Peh: The Hebrew Letter of Mouth

Peh (Pe) is the seventeenth Hebrew letter and a double letter, sounding as a hard 'p' or a soft 'f'. Its name means 'mouth' and its value is 80; it is fittingly the letter of speech. 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 Peh is assigned to a planet and 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 Peh to the planet Mars and to The Tower (trump XVI), the lightning-struck tower of sudden, forceful upheaval.