Major Arcana · XX
Fire (and Spirit) · ש Shin · Thoth: The Aeon
A call to rise: to take stock of your life and answer what it asks of you now.
Shin, the tooth, is the third Mother letter: Fire, the hissing sound, the head of the human body and heat. Its three flames (ש) are often read as the three pillars or the three Mothers. Its value is 300, which is also the value of Ruach Elohim, the Spirit of God. The Renaissance Christian cabalists wrote Shin into the middle of YHVH to form YHShVH, Yeheshuah (Jesus), the Pentagrammaton: the four elements crowned by Spirit. For this reason the Golden Dawn gives this path both Fire and Spirit.
The 31st path rises from Malkuth to Hod: the fire of transformation lifting matter towards the mind. It is the first path of the Practicus grade and one of the three letters of Qesheth, the rainbow (Qoph, Shin, Tav: paths 29, 31, 32), that arches over the Outer Order paths below Tiphareth.
Smith painted the Last Judgement: the angel Gabriel blows a trumpet hung with a red-cross banner, and naked figures (a man, a woman and a child) rise from coffins floating on water, arms raised in wonder. Waite reads it as the resurrection of the whole person, the call that wakes the dead; Case’s key word is realization: the final awakening of the personality to the One Self.
Crowley replaced the Last Judgement with The Aeon, based on the Stele of Revealing (the Egyptian funerary stele of Ankh-af-na-Khonsu that inspired The Book of the Law). Nuit arches her star-body over the card; Hadit is the winged globe of fire beneath her; and Horus appears as Ra-Hoor-Khuit enthroned and as the transparent child Hoor-paar-kraat with his finger to his lips. A great Shin rises below, with a human figure in each flame. It is the end of the Aeon of Osiris and the beginning of the Aeon of Horus: Crowley calls it “the Last Judgement of the old aeon”.
Card image: Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite tarot, 1909 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).