Path 18

The eighteenth path joins Binah, Understanding, to Geburah, Severity, running down the left-hand Pillar of Severity from the supernal mother to the sphere of judgement and strength. It carries the letter Cheth, whose name means "fence" or "enclosure", the boundary that encloses and protects a space, an image well suited to a path on the pillar of form and limitation.

In the Sefer Yetzirah Cheth is one of the twelve simple letters assigned to the twelve zodiac signs, and it is given to Cancer, the crab, the cardinal water sign of home, shelter, the protective shell and the tides of feeling. The attribution of the letter to Cancer belongs to the ancient Jewish scheme in which the twelve single letters correspond to the signs and months; the sign of the crab, with its hard enclosing shell and its guarding of what lies within, matches precisely the letter's meaning of the fence that bounds and defends.

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Chariot, the card of triumph, mastery and directed will, whose enclosing armoured car and canopied throne answer to the letter Cheth's meaning of "enclosure" and to the protective shell of its zodiacal sign Cancer. The Golden Dawn read the Chariot as the soul carried in the vehicle of the body, contained and yet advancing, the crab's shell in motion. The correspondence of letters to tarot trumps was proposed by Eliphas Levi and systematised by the Golden Dawn from 1888, as set out in Liber 777.

The layers must be separated. The path from Binah to Geburah, the letter Cheth, and its attribution to Cancer are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the identification with the Chariot is Hermetic Qabalah, the Victorian Western magical overlay, a construction of 1888 that forms no part of the Jewish mystical tradition from which the underlying path and letter derive.