereabouts, she answers: "They've probably all dissolved into their favorite Sephirah and are floating around without a form."

Now that's all well and good, but what's a Sephirah? Surprise: it's no mystery in the original Japanese. The word she uses is 局, normally pronounced きょく (KYO), but on which Miura added セフィラ (SEFIRA) as furigana. 

局 has many meanings (department, bureau, station...) and that varies depending on the context, as it's most often used as a suffix. For example, NASA in Japanese is アメリカ航空宇宙局, where 局 means "administration". In the Japanese name for the "CIA", it means "agency", and for the FBI, "bureau". When talking about the post office (郵便局), it means "office". You get the idea.

The idea here is that the members of the God Hand have certain "branches of activity" they favor more than others, and that these are subdivisions of a whole. It's important to underscore that aspect, because in English the concept is usually translated with the word "domain", which has multiple meanings. Here it doesn't refer to places they would rule over, instead it's more like they're department heads at a company.

Now that it's clear, why "Sephirah"? I'm afraid it's nothing too deep. The word comes from the Kabbalah, a current of Jewish mysticism that was influential in Western occult practices. Miura had researched it at the time and several terms from it ended up in Berserk. In the Kabbalah, it refers to the 10 mystical attributes of God's primordial form. Sephirah (or Sefirah) is the single form, and Sephiroth (or Sefirot) is the plural.

But in Berserk, it just refers to these subdivisions of something (mankind's collection consciousness?) that the God Hand oversees. There's likely no plural form, and no deeper meaning or connection beyond the fact it was a cool name. The same applies for the Qliphoth.