Peh · XVI The Tower

Correspondences

Letter

פ Peh (פה), “Mouth”

Value

80

Kind

Double letter (one of the seven Doubles: Beth, Gimel, Daleth, Kaph, Peh, Resh, Tav)

Attribution

♂︎ Mars

Joins

Netzach (7) and Hod (8)

Tarot trump

XVI · Waite: The Tower · Thoth: The Tower (War) · Marseille: La Maison Dieu

Golden Dawn title (Book T)

The Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty

Lévi’s attribution (1855)

XVII L’Étoile

Case’s key word

Awakening

Colours

King: Scarlet · Queen: Red

Gods (777)

Egyptian: Horus · Greek: Ares, Athena · Roman: Mars · Hindu: Krishna

Animals

Horse; bear; wolf

Plants

Absinthe; rue

Precious stones

Ruby; any red stone

Perfumes

Pepper; dragon’s blood; all hot pungent odours

Magical weapon

The sword

The letter

Peh, the mouth, is the organ of speech and of eating. It is a Double letter with a final form (ף, 800); its ordinary value is 80. In Kaplan’s Sepher Yetzirah its opposites are Dominance and Subjugation. The word spoken by the mouth can build or destroy, as the Tower shows.

On the Tree

The 27th path runs horizontally from Netzach to Hod, the lowest of the three horizontal paths: it links feeling and intellect, Venus and Mercury, through the fire of Mars. The Golden Dawn’s Philosophus grade includes it. In the diagram of the Fall, the Tower is the path struck by the dragon.

The Tower in the Waite deck

A tall grey tower on a crag is struck by lightning; its crown is blown off, flames burst from the windows, and a crowned man and a woman fall headlong among falling flame-shaped Yods. Waite, following Grand Orient, reads it as the ruin of the House of Life when evil has prevailed in it; Case’s key word is awakening: the flash of insight that destroys the false structure built on mistaken ideas.

The Tower in the Thoth deck

Crowley subtitled it War. The Eye of Horus (or of Shiva, whose opening destroys the universe) blazes at the top; from the jaws of Dis below, flames shatter a geometric tower and figures fall. To one side a dove with an olive branch and a lion-headed serpent (Abraxas or Chnoubis) represent the two forms of desire, love and death. Crowley calls the card the destruction of the old by the new, and says that it can mean the sudden awakening that comes with initiation.

La Maison Dieu

In the Marseille deck it is La Maison Dieu, the House of God (or the hospital, as the Hôtel-Dieu), struck by fire from heaven, perhaps an image of the Tower of Babel. Lévi gave it the letter Ayin.

Where this path leads

• נצח Netzach (7)
• הוד Hod (8)

Read further

• The Tower 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).