Path 17

The seventeenth path joins Binah, Understanding, to Tiphareth, Beauty, descending from the supernal mother to the harmonising centre. It carries the letter Zayin, whose name means "sword" or "weapon", and whose form suggests a blade, an image of discrimination, of cutting and dividing, and so of the choices and distinctions the mind must make.

In the Sefer Yetzirah Zayin is one of the twelve simple letters assigned to the twelve zodiac signs, and it is given to Gemini, the twins, the mutable air sign of duality, communication and the pairing of opposites. The attribution of the letter to Gemini is part of the ancient Jewish scheme in which the twelve single letters correspond to the signs of the zodiac and the months of the year; the sign of the twins, with its theme of two joined and two divided, suits a letter whose sword both separates and, in the choosing, unites.

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Lovers, and the pairing draws directly on the zodiacal sign Gemini, the twins: the Lovers as the card of union, choice and the joining of two, and the sword of Zayin as the discrimination that a true choice requires. The Golden Dawn read the card as the mystery of the two made one and of the decision that unites them. The mapping of the twenty-two letters onto the trumps descends from Eliphas Levi and was fixed by the Golden Dawn from 1888, in the scheme published in Liber 777. As with every path, the provenance must be kept clear.

The path from Binah to Tiphareth, the letter Zayin, and its attribution to Gemini are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the correspondence to the Lovers is Hermetic Qabalah, the modern Western esoteric adaptation of 1888, distinct from the Jewish Kabbalah whose letters and paths it borrowed and reinterpreted for magic.