Daleth and the Empress: The Tarot Overlay

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Empress, and the pairing is exceptionally apt: the Empress, the great mother, the card of fertility, abundance and generative love, matches both the letter Daleth's attribution to Venus and its meaning of "door", the Empress as the gateway of birth and the supernal mother made manifest. The mapping of the twenty-two letters onto the tarot trumps was proposed by Eliphas Levi and fixed in detail by the Golden Dawn from 1888, as set out in Liber 777. As with every path, the layers should be separated.

The path between Chokmah and Binah, the letter Daleth, and its Venusian attribution come from Jewish sources, principally the Sefer Yetzirah, while the correspondence to the Empress is Hermetic Qabalah, the Western esoteric system of the Victorian occult revival, a magical overlay of 1888 that forms no part of Jewish Kabbalah and should not be read back into it.