Path 24

The twenty-fourth path joins Tiphareth, Beauty, to Netzach, Victory, descending the right side of the lower Tree from the harmonising centre to the sphere of the emotions. It carries the letter Nun, whose name means "fish", the creature of the deep waters, and by extension a symbol of fertility, of what teems and multiplies unseen, and in some readings of continuity and the generations.

In the Sefer Yetzirah Nun is one of the twelve simple letters assigned to the twelve zodiac signs, and it is given to Scorpio, the fixed water sign of death, transformation, sexuality and the hidden depths. The attribution of the letter to Scorpio belongs to the ancient Jewish scheme in which the twelve single letters correspond to the signs and months; the fish of the deep and the scorpion of transformation together make this the path of death and regeneration, the descent into the waters from which new life comes.

This path is assigned the tarot trump Death, and the pairing is direct: Death, the card not of literal ending but of transformation, of the clearing-away that makes renewal possible, answers to its zodiacal sign Scorpio, the sign of death and rebirth, and to the letter Nun, the fish of the deep waters from which life is renewed. The Golden Dawn read the card as the necessary dissolution that precedes regeneration, in keeping with the Scorpionic mysteries. The correspondence of letters to tarot trumps was proposed by Eliphas Levi and codified by the Golden Dawn from 1888, in the scheme given in Liber 777.

The layers must be distinguished. The path from Tiphareth to Netzach, the letter Nun, and its attribution to Scorpio are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the identification with Death is Hermetic Qabalah, the Victorian Western magical overlay, a construction of 1888 that has no standing in the Jewish Kabbalah from which the path and letter derive.