Gimel and the High Priestess: The Tarot Overlay

This path is assigned the tarot trump The High Priestess, and the pairing is one of the most celebrated in the Western system: the card of hidden wisdom, the veil, and the lunar mysteries matches both the letter Gimel's attribution to the Moon and its role as the path crossing the abyss, the veiled gateway between the supernal Crown and the created world. The correspondence of Hebrew letters to tarot trumps was proposed by Eliphas Levi in the nineteenth century and systematised by the Golden Dawn from 1888, in the form recorded in Liber 777. The distinction of provenance must be kept.

The path from Kether to Tiphareth, the letter Gimel, and its lunar attribution derive from Jewish tradition, the Sefer Yetzirah above all, whereas the identification with the High Priestess is Hermetic Qabalah, the Victorian Western adaptation of Kabbalah for magical and divinatory use, dated to 1888 and after and distinct from the Jewish mystical tradition it borrowed from.