Alphabet Letter

Ayin ע

AH-yin

Also Known As Ayin

Hebrew Letters

Origin Develops the Achaemenid Aramaic chancery hand, adopted after the exile

Ayin is the sixteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, its name meaning eye and its gematria value seventy. It is one of the twelve Simple letters, attributed to the twelve zodiac signs, and is given to Capricorn. In the Hermetic scheme it corresponds to the tarot trump The Devil and to the twenty-sixth path of the Tree of Life, joining Tiphareth to Hod. As the eye, it symbolizes sight, perception, and outward appearance, and by extension the surface that can both reveal and deceive; the Hebrew word ayin also means a spring or fountain. Fittingly it belongs to Capricorn, the earthy goat ruled by Saturn, and to the card of material illusion and the shadow that must be seen through.

Facts

Disputed

Origin Period

Scholem places Sefer Yetzirah between the second and sixth century CE 5Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Origin Period

Survives in three recensions that do not agree in detail 5Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Origins

Origin Period

Develops the Achaemenid Aramaic chancery hand, adopted after the exile 1The Hebrew square script

Origin Period

Not the script of the earliest Hebrew inscriptions 1The Hebrew square script

Origin Period

Standard by the Hasmonean period; palaeo-Hebrew survives only on coins 1The Hebrew square script

Place of Origin

The Levant, by way of the Aramaic administrative script of the Persian empire. 1The Hebrew square script

Origin of the Name

Names travelled into Greek unchanged and meaningless 1The Hebrew square script

Origin of the Name

Northwest Semitic words inherited from the older linear script 1The Hebrew square script

Origin of the Name

Pictographic meanings (ox head, house, water) are modern reconstructions 1The Hebrew square script

Sense of the Name

eye 1The Hebrew square script

The pictographic sense is a modern reconstruction from the letter name rather than a meaning attested in the script's own period, and the atlas records that position elsewhere on this letter. The name itself is inherited; the picture behind it is inferred.

Contested Use

Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

A criticism of the predictive method, not of the tradition itself 4

Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

So many possible sums exist that a match can always be found 4

Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Used as proof: the beast of Revelation, verse prophecy, Bible codes 4

Identity

Alphabet

Hebrew 1

Script Type

An abjad: the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew square script record consonants, read right to left, with vowels supplied either by the reading tradition or, in pointed texts, by the Masoretic vowel-pointing system. 1The Hebrew square script

Position

Sixteenth of twenty-two in the Hebrew alphabet 1

Attributions

Associated Sound

Voiced pharyngeal fricative in ancient pronunciation, a sound with no English equivalent; reduced to a glottal stop or silent in modern Hebrew 1

Attestation

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Hebrew letter mysticism is a continuous, living Jewish tradition 2Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

One of the twelve simple letters, with a single pronunciation 3Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Runs through medieval commentary, golem lore, Abulafia, hasidic teaching 2Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Still studied and practised today 2Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

The twelve assign to signs, months, cube-of-space edges, body faculties 3Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Which sign goes with which letter is not recorded; order disputed 3Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Alphabet (class)

Hebrew 1

Script type (class)

Abjad 1

Learn More

Ayin: The Hebrew Letter of Eye

Ayin is the sixteenth Hebrew letter and a simple letter; its name means 'eye' (and, homophonously, 'fountain' or 'source') and its value is 70. It is a guttural, historically a voiced pharyngeal sound. The Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation), the foundational text of Jewish letter-mysticism compiled in late antiquity, divides the twenty-two Hebrew consonants into three groups: three 'mother' letters (Aleph, Mem, Shin) assigned to the elements Air, Water and Fire; seven 'double' letters, each with a hard and soft pronunciation, assigned to the seven classical planets and to seven pairs of opposites; and twelve 'simple' letters assigned to the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve months. As a simple letter Ayin is assigned to the sign Capricorn and the month of Tevet.

A separate and much later system, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888), mapped the twenty-two letters onto the twenty-two trumps of the tarot along the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This tarot correspondence is a modern Western-esoteric overlay, not part of the ancient Hebrew or classical Kabbalistic tradition. The Golden Dawn assigns Ayin to The Devil (trump XV), the horned goat-figure answering to Capricorn the sea-goat.

Ayin: Scribal Tradition

Ayin is one of seven Hebrew letters, recalled by the mnemonic shatnez getz, that Jewish law requires a sofer to crown with three small decorative strokes called tagin whenever it is written in a Torah scroll, tefillin or mezuzah, a rule recorded in the Talmud at Menachot 29b. Ayin also carries a specific scribal enlargement of its own: the opening word of the Shema, shema, hear, traditionally ends in an enlarged Ayin, paired with the enlarged final Dalet that closes the prayer's declaration of God's oneness in the word echad, one, discussed elsewhere in this atlas.

