Path 13

The thirteenth path is one of the three that cross the abyss, running straight down the central Pillar of Equilibrium from Kether, the Crown, to Tiphareth, Beauty, the longest vertical descent on the Tree, linking the highest sphere to the harmonising heart. It carries the letter Gimel, whose name means "camel", the beast that carries burdens across the desert, an image the Kabbalists read as the path that bears the influence of the Crown across the great gulf to the centre.

In the Sefer Yetzirah Gimel is one of the seven double letters assigned to the seven planets, and it is given to the Moon, whose reflected light and mediating position suit a path that carries the higher light downward through darkness. The pairing of the letter with the Moon is part of the ancient Jewish attribution of the alphabet to the powers of creation, the double letters mapping onto the seven planets that govern the days and the visible heavens.

This path is assigned the tarot trump The High Priestess, and the pairing is one of the most celebrated in the Western system: the card of hidden wisdom, the veil, and the lunar mysteries matches both the letter Gimel's attribution to the Moon and its role as the path crossing the abyss, the veiled gateway between the supernal Crown and the created world. The correspondence of Hebrew letters to tarot trumps was proposed by Eliphas Levi in the nineteenth century and systematised by the Golden Dawn from 1888, in the form recorded in Liber 777. The distinction of provenance must be kept.

The path from Kether to Tiphareth, the letter Gimel, and its lunar attribution derive from Jewish tradition, the Sefer Yetzirah above all, whereas the identification with the High Priestess is Hermetic Qabalah, the Victorian Western adaptation of Kabbalah for magical and divinatory use, dated to 1888 and after and distinct from the Jewish mystical tradition it borrowed from.