Meaning
Ayin, the eye, links the heart of the Tree to the sphere of the thinking mind. With the Devil, trump XV, and Capricorn, the Golden Dawn made it the path of attachment and ambition. In our own words, it is the path of seeing clearly what binds us, from habit to fear to ambition, and of using that energy instead of being ruled by it. The card's chained figures are a picture of a hold that can be loosened.
The letter
Ayin is the sixteenth letter, worth 70, and its name means an eye in the tradition and in scholarship alike. The Sefer Yetzirah counts Ayin among the twelve simple letters and gives it Capricorn in every version we read; the Golden Dawn kept the sign. Lévi put the Tower on Ayin; the Golden Dawn has the Devil, the card before.
On the Tree
On Kircher's tree the path runs diagonally from Tiphareth at the centre down to Hod, at the foot of the Pillar of Severity on the viewer's left; it mirrors path 24, Nun, which runs to Netzach on the right. 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 Renovating Intelligence", in Westcott's English: a renewal, which our reading echoes.
The Devil is the Sun card for anyone born with the Sun in Capricorn, so this path is the optional Sun layer on the tree of the sample person on the system page, born in January. The Sun card is off until you turn it on, and taken at local noon when no birth time is known. A person whose personality or soul card is the Devil has this path marked; the joining of cards and paths is our own, and makes no claim that anyone walks a path.
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
- Capricorn: the same in every version of the Sefer Yetzirah we read, kept by the Golden Dawn sourced
- On the Jewish trees
- The Gra and Ari trees put the simple letters on the diagonal paths, so Ayin need not be here sourced
- Birth card on this path
- Marked when a person's personality or soul card is the Devil (Greer's method on the Golden Dawn's table) our construction
- Our keywords
- Attachment, ambition, seeing through our construction
How the schools read it
- Sefer Yetzirah (2nd to 9th century)
- One of the twelve simple letters, with the sign Capricorn.
- Lévi and the French school (1854 to 1856)
- XVI The Tower on Ayin.
- The Golden Dawn (1888; *777*, 1909)
- XV The Devil, with the sign Capricorn.
- EsoTerrier
- Seeing clearly what binds us, from habit to fear to ambition, and using that energy instead of being ruled by it.
Claims about it
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Path 26 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 26 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 26 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.
