Path 15

The fifteenth path joins Chokmah, Wisdom, to Tiphareth, Beauty, descending the right side of the Tree from the supernal father to the harmonising centre. It carries the letter Heh, whose name means "window", the opening through which light and breath pass, and which in Hebrew grammar marks the definite article and, doubled in the divine name, the feminine and the breath of life.

In the Sefer Yetzirah Heh is one of the twelve simple or single letters, and these twelve are assigned to the twelve signs of the zodiac; Heh is given to Aries, the first sign, the ram, the beginning of the zodiacal year. The letter-to-sign attribution is part of the ancient Jewish scheme in which the alphabet builds the cosmos: three mother letters for the elements, seven doubles for the planets, and twelve simples for the signs of the zodiac, each letter a creative channel and each simple letter a month, a sign and a faculty of the body.

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Emperor, the card of authority, order and worldly rule, fitting the martial, initiating character of its zodiacal sign Aries, ruled by Mars. This is the traditional Golden Dawn attribution as published in Liber 777; readers should be aware that Aleister Crowley later, on the authority of his Book of the Law, swapped the positions of The Emperor and The Star, so that some twentieth-century Thoth-based systems assign Heh differently, a reminder that even within Hermetic Qabalah the correspondences are constructed and contested rather than received.

The mapping of letters to trumps descends from Eliphas Levi and the Golden Dawn of 1888. The path from Chokmah to Tiphareth, the letter Heh, and its attribution to Aries are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the tarot correspondence, and the later dispute over it, belongs entirely to Hermetic Qabalah, the modern Western magical tradition.