Meaning
Nun, the fish, links the heart of the Tree to the sphere of feeling. With Death, trump XIII, and Scorpio, the Golden Dawn made it the path of transformation. In our own words, it is the path of endings that make room for change: what has been outgrown is released so that something new can live.
The letter
Nun is the fourteenth letter, worth 50. Its traditional gloss is a fish; scholars of the early alphabet read the name as a snake, with the fish as the later gloss. The Sefer Yetzirah counts Nun among the twelve simple letters and gives it Scorpio in every version we read; the Golden Dawn kept the sign. Lévi put Temperance here; the Golden Dawn has Death, the card before it.
On the Tree
On Kircher's tree the path runs diagonally from Tiphareth at the centre down to Netzach, at the foot of the Pillar of Mercy on the viewer's right; it mirrors path 26, Ayin, which runs to Hod on the left. 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 Imaginative Intelligence", in Westcott's English.
A person whose personality or soul card is Death has this path marked, by our own joining of Greer's birth cards to the Golden Dawn's table. Death also shows how the birth-card rules differ: the century-split rule taught in one course gives our synthetic test person 13, Death, as the first card, where Greer's rule gives 4, the Emperor. Only the soul card agrees across the rules.
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
- Scorpio: the same in every version of the Sefer Yetzirah we read, kept by the Golden Dawn sourced
- Scholars' reading of the name
- Snake (fish is the traditional gloss) disputed
- On the Jewish trees
- The Gra and Ari trees put the simple letters on the diagonal paths, so Nun need not be here sourced
- Birth card on this path
- Marked when a person's personality or soul card is Death (Greer's method on the Golden Dawn's table) our construction
- Our keywords
- Transformation, release, renewal our construction
How the schools read it
- Sefer Yetzirah (2nd to 9th century)
- One of the twelve simple letters, with the sign Scorpio.
- Lévi and the French school (1854 to 1856)
- XIV Temperance on Nun.
- The Golden Dawn (1888; *777*, 1909)
- XIII Death, with the sign Scorpio.
- EsoTerrier
- Endings that make room: what has been outgrown is released so that something new can live.
Claims about it
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Path 24 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 24 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 traditional gloss of Path 24's letter is what its name originally meant.
disputedWhat the record shows: The glosses are the ones the Hermetic tradition works with, and we show them. Scholars of the early alphabet read several names differently.
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The letter of Path 24 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.
