Teth: The Hebrew Letter of Serpent

Teth is the ninth Hebrew letter and a simple letter; its name means 'serpent' and its value is 9. Its coiled ancient form and its meaning made it, for later commentators, a letter of hidden good and the entwined power of instinct. 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 Teth is assigned to the sign Leo and the month of Av.

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 Teth to Strength (trump VIII in its ordering), the woman mastering the lion, a fitting image for the serpent-letter of Leo.