Path 31

The thirty-first path joins Hod, Splendour, to Malkuth, the Kingdom, descending the left side of the Tree to the material world. It carries the letter Shin, whose name means "tooth", and which is one of the three mother letters of the Sefer Yetzirah, the primal trio Aleph, Mem and Shin, from which the alphabet and the basic divisions of the cosmos proceed. The three mothers are assigned to the three elements: Aleph to air, Mem to water, and Shin to fire.

Shin is thus an elemental letter, carrying the formative power of fire, the consuming, transforming and purifying element; its three-pronged form is often read as a triple flame. Its position and its fiery attribution come directly from the ancient Jewish source, where the three mother letters are the fundamental principles holding the cosmos in balance, fire and water at the extremes with air reconciling them, and Shin the letter of the flame at the base of the Tree.

This path is assigned the tarot trump Judgement, and the pairing rests on the letter Shin's elemental attribution to fire: Judgement, the card of the angel's trumpet, of resurrection, awakening and the last call, is read in the Golden Dawn system as the card of the element of fire in its aspect of the purging, resurrecting flame, the fire of the final awakening.

The three-pronged flame of Shin and the fiery trumpet-blast of Judgement answer to one another. 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. The path from Hod to Malkuth, the letter Shin, and its attribution to the element fire as one of the three mother letters are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the correspondence to Judgement is Hermetic Qabalah, the Victorian Western magical overlay of 1888, distinct from Jewish Kabbalah.