Path 23

The twenty-third path joins Geburah, Severity, to Hod, Splendour, descending the left-hand Pillar of Severity from the sphere of judgement to the sphere of the intellect. It carries the letter Mem, whose name means "water", and which is one of the three mother letters of the Sefer Yetzirah, the primal trio Aleph, Mem and Shin, from which, in that text, the whole alphabet and the three basic divisions of the cosmos proceed.

The three mothers are assigned to the three elements of the ancient scheme: Aleph to air, Shin to fire, and Mem to water. Mem is thus not a planetary or zodiacal letter but an elemental one, carrying the formative power of water, the deep, the fluid and the maternal. Its position and its watery attribution come directly from the ancient Jewish source, where the three mother letters are the fundamental principles, the balance-beam holding fire and water in equilibrium with air between them.

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Hanged Man, and the pairing rests on the letter Mem's elemental attribution to water: the Hanged Man, suspended upside down in willing surrender, is read in the Golden Dawn system as the card of the element of water, of reversal, sacrifice, and the immersion of the self, the reflection in still water, the world seen inverted. The mapping of the twenty-two letters onto the tarot trumps descends from Eliphas Levi and was fixed by the Golden Dawn from 1888, as published in Liber 777. The provenance must be kept clear throughout.

The path from Geburah to Hod, the letter Mem, and its attribution to the element water as one of the three mother letters are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the correspondence to the Hanged Man is Hermetic Qabalah, the modern Western esoteric adaptation of 1888, a magical overlay distinct from the Jewish mystical tradition it borrowed from.