Path 11

The attributions recorded for these paths pair each of the twenty-two connections between the sephirot with a Hebrew letter and a tarot trump. The letters and the paths belong together and are ancient. The trumps are an eighteenth-century addition, and the specific arrangement given here is from the 1880s.

The Sefer Yetzirah, which is where the thirty-two paths of wisdom come from, counts ten sephirot and twenty-two letters and classifies the letters into three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples. That classification maps naturally onto three elements, seven planets and twelve signs, and it is the basis of everything that follows. The text says nothing about cards, and could not: playing cards do not reach Europe until the fourteenth century and the trump sequence not until the fifteenth, in northern Italy, as part of a card game.

The identification of the trumps with the letters begins with Antoine Court de Gebelin, who asserted in 1781 that the cards were a surviving Egyptian book, and it was made systematic by Eliphas Levi in the 1850s, who set the twenty-two trumps against the twenty-two letters and against the paths. Michael Dummett, with Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis, established the documentary history of this in detail: there is no evidence of divinatory or occult use of the tarot before the late eighteenth century, and abundant evidence of its use as a game from the fifteenth.

Levi's arrangement was not the Golden Dawn's. He began the sequence with the Magician on Aleph and put the Fool late, near the end. The order set out here, with the Fool on Aleph at the head of the sequence and the World on Tau at the end, and with Strength and Justice exchanged, is the Golden Dawn's revision, transmitted through Regardie's publication of the order's papers and through Waite and Colman Smith's deck, which is drawn on it.

So the arrangement carried by these entries has three layers of quite different ages: a letter-and-path structure from a text of perhaps the third to sixth century, astrological correspondences developed on it across the medieval Kabbalistic literature, and a tarot overlay assembled between 1781 and 1888. It is a genuine synthesis and it is internally coherent, which is why it has lasted. It is not an inheritance from antiquity, and no Kabbalist before the nineteenth century would have recognised the third layer at all.

The eleventh path is the first of the twenty two, and its numbering is the clearest single lesson in how the Tree is counted. The ten Sephiroth are paths one to ten in the older reckoning, so the connecting lines begin at eleven, and every path number in the atlas is offset from its letter's position by ten. Aleph is the first Hebrew letter and the eleventh path.

It joins Kether, the Crown, to Chokmah, Wisdom, running along the top of the Pillar of Mercy. In the diagram this is the shortest possible distance from the undifferentiated point to the first thing that can be called anything at all, and the tradition treats it accordingly: the path of the first distinction, where unity becomes a unity and something else.

Its letter is Aleph, one of the three Mother letters of the Sefer Yetzirah, and its element is Air. Aleph is written but not sounded, a silent letter that carries whatever vowel is placed with it, and the commentators make a great deal of that. A path from the Crown could hardly be assigned a letter with a noise of its own. The name of the letter means ox, and the older pictographic form is an ox head, which is why the path also collects associations of the yoked strength that pulls a thing into motion.

The tarot trump attached to it is The Fool, unnumbered or numbered zero, and that attribution is much later than the rest. The atlas treats the tarot overlay separately, because the correspondence between the trumps and the paths dates from the eighteenth century and after, while the letters and the Sephiroth do not.