The 24th path · Tiphareth to Netzach
נ
Nun · XIII Death
♏︎ Scorpio · Thoth: Death
The Twenty-fourth Path is the Imaginative Intelligence, and it is so called because it gives a likeness to all the similitudes, which are created in like manner similar to its harmonious elegancies.
The Imaginative Intelligence: The 32 Paths of Wisdom, trans. Westcott
The card
Trump XIII, Death.
Open Death in the Tarot section →
Meanings in a reading, upright and reversed.
Correspondences
- Letter
- נ Nun (נון), “Fish”
- Value
- 50
- Kind
- Single letter (one of the twelve Singles, given to the signs of the zodiac)
- Attribution
- ♏︎ Scorpio
- Tarot trump
- XIII · Waite: Death · Thoth: Death · Marseille: L’Arcane sans nom (unnamed XIII)
- Golden Dawn title (Book T)
- The Child of the Great Transformers; the Lord of the Gate of Death
- Lévi’s attribution (1855)
- XIV Tempérance
- Case’s key word
- Transformation
- Colours
- King: Green-blue · Queen: Dull brown
- Gods (777)
- Egyptian: Typhon, Apep, Khephra · Greek: Ares, Hades · Roman: Mars · Hindu: Kundalini
- Animals
- Scorpion; beetle; lobster or crayfish; wolf
- Plants
- Cactus
- Precious stones
- Snakestone
- Perfumes
- Siamese benzoin; opoponax
- Magical weapon
- The pain of the obligation
The letter
Nun, the fish, is the swimmer in the waters of the unconscious: Joshua was “the son of Nun”, and Jesus’ disciples were fishers. Its ordinary value is 50 and its final form (ן) 700. The Talmud says the bent Nun (נ) is the faithful one who is bowed, and the straight final Nun the faithful one who is raised: humility and its reward. Case gives it the faculty of motion.
On the Tree
The 24th path joins Tiphareth to Netzach. It is one of the three paths that lead to Tiphareth from the Astral Triad, whose crossing in the Portal grade marks the entrance to the Inner Order. Death and rebirth are the price of that passage.
Death in the Waite deck
Smith’s Death is a skeleton in black armour on a white horse, carrying a black banner with a white five-petalled rose. A king lies dead under the hooves; a bishop pleads; a maiden turns away; a child offers flowers. Between two towers on the horizon the sun is rising. Case’s key word is transformation: Scorpio’s power, used for regeneration rather than decay.
Death in the Thoth deck
Harris painted a skeleton with the crown of Osiris sweeping a scythe through bubbles in which new forms are born; around him are the three beasts of Scorpio, the scorpion (the lowest form), the serpent (the middle) and the eagle (the highest), with a fish (Nun). Crowley stresses that the scythe cuts but the figures are dancing: death in this card is putrefaction in the alchemical sense, the black stage that precedes rebirth.
The unnamed card
In the Marseille deck trump XIII has no name: the skeleton harvests heads and hands from black earth. Players and later occultists called it l’arcane sans nom, the nameless arcanum.
Where this path leads
Read further
- Death on Wikipediahistory and iconography of the card
- Sepher Yetzirah and the 32 Paths of WisdomW. Wynn Westcott, trans., 1887
- The Kabbalah UnveiledS. L. MacGregor Mathers, from Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata, 1887
- Liber 777 RevisedAleister Crowley, 1909/1955
- The Book of ThothAleister Crowley, 1944
- The Golden DawnIsrael Regardie, ed., 1937–40
- A Garden of PomegranatesIsrael Regardie, 1932
- The Mystical QabalahDion Fortune, 1935
- The Pictorial Key to the TarotA. E. Waite, 1910
- The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the AgesPaul Foster Case, 1947
- A Practical Guide to Qabalistic SymbolismGareth Knight, 1965
Also in the background throughout: Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (1974) and Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), for the Jewish tradition as historians understand it; Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah (1990); Kenneth Grant, Nightside of Eden (1977), for the Qliphoth; Robert Wang, The Qabalistic Tarot (1983).