Gimel: The Hebrew Letter of Camel

Gimel is the third Hebrew letter and a double letter; its name means 'camel' and its value is 3. Traditional commentary links the camel, the beast that carries burdens across the desert, to the idea of giving and sustaining, with the following letter Daleth (the poor door) receiving what Gimel bears. 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 double letter Gimel is assigned to a planet and a pair of opposites.

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 attributes Gimel to the Moon and to The High Priestess (trump II), whose path crosses the abyss straight to the crown of the Tree of Life.