Meaning
Beth, the house, runs from the Crown to Understanding and gives the first impulse a place to live. With the Magician, trump I, and the planet Mercury, the Golden Dawn made it the path of skill and the shaping word. In our own words, it is the path of concentrated attention: taking everything that is possible and choosing one thing to make real.
The letter
Beth is the second letter, worth 2, and its name means a house in the tradition and in scholarship alike. The Sefer Yetzirah makes it one of the seven double letters, each tied to one of the seven planets of the old astronomy, but its versions do not agree on which. The short, long and Saadia versions, and the Warsaw Hebrew of 1884, give Beth Saturn; the Gra version gives it the Moon; Kircher gave it the Sun. Westcott printed two of these orders in 1887 and 1893 and called both wrong. The order that gives Beth Mercury is the Golden Dawn's own, first printed in 777 in 1909, and it is the one we show, labelled as theirs.
Lévi put the High Priestess on Beth, one letter further on than the Golden Dawn, because he had placed the Magician on Aleph. Crowley's Thoth deck keeps the Magician here and calls him the Magus.
On the Tree
On Kircher's tree the path runs diagonally from Kether down to Binah, the head of the Pillar of Severity on the viewer's left. On the Gra and Ari trees of Jewish Kabbalah the double letters lie on the vertical paths, and there is no tarot. The Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom calls it "the Intelligence of Transparency", in Westcott's English.
A person whose personality or soul card is the Magician has this path marked; the Magician is also the soul card of anyone whose personality card is 10 or 19. Putting the card on the path is our own combination of two published systems, and the page reads the path, nothing more.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- The Golden Dawn's planet
- Mercury, in the order first printed in 777 (1909) sourced
- The Sefer Yetzirah's planet
- A planet, in other orders: the short, long and Saadia versions give Saturn; the Gra version the Moon; Kircher the Sun disputed
- Thoth variant (Crowley, 1944)
- In Crowley's Thoth deck: The Magus sourced
- On the Jewish trees
- The Gra and Ari trees put the double letters on the vertical paths, so Beth need not be here sourced
- Birth card on this path
- Marked when a person's personality or soul card is the Magician (Greer's method on the Golden Dawn's table) our construction
- Our keywords
- Focus, skill, the word that shapes our construction
How the schools read it
- Sefer Yetzirah (2nd to 9th century)
- One of the seven double letters, with a planet: in its short, long and Saadia versions Saturn.
- Lévi and the French school (1854 to 1856)
- II The High Priestess on Beth.
- The Golden Dawn (1888; *777*, 1909)
- I The Magician, with the planet Mercury. The planet's order is the order's own.
- Crowley's Thoth deck (1944)
- The Magus, the same card renamed.
- EsoTerrier
- Concentrated attention: taking everything that is possible and choosing one thing to make real.
Claims about it
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Path 12 and the attributions on this page are Kabbalah.
falseWhat the record shows: The Tree comes from Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition, which has no tarot and its own ways of drawing and reading it. The tables here are the Hermetic Qabalah's, compiled by Agrippa, Mathers and the Golden Dawn.
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A birth card on Path 12 is the path a person is walking, or is tasked with, for life.
unverifiedWhat the record shows: No tradition gives anyone a path. Placing Greer's birth cards on the Golden Dawn's paths is our own combination, and the page reads the path, nothing more.
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The planet of Path 12's letter is the Sefer Yetzirah's own attribution.
falseWhat the record shows: The Sefer Yetzirah gives the double letters planets, but its versions run in other orders. This one is the Golden Dawn's, first printed in 777 in 1909.
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The letter of Path 12 is a vibrational frequency that sets a person's energy.
falseWhat the record shows: The Sefer Yetzirah says the letters were engraved, weighed and combined to make the world: a creation account, not physics. Nothing about a letter is measured, and nothing about a person follows from it.
