Meaning
Shin, the tooth and the letter of fire, links the sphere of thought to the physical world. With Judgement, trump XX, and the element Fire, the Golden Dawn made it the path of awakening. In our own words, it is a call that changes how one lives, not only how one thinks, as the card's figures rise at the sound of a trumpet.
The letter
Shin is the twenty-first letter, worth 300, and its name means a tooth. The Sefer Yetzirah makes it the third of the mother letters, with Aleph and Mem, and gives it Fire; all its versions agree. The Golden Dawn kept Fire, and also gave Shin to Spirit, the fifth element, a second attribution we show beside the first. Modern tables add Pluto, a planet found in 1930. The earliest record we found is Paul Foster Case's tarot course of 1933, which gives it with a question mark; our old engine showed Pluto here as the path's planet. It is a labelled footnote now, never the attribution.
Lévi's Fool
This is the letter on which Éliphas Lévi, in the 1850s, put the Fool, between Judgement and the World, so that his Magician could take Aleph. The Golden Dawn moved the Fool to Aleph, path 11, and gave Shin to Judgement; Papus and the French school kept versions of Lévi's order. Crowley's Thoth deck keeps Judgement here and calls it the Aeon.
On the Tree
On Kircher's tree the path runs diagonally from Hod, at the foot of the Pillar of Severity on the viewer's left, down to Malkuth; it mirrors path 29, Qoph, on the right. On the Jewish trees the mother letters lie on the horizontals instead. The Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom calls it "the Perpetual Intelligence", in Westcott's English. A person whose personality or soul card is Judgement has this path marked, by our own joining of Greer's cards to 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.
- Element
- Fire: the Sefer Yetzirah's own, kept by the Golden Dawn sourced
- Outer planet (modern footnote)
- Pluto, first found in Case's course of 1933; not in the Sefer Yetzirah, the Golden Dawn's tables or 777 disputed
- Also given by the Golden Dawn
- Shin to Spirit sourced
- Thoth variant (Crowley, 1944)
- In Crowley's Thoth deck: The Aeon sourced
- On the Jewish trees
- The Gra and Ari trees put the mother letters on the horizontal paths, so Shin need not be here sourced
- Birth card on this path
- Marked when a person's personality or soul card is Judgement (Greer's method on the Golden Dawn's table) our construction
- Our keywords
- Awakening, calling, change by fire our construction
How the schools read it
- Sefer Yetzirah (2nd to 9th century)
- One of the three mother letters, with the element Fire.
- Lévi and the French school (1854 to 1856)
- 0 The Fool on Shin. The Golden Dawn moved the Fool to Aleph.
- The Golden Dawn (1888; *777*, 1909)
- XX Judgement, with the element Fire.
- Crowley's Thoth deck (1944)
- The Aeon, the same card renamed.
- Case (1933) and later tables
- Add Pluto to the element.
- EsoTerrier
- Awakening: a call that changes how one lives, not only how one thinks.
Claims about it
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Path 31 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 31 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 31'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.
