Path 12

This is the twelfth of the thirty-two paths of wisdom, the numbering that runs on from the ten sefirot so that the ten spheres and the twenty-two connecting paths together make thirty-two, exactly the count named at the opening of the Sefer Yetzirah. It joins Kether, the Crown, to Binah, Understanding, on the left side of the upper Tree, and it carries the Hebrew letter Beth, whose name means "house" and whose form began as a pictograph of a dwelling. In the Sefer Yetzirah Beth is one of the seven double letters, letters with two sounds, hard and soft, and these seven are assigned to the seven classical planets; Beth is given to Mercury, the planet of mind and communication. The letter-to-planet attribution is thus rooted in the Jewish source itself, part of the ancient scheme in which the alphabet is the instrument of creation, each letter a channel of a particular divine energy between two spheres.

The correspondence of this path to a tarot trump belongs to a much later and distinct tradition. Beth is assigned The Magician, the card of skill, will and the directing mind, a pairing that fits both the letter's Mercurial planet and its meaning of "house", the Magician as the vessel and channel of power. This mapping of the twenty-two Hebrew letters onto the twenty-two trumps of the tarot was first proposed by the French occultist Eliphas Levi in the mid-nineteenth century and then fixed in its detailed form by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888, whose attributions were published in Aleister Crowley's Liber 777. It is essential to distinguish the layers: the path itself, the letter Beth, and its planetary attribution to Mercury come from Jewish sources, above all the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the tarot correspondence is Hermetic Qabalah, a Western magical construction of the Victorian era that has no basis in and no standing within Jewish Kabbalah.