Meaning
Mem, the letter of water, runs down the left-hand pillar from Severity to Splendour. With the Hanged Man, trump XII, and the element Water, the Golden Dawn made it the path of surrender and reversal. In our own words, it is letting go and seeing from another angle when effort alone will not move things: the card's hanging figure is upside down, and calm about it.
The letter
Mem is the thirteenth letter, worth 40, and its name means water. The Sefer Yetzirah makes it one of the three mother letters, with Aleph and Shin, and gives it Water; all its versions agree. The Golden Dawn kept the element and added nothing else. Modern tables pair the Hanged Man with Neptune, a planet found in 1846. The earliest record we found is Paul Foster Case's tarot course of 1933; we show Neptune only as a labelled footnote, never as the attribution. Our old engine had Uranus and Pluto on the other two mother letters but nothing here, which matched neither scheme.
Lévi put Death on Mem; the Golden Dawn has the Hanged Man.
On the Tree
On Kircher's tree the path runs vertically down the Pillar of Severity, on the viewer's left, from Geburah to Hod; it mirrors path 21, Kaph, on the right. This is one of the plainest differences from the Jewish trees, on which the three mother letters lie on the three horizontal paths; on ours they sit on paths 11, 23 and 31, two diagonals and this vertical. The Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom calls it "the Stable Intelligence", in Westcott's English.
A person whose personality or soul card is the Hanged Man has this path marked. The sample person on the system page meets it as their year card for 2026, a layer that is off until you turn it on. The joining of the cards to the paths is our own.
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.
- Element
- Water: the Sefer Yetzirah's own, kept by the Golden Dawn sourced
- Outer planet (modern footnote)
- Neptune, first found in Case's course of 1933; not in the Sefer Yetzirah, the Golden Dawn's tables or 777 disputed
- On the Jewish trees
- The Gra and Ari trees put the mother letters on the horizontal paths, so Mem need not be here sourced
- Birth card on this path
- Marked when a person's personality or soul card is the Hanged Man (Greer's method on the Golden Dawn's table) our construction
- Our keywords
- Surrender, reversal, deep water our construction
How the schools read it
- Sefer Yetzirah (2nd to 9th century)
- One of the three mother letters, with the element Water.
- Lévi and the French school (1854 to 1856)
- XIII Death on Mem.
- The Golden Dawn (1888; *777*, 1909)
- XII The Hanged Man, with the element Water.
- Case (1933) and later tables
- Add Neptune to the element.
- EsoTerrier
- Letting go and seeing from another angle, when effort alone will not move things.
Claims about it
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Path 23 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 23 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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Path 23's planet is the outer planet modern tables give it, by the Golden Dawn's attribution.
disputedWhat the record shows: The Golden Dawn and 777 give the three mother letters the elements only. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are a twentieth-century addition, first found in Case's course of 1933.
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On this tree the mother letters lie on the horizontal paths.
falseWhat the record shows: True of the Gra and Ari trees of Jewish Kabbalah. On Kircher's tree the horizontals carry Daleth, Teth and Peh, and the mothers sit on paths 11, 23 and 31.
