Path 29

The twenty-ninth path joins Netzach, Victory, to Malkuth, the Kingdom, descending the right side of the Tree to the material world. It carries the letter Qoph, whose name is usually taken to mean "back of the head", the seat of the instinctive and the unconscious functions, and whose form dips below the line of writing, alone among the letters reaching downward into the depths.

In the Sefer Yetzirah Qoph is one of the twelve simple letters assigned to the twelve zodiac signs, and it is given to Pisces, the mutable water sign of the fishes, dream, dissolution, the deep unconscious and the boundless. The attribution of the letter to Pisces belongs to the ancient Jewish scheme in which the twelve single letters correspond to the signs and months; the deep water of Pisces and the "back of the head" of Qoph, the region of instinct and dream, together make this the path of the unconscious, the descent into the dark waters nearest the material world.

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Moon, and the pairing rests on its zodiacal sign Pisces, the fishes of the deep water, and on the letter Qoph, the "back of the head", the seat of instinct and dream: the Moon, the card of illusion, the unconscious, fear and the uncertain path between the towers, answers to the Piscean waters and to the dark, dipping letter. The Golden Dawn read the Moon as the card of the treacherous, dreamlike descent through the lower astral, the path of glamour and hidden fear.

The mapping of letters to trumps descends from Eliphas Levi and the Golden Dawn of 1888, as recorded in Liber 777. The layers must be kept distinct. The path from Netzach to Malkuth, the letter Qoph, and its attribution to Pisces are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the correspondence to the Moon is Hermetic Qabalah, the Victorian Western magical overlay of 1888, distinct from the Jewish Kabbalah from which the path and letter derive.