Mem: The Hebrew Letter of Water

Mem is the thirteenth Hebrew letter and one of the three mother letters; its name means 'water' and its value is 40. Mem has two forms, an open medial mem and a closed final mem, a duality the Talmud and later Kabbalah read as the open and hidden aspects of divine wisdom. 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 mother letter Mem governs the element Water; its sound is the silent, murmuring counterpart to the hiss of Shin, and it is associated with the belly and the cold season.

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 Mem to The Hanged Man (trump XII), the figure suspended in the waters of reversal and surrender.