Cheth and the Chariot: The Tarot Overlay

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Chariot, the card of triumph, mastery and directed will, whose enclosing armoured car and canopied throne answer to the letter Cheth's meaning of "enclosure" and to the protective shell of its zodiacal sign Cancer. The Golden Dawn read the Chariot as the soul carried in the vehicle of the body, contained and yet advancing, the crab's shell in motion. The correspondence of letters to tarot trumps was proposed by Eliphas Levi and systematised by the Golden Dawn from 1888, as set out in Liber 777.

The layers must be separated. The path from Binah to Geburah, the letter Cheth, and its attribution to Cancer are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the identification with the Chariot is Hermetic Qabalah, the Victorian Western magical overlay, a construction of 1888 that forms no part of the Jewish mystical tradition from which the underlying path and letter derive.