Path 14

The fourteenth path is the topmost horizontal path of the Tree, joining Chokmah, Wisdom, to Binah, Understanding, the supernal father and mother, whose union above the abyss is the source from which the lower sefirot flow. It carries the letter Daleth, whose name means "door", the aperture between the two supernal powers, and whose form derives from a pictograph of a door or doorway.

In the Sefer Yetzirah Daleth is one of the seven double letters assigned to the seven planets, and it is given to Venus, the planet of love, union and generation, fitting for the path that links the primordial masculine and feminine and stands as the doorway of creative union at the summit of the Tree. The attribution of the letter to Venus is part of the ancient Jewish scheme in which the alphabet is the toolkit of creation, the seven doubles corresponding to the seven planets and the fundamental pairs of opposites the Sefer Yetzirah names.

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.