The Path of Cheth: Binah to Geburah

The eighteenth path joins Binah, Understanding, to Geburah, Severity, running down the left-hand Pillar of Severity from the supernal mother to the sphere of judgement and strength. It carries the letter Cheth, whose name means "fence" or "enclosure", the boundary that encloses and protects a space, an image well suited to a path on the pillar of form and limitation.

In the Sefer Yetzirah Cheth is one of the twelve simple letters assigned to the twelve zodiac signs, and it is given to Cancer, the crab, the cardinal water sign of home, shelter, the protective shell and the tides of feeling. The attribution of the letter to Cancer belongs to the ancient Jewish scheme in which the twelve single letters correspond to the signs and months; the sign of the crab, with its hard enclosing shell and its guarding of what lies within, matches precisely the letter's meaning of the fence that bounds and defends.