Ayin and the Devil: The Tarot Overlay

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Devil, and the pairing rests on its zodiacal sign Capricorn, the goat, the Devil traditionally depicted as a goat-headed figure, and on the letter Ayin, the "eye", read here as the deceptive appearance and the bondage of the material. The Golden Dawn understood the Devil not as literal evil but as the card of matter, materiality and the illusory chains the soul mistakes for real, the goat-sign's earthbound heaviness. The correspondence of letters to tarot trumps was proposed by Eliphas Levi and codified by the Golden Dawn from 1888, in the form given in Liber 777.

The layers must be separated. The path from Tiphareth to Hod, the letter Ayin, and its attribution to Capricorn are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the identification with the Devil is Hermetic Qabalah, the Victorian Western magical overlay of 1888, distinct from the Jewish mystical tradition that supplied the underlying path and letter.