Zayin and the Lovers: The Tarot Overlay

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Lovers, and the pairing draws directly on the zodiacal sign Gemini, the twins: the Lovers as the card of union, choice and the joining of two, and the sword of Zayin as the discrimination that a true choice requires. The Golden Dawn read the card as the mystery of the two made one and of the decision that unites them. The mapping of the twenty-two letters onto the trumps descends from Eliphas Levi and was fixed by the Golden Dawn from 1888, in the scheme published in Liber 777. As with every path, the provenance must be kept clear.

The path from Binah to Tiphareth, the letter Zayin, and its attribution to Gemini are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the correspondence to the Lovers is Hermetic Qabalah, the modern Western esoteric adaptation of 1888, distinct from the Jewish Kabbalah whose letters and paths it borrowed and reinterpreted for magic.