Meaning
Cheth, the fence or enclosure, runs down the left-hand pillar from Understanding to Severity. With the Chariot, trump VII, and Cancer, the crab with its shell, the Golden Dawn made it the path of a will that moves under protection. In our own words, it is a protected will in motion: holding a course and keeping what matters safe along the way. Its shadow, read the same way, is the shell that keeps everything else out.
The letter
Cheth is the eighth letter, worth 8. The traditional gloss is a fence or an enclosure; scholars read the name as a courtyard or a wall, much the same idea. The Sefer Yetzirah counts it among the twelve simple letters and gives it Cancer in every version we read; the Golden Dawn kept the sign. Lévi put Justice here, numbered VIII in the Marseille order; the Golden Dawn has the Chariot, and moved Justice to Lamed, path 22.
On the Tree
On Kircher's tree the path runs vertically down the Pillar of Severity, on the viewer's left, from Binah to Geburah; it mirrors path 16, Vav, on the Pillar of Mercy. In the Hermetic reading Binah gives form and Geburah sets limits, so the path joins the sphere of form to the sphere of limits; the Chariot, armoured, with a walled city behind it on Smith's card, fits that picture. On the Gra and Ari trees of Jewish Kabbalah the simple letters lie on the diagonals instead, and there is no tarot. The Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom calls it "the House of Influence", in Westcott's English.
A person whose personality or soul card is the Chariot has this path marked. The Chariot is also the soul card of anyone whose personality card is the Tower, 16. The placing is our own combination of Greer's cards and the Golden Dawn's paths.
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
- Cancer: the same in every version of the Sefer Yetzirah we read, kept by the Golden Dawn sourced
- Scholars' reading of the name
- Courtyard, wall disputed
- On the Jewish trees
- The Gra and Ari trees put the simple letters on the diagonal paths, so Cheth need not be here sourced
- Birth card on this path
- Marked when a person's personality or soul card is the Chariot (Greer's method on the Golden Dawn's table) our construction
- Our keywords
- Protection, resolve, the vessel in motion our construction
How the schools read it
- Sefer Yetzirah (2nd to 9th century)
- One of the twelve simple letters, with the sign Cancer.
- Lévi and the French school (1854 to 1856)
- VIII Justice on Cheth.
- The Golden Dawn (1888; *777*, 1909)
- VII The Chariot, with the sign Cancer.
- EsoTerrier
- A protected will in motion: holding a course, and keeping what matters safe along the way.
Claims about it
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Path 18 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 18 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 18 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.
