Beth and the Magician: The Tarot Overlay

The correspondence of this path to a tarot trump belongs to a much later and distinct tradition. Beth is assigned The Magician, the card of skill, will and the directing mind, a pairing that fits both the letter's Mercurial planet and its meaning of "house", the Magician as the vessel and channel of power. This mapping of the twenty-two Hebrew letters onto the twenty-two trumps of the tarot was first proposed by the French occultist Eliphas Levi in the mid-nineteenth century and then fixed in its detailed form by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888, whose attributions were published in Aleister Crowley's Liber 777. It is essential to distinguish the layers: the path itself, the letter Beth, and its planetary attribution to Mercury come from Jewish sources, above all the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the tarot correspondence is Hermetic Qabalah, a Western magical construction of the Victorian era that has no basis in and no standing within Jewish Kabbalah.