Read together across the two verses, the two enlarged letters spell out the word ed, witness, and commentators have long read the pairing as meaning that reciting the Shema attentively is itself an act of bearing witness to the divine unity the prayer proclaims, one of the best-known examples of meaning drawn from enlarged Masoretic letters rather than from the ordinary text. Ayin's literal meaning, eye, is already fixed in the older palaeo-Hebrew script that Jewish tradition holds the current square alphabet replaced after the Babylonian exile, a transition covered elsewhere in this atlas, in the earliest surviving inscriptions of which the letter was drawn as a simple circle, much like the Greek and Latin letters descended from the same Phoenician ancestor, discussed elsewhere in this atlas under omicron and O.

Connections

Associated With

The Devil

In the Golden Dawn Kabbalistic attribution, The Devil corresponds to the Hebrew letter Ayin by way of its Tree of Life path.

Source The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie

Contained In

Hebrew

Corresponds To

Path 26

Source Liber 777Aleister Crowley

Derived from This

Ayin O

Passing the River Ayin stands for the Hebrew letter Ayin, and carries its value of 70. Agrippa prints the three scripts in Book III of De occulta philosophia as tables of Hebrew equivalents. The sign shapes vary between the manuscript and printed traditions; the letter for letter correspondence does not.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Ayin O

Malachim Ayin stands for the Hebrew letter Ayin, and carries its value of 70. Agrippa prints the three scripts in Book III of De occulta philosophia as tables of Hebrew equivalents. The sign shapes vary between the manuscript and printed traditions; the letter for letter correspondence does not.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Ayin O

Celestial Ayin stands for the Hebrew letter Ayin, and carries its value of 70. Agrippa prints the three scripts in Book III of De occulta philosophia as tables of Hebrew equivalents. The sign shapes vary between the manuscript and printed traditions; the letter for letter correspondence does not.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Related To

Ayin

Both signs continue the same Northwest Semitic consonant inherited from a shared abjad ancestor; this is a cognate correspondence, not a borrowing in either direction. Ugaritic and Hebrew share the same twenty-two-consonant core, with Ugaritic adding six further signs Hebrew never developed separately.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Ayin O

Celestial Ayin is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Ayin; Agrippa's Book III prints Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River as tables of Hebrew equivalents, letter for letter.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Ayin O

Malachim Ayin is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Ayin; Agrippa's Book III prints Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River as tables of Hebrew equivalents, letter for letter.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Ayin O

Passing the River Ayin is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Ayin; Agrippa's Book III prints Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River as tables of Hebrew equivalents, letter for letter.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Ayn (Pharyngeal A) ዐ

Ayn and the Hebrew ayin continue the Semitic pharyngeal and carry the same inherited name. Both languages also merged into it a second consonant, the voiced velar fricative that Arabic still writes as ghayn.

Source Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)Wolf Leslau

Ayn ع

Cognate letters. Arabic ayn and Hebrew ayin both continue the twenty-two letter Northwest Semitic alphabet, and they hold the same place in the inherited order and the same numeral value, 70. Neither is derived from the other.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

E ܥ

Syriac E and Hebrew Ayin stand at the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence and carry the same letter-numeral value, 70. The Syriac script grew out of the local Aramaic cursive of Edessa and the Hebrew square script out of the same Aramaic alphabet, so the two letters are inherited from one ancestor rather than borrowed from each other.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

In ࡏ

Mandaic In and Hebrew Ayin occupy the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence. Hebrew keeps the inherited noun as the letter name and the numeral value 70; Mandaic keeps neither. Where the Mandaic shapes came from is disputed, a cursive Aramaic hand or the Parthian chancery script.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

In ࠏ

Samaritan In and Hebrew Ayin are cognates, both continuing the same Paleo-Hebrew sign at the value 70. The Samaritan name records the weakening of the fourth and last of the throat consonants in the community reading tradition.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Omicron ο

Greek Omicron and Hebrew Ayin are cognates. Both continue the same Phoenician sign, which is why both carry the numeral value 70 in their letter-number systems. A shared ancestor, not a borrowing in either direction. The Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician abjad in the early first millennium BC, and the Hebrew square script descends from the same abjad through Aramaic.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Omicron ο

Hebrew Ayin and Greek Omicron continue the same Phoenician ayin; both carry the numeral value 70 in their letter-number systems.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Sources

1. The World's Writing Systems

Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996the chapter on the Aramaic scriptView the Source

2. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid

Moshe Idel, State University of New York Press, 1990the chapters on the letter-combination traditions and their reception

3. Sepher Yetzirah (Book of Formation)

Anonymous (traditionally attributed to Abraham)On Ayin as a simple letter and the sign CapricornView the Source

4. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought

Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997the chapters on the beast, on the law of small numbers and on biblical sevensView the Source

5. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

Gershom Scholem, Schocken Books, 1961the chapter on early Jewish mysticism, on Sefer YetzirahView the Source

Sepher Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, and the Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom

William Wynn Westcott, Theosophical Publishing Society / Internet Sacred Text Archive, 1887On the twelve simple letters and the zodiacView the Source

The Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume I

Stuart R. Kaplan, U.S. Games Systems, 1978For the Golden Dawn attribution (Capricorn, The Devil)View the Source

Liber 777

Aleister Crowley, Walter Scott, 1909Corresponds To: Path 26View the Source

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Ayin ע

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