Path 30

The thirtieth path joins Hod, Splendour, to Yesod, Foundation, descending the left side of the lower Tree from the sphere of the intellect to the foundation. It carries the letter Resh, whose name means "head", the summit of the body, the seat of the face and the countenance, and by extension the beginning, the chief or the principal thing, the same root gives rosh, head, as in Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year.

In the Sefer Yetzirah Resh is one of the seven double letters assigned to the seven planets, and it is given to the Sun, the chief of the heavenly lights, the source of day and of life, a fitting planet for the letter of the "head" and the foremost. The seven doubles map onto the seven planets that govern the days and the visible sky, and the pairing of Resh with the Sun, the ruling light, comes directly from this ancient Jewish attribution of the alphabet to the powers of creation.

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Sun, and the pairing is exact and self-explanatory: the letter Resh's planet is the Sun, and the tarot trump is the Sun itself, the card of light, joy, clarity, vitality and the illumined consciousness. The Golden Dawn read the Sun as one of the most benevolent of the trumps, the radiance of the higher self shining without obstruction, in keeping with the solar attribution of the letter of the "head".

The mapping of the twenty-two letters onto the tarot trumps descends from Eliphas Levi and was codified by the Golden Dawn from 1888, as given in Liber 777. The provenance must be kept clear as always. The path from Hod to Yesod, the letter Resh, and its attribution to the Sun are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the correspondence to the tarot Sun is Hermetic Qabalah, the modern Western esoteric adaptation of 1888, distinct from the Jewish mystical tradition.