Tree of Life Paths
Path 32
Planet Paths
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Origin 1850 to 1859
The thirty-second path joins Yesod, Foundation, to Malkuth, Kingdom, running straight up the Middle Pillar out of the material world. It bears the Hebrew letter Tav (the mark or cross, a Double letter), the planet Saturn (with an older attribution to the element Earth), and the tarot trump The World. Tav is the final letter, the seal and completion of the alphabet. As the very first path the ascending initiate treads, in the Great Work it is the threshold and gateway: the step off the solid ground of the physical kingdom onto the ladder of return, the beginning of the long climb back toward the Crown.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1850 to 1859 1Tradition: Continental occultism (Éliphas Lévi) Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account1888 to 1896 2Tradition: Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: the arrangement this atlas records Origin Period200 to 600 CE 3Tradition: Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters Origin PeriodPath 32, joining Yesod to Malkuth under the letter Tav, belongs to the Sefer Yetzirah's original thirty-two Paths of Wisdom, a text Scholem places between the second and sixth century CE and which survives in recensions that do not agree in every particular. 3Tradition: Sefer Yetzirah, the thirty-two Paths of Wisdom Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own accountThe Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, established its own ceremonial correspondence scheme by the mid-1890s, and it is the Golden Dawn's own trump attribution for the letter Tav that this atlas records as the path's tarot-attribution. 2Tradition: Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Origin PeriodThe pairing of a tarot trump with this path's letter, Tav, first entered Kabbalistic use in Eliphas Levi's 1850s synthesis of Kabbalah and the tarot, the founding gesture of the French occult revival's Hermetic Qabalah. 1Tradition: Continental occultism (Eliphas Levi) Place of OriginSefer Yetzirah tradition, late-antique Near East 4 Place of OriginTarot overlay added in 19th-century France, then England 4 Occult Attributions
Tarot Trump AttributedThe World 5Tradition: Continental occultism (Éliphas Lévi) Tarot Trump AttributedSourced to the subject's own accountThe World 2Tradition: Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Learn More
The Path of Tav: Yesod to Malkuth
The thirty-second and last path runs down the base of the central Pillar of Equilibrium from Yesod, Foundation, to Malkuth, the Kingdom, the final step by which the whole descending flow of the Tree arrives in the material world. It carries the letter Tav, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, whose name means "mark", "sign" or "cross", the mark set as a seal or a completion; in Ezekiel the tav is the mark set on the foreheads of the righteous.
In the Sefer Yetzirah Tav is one of the seven double letters assigned to the seven planets, and it is given to Saturn, the outermost and slowest of the classical planets, the bound of the visible cosmos, fitting for the final letter and the last path at the threshold of the material world. The seven doubles map onto the seven planets, and the pairing of the last letter with Saturn, the planet of limit, ending and materiality, comes from this ancient Jewish attribution.
Tav and the World: The Tarot Overlay
This path is assigned the tarot trump The World, and the pairing is a fitting close to the sequence: the World, the last of the trumps, the card of completion, fulfilment, the finished cosmos and the dancer within the wreath, answers to the letter Tav, the final letter and the "mark" of completion, and to its planet Saturn, the bound and boundary of the created world.
The Golden Dawn read the World as the consummation of the whole journey, the return to Malkuth made whole. The mapping of the twenty-two letters onto the tarot trumps descends from Eliphas Levi and was codified by the Golden Dawn from 1888, as recorded in Liber 777. The provenance must be kept clear to the last.
The path from Yesod to Malkuth, the letter Tav, and its attribution to Saturn are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the correspondence to the World is Hermetic Qabalah, the modern Western esoteric adaptation of 1888, distinct from the Jewish Kabbalah from which the thirty-two paths themselves derive.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
In the Golden Dawn Kabbalistic attribution, The World is assigned to Path 32 on the Tree of Life.
Originates in Language
Sources
1. Eliphas Levi and the French Occult Revival
Christopher McIntosh, State University of New York Press, 2011on Levi's tarot-Kabbalah synthesis and its publication in the 1850s
2. The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th edition
Israel Regardie, Llewellyn, 1989Book T and the tables of correspondenceView the Source 3. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
Gershom Scholem, Schocken Books, 1961ch. 2: the Sefer Yetzirah, the thirty-two paths and the classification of the lettersView the Source 4. A History of the Occult Tarot
Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett, Duckworth, 2002on the French and English phases of the occult tarotView the Source 5. A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot
Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett, St Martin's Press, 1996On Eliphas Levi and the Hebrew letter correspondencesView the Source The Golden Dawn
Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and Practice
Liber 777
Aleister Crowley, Walter Scott, 1909the attribution of Saturn and The UniverseView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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