Tav · XXI The World

Correspondences

Letter

ת Tav (תו), “Mark, cross (tau)”

Value

400

Kind

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

Attribution

♄︎ Saturn (and Earth)

Joins

Yesod (9) and Malkuth (10)

Tarot trump

XXI · Waite: The World · Thoth: The Universe · Marseille: Le Monde

Golden Dawn title (Book T)

The Great One of the Night of Time

Lévi’s attribution (1855)

XXI Le Monde

Case’s key word

Cosmic consciousness

Colours

King: Indigo · Queen: Black

Gods (777)

Egyptian: Sebek, Mako · Greek: Athena · Roman: Saturn, Terminus · Hindu: Brahma

Animals

Crocodile

Plants

Ash; cypress; hellebore; yew; nightshade

Precious stones

Onyx

Perfumes

Assafoetida; scammony; indigo; sulphur (all evil odours)

Magical weapon

The sickle

The letter

Tav, the mark or cross, is the last letter, the seal: in Ezekiel 9 the angel sets a Tav on the foreheads of the righteous, and in the old Hebrew script it was written as a cross, X or +. Its value is 400. It is a Double letter; in Kaplan’s Sepher Yetzirah its opposites are Grace and Ugliness. As the last letter it completes the alphabet, and the Golden Dawn gives it both Saturn and Earth.

On the Tree

The 32nd path rises from Malkuth to Yesod: the first path of the ascent, the gateway out of the material world into the astral. The Golden Dawn’s Theoricus grade opens with the candidate’s passage along it, through the temple of Saturn, guided by the Kerubic beasts. Its 32 Paths name, the Administrative Intelligence, “directs the seven planets in their courses”, since everything above passes through it into the world.

The World in the Waite deck

Smith’s World is a dancing woman, naked except for a purple scarf, holding a wand in each hand, within an oval wreath tied with red ribbons. The four Kerubim (man, eagle, bull and lion) watch from the corners. Waite calls it “the perfection and end of the Cosmos”; Case’s key word is cosmic consciousness: the dancer is the self, freed and moving in perfect rhythm with the universe.

The Universe in the Thoth deck

Crowley’s Universe shows a young woman dancing with a serpent within an ellipse of seventy-two circles (the quinaries of the zodiac), while a great eye of God watches and the four Kerubim in the corners pour out water. At the bottom is the plan of the House of Matter, based on the periodic table of the elements as known in 1944. Crowley calls her the completion of the Great Work, “the Great Work accomplished”, and the end that is also the beginning: the dancing maiden is Heh final, the Daughter, who will be set on the throne of the Mother.

Where this path leads

• יסוד Yesod (9)
• מלכות Malkuth (10)

Read further

• The World 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).