Path 26

The twenty-sixth path joins Tiphareth, Beauty, to Hod, Splendour, descending the left side of the lower Tree from the harmonising centre to the sphere of the intellect. It carries the letter Ayin, whose name means "eye", and by extension a fountain or source, since the same word denotes a spring of water, the eye that sees and the spring that flows.

In the Sefer Yetzirah Ayin is one of the twelve simple letters assigned to the twelve zodiac signs, and it is given to Capricorn, the cardinal earth sign of the goat, ambition, structure, materiality and the disciplined climb. The attribution of the letter to Capricorn belongs to the ancient Jewish scheme in which the twelve single letters correspond to the signs and months; the goat of Capricorn, with its association with the material and the earthbound, suits a path whose tarot correspondence will make it the way of confronting the material and instinctual nature at its most binding.

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Devil, and the pairing rests on its zodiacal sign Capricorn, the goat, the Devil traditionally depicted as a goat-headed figure, and on the letter Ayin, the "eye", read here as the deceptive appearance and the bondage of the material. The Golden Dawn understood the Devil not as literal evil but as the card of matter, materiality and the illusory chains the soul mistakes for real, the goat-sign's earthbound heaviness. The correspondence of letters to tarot trumps was proposed by Eliphas Levi and codified by the Golden Dawn from 1888, in the form given in Liber 777.

The layers must be separated. The path from Tiphareth to Hod, the letter Ayin, and its attribution to Capricorn are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the identification with the Devil is Hermetic Qabalah, the Victorian Western magical overlay of 1888, distinct from the Jewish mystical tradition that supplied the underlying path and letter.