Shin and Judgement: The Tarot Overlay

This path is assigned the tarot trump Judgement, and the pairing rests on the letter Shin's elemental attribution to fire: Judgement, the card of the angel's trumpet, of resurrection, awakening and the last call, is read in the Golden Dawn system as the card of the element of fire in its aspect of the purging, resurrecting flame, the fire of the final awakening.

The three-pronged flame of Shin and the fiery trumpet-blast of Judgement answer to one another. The mapping of the twenty-two letters onto the tarot trumps descends from Eliphas Levi and was fixed by the Golden Dawn from 1888, as published in Liber 777. The provenance must be kept clear. The path from Hod to Malkuth, the letter Shin, and its attribution to the element fire as one of the three mother letters are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the correspondence to Judgement is Hermetic Qabalah, the Victorian Western magical overlay of 1888, distinct from Jewish Kabbalah.