Path 19

The nineteenth path is one of the horizontal paths, joining Chesed, Mercy, to Geburah, Severity, across the Tree and linking the two great opposed powers of expansion and restraint whose balance the Tree depends on. It carries the letter Teth, whose name means "serpent", the coiled snake, an image of hidden strength, of the life-force and of the wisdom and danger the serpent has signified across traditions.

In the Sefer Yetzirah Teth is one of the twelve simple letters assigned to the twelve zodiac signs, and it is given to Leo, the lion, the fixed fire sign of courage, vitality, sovereignty and the sun's strength. The attribution of the letter to Leo belongs to the ancient Jewish scheme in which the twelve single letters correspond to the signs and the months; the lion's strength and the serpent's coiled power together suit a path that binds mercy and severity, the taming of force by wisdom across the central axis of the Tree.

This path is assigned the tarot trump Strength, the card, in the Golden Dawn and Rider-Waite ordering, of the woman gently mastering the lion, and the pairing rests directly on its zodiacal sign Leo, the lion itself, and on the letter Teth's meaning of "serpent", the force to be mastered. The Golden Dawn placed Strength at this path as the taming of the beast by spiritual power, courage expressed as gentleness. It was the Golden Dawn who, from 1888, exchanged the traditional numbering of Strength and Justice to fit their zodiacal scheme, an editorial decision recorded in Liber 777.

The mapping of letters to trumps descends from Eliphas Levi and the Golden Dawn. The path from Chesed to Geburah, the letter Teth, and its attribution to Leo are Jewish, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the correspondence to Strength, and the renumbering it entailed, is Hermetic Qabalah, the modern Western system, distinct from Jewish Kabbalah.