Beth: The Hebrew Letter of House

Beth is the second Hebrew letter and a double letter, sounding as a hard 'b' or a soft 'v' depending on whether it carries a dagesh. Its name means 'house' and its value is 2; it is the letter with which the Torah opens (the word bereshit, 'in the beginning'), a fact on which much Kabbalistic commentary rests. 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 double letter Beth is assigned in the Sefer Yetzirah to one of the seven planets and to a pair of opposites.

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 attributes Beth to the planet Mercury and to The Magician (trump I), the card of skilled speech, craft and the directed will.