Meaning
Zayin, the sword, runs from Understanding down to the heart of the Tree and divides in order to choose. With the Lovers, trump VI, and Gemini, the sign of the twins, the Golden Dawn made it the path of relationship and decision. In our own words, it is choice and union: seeing two possibilities clearly and committing to one. The card is often read as a romance; the path, read with its letter, is as much about the cut that a decision makes.
The letter
Zayin is the seventh letter, worth 7. The traditional gloss is a sword, and scholars read the name as a weapon. The Sefer Yetzirah counts it among the twelve simple letters and, in every version we read, gives it Gemini; the Golden Dawn kept the sign. Lévi put the Chariot here; the Golden Dawn has the Lovers, the card before it.
On the Tree
On Kircher's tree the path runs diagonally from Binah, at the head of the Pillar of Severity on the viewer's left, down to Tiphareth at the centre; it mirrors path 15, Heh, which comes down from Chokmah on the other side. On the Gra and Ari trees of Jewish Kabbalah the simple letters lie on the diagonals as well, though not in this order, and there is no tarot. The Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom calls it "the Disposing Intelligence", in Westcott's English.
The Golden Dawn's scheme gives each simple letter one sign and one card, and puts the cards on the paths in the order of the zodiac from Aries to Pisces. That is why the Lovers, the Gemini card, sits on the third simple letter, after the Emperor (Aries) and the Hierophant (Taurus). A person whose personality or soul card is the Lovers has this path marked: our own combination of Greer's birth cards and the order's table.
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.
- Sign
- Gemini: the same in every version of the Sefer Yetzirah we read, kept by the Golden Dawn sourced
- Scholars' reading of the name
- Weapon disputed
- On the Jewish trees
- The Gra and Ari trees put the simple letters on the diagonal paths, so Zayin need not be here sourced
- Birth card on this path
- Marked when a person's personality or soul card is the Lovers (Greer's method on the Golden Dawn's table) our construction
- Our keywords
- Choice, union, discernment our construction
How the schools read it
- Sefer Yetzirah (2nd to 9th century)
- One of the twelve simple letters, with the sign Gemini.
- Lévi and the French school (1854 to 1856)
- VII The Chariot on Zayin.
- The Golden Dawn (1888; *777*, 1909)
- VI The Lovers, with the sign Gemini.
- EsoTerrier
- Choice and union: seeing two possibilities clearly and committing to one.
Claims about it
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Path 17 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 17 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 letter of Path 17 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.
