Ayin: The Hebrew Letter of Eye

Ayin is the sixteenth Hebrew letter and a simple letter; its name means 'eye' (and, homophonously, 'fountain' or 'source') and its value is 70. It is a guttural, historically a voiced pharyngeal sound. The Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation), the foundational text of Jewish letter-mysticism compiled in late antiquity, divides the twenty-two Hebrew consonants into three groups: three 'mother' letters (Aleph, Mem, Shin) assigned to the elements Air, Water and Fire; seven 'double' letters, each with a hard and soft pronunciation, assigned to the seven classical planets and to seven pairs of opposites; and twelve 'simple' letters assigned to the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve months. As a simple letter Ayin is assigned to the sign Capricorn and the month of Tevet.

A separate and much later system, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888), mapped the twenty-two letters onto the twenty-two trumps of the tarot along the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This tarot correspondence is a modern Western-esoteric overlay, not part of the ancient Hebrew or classical Kabbalistic tradition. The Golden Dawn assigns Ayin to The Devil (trump XV), the horned goat-figure answering to Capricorn the sea-goat.