Nun: The Hebrew Letter of Fish

Nun is the fourteenth Hebrew letter and a simple letter; its name means 'fish' and its value is 50. Like Mem it has a distinct final form. In Aramaic 'nun' means fish, an image of fertile life hidden in the deep. The Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation), the foundational text of Jewish letter-mysticism compiled in late antiquity, divides the twenty-two Hebrew consonants into three groups: three 'mother' letters (Aleph, Mem, Shin) assigned to the elements Air, Water and Fire; seven 'double' letters, each with a hard and soft pronunciation, assigned to the seven classical planets and to seven pairs of opposites; and twelve 'simple' letters assigned to the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve months. As a simple letter Nun is assigned to the sign Scorpio and the month of Cheshvan.

A separate and much later system, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888), mapped the twenty-two letters onto the twenty-two trumps of the tarot along the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This tarot correspondence is a modern Western-esoteric overlay, not part of the ancient Hebrew or classical Kabbalistic tradition. The Golden Dawn assigns Nun to Death (trump XIII), a card of transformation matching Scorpio's themes of dissolution and renewal.