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The 22 paths on the Tree of Life in Kabbalah are matched, in the Hermetic Qabalah of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, with the 22 Major Arcana cards of the Tarot. Each path also carries one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, so every path joins two Sephiroth, one letter and one card.
The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life usually has 10 Sephiroth, or 11 in diagrams that add Da’at (knowledge) below Keter, joined by 22 paths. The diagram grew out of Jewish texts such as the Bahir and the Zohar, and later Christian and Hermetic writers drew their own versions, among them Johann Reuchlin and Athanasius Kircher, whose 1652 tree is the most common layout in Hermetic Qabalah.
Hermetic Qabalists treat the Tarot trumps as keys to the paths.
Hermetic Qabalists see the cards of the tarot as keys to the Tree of Life. The 22 cards … are seen as corresponding to the 22 Hebrew letters and the 22 paths of the Tree…
Wikipedia, "Hermetic Qabalah"
The same system gives the aces to tens of each suit to the ten Sephiroth, and the sixteen court cards to the elements in the four worlds. For a card by card view, see the 22 Major Arcana cards of the Tarot, and for the wider tree, see the Tree of Life in Eden, Kabbalah and the Assyrian sources.
The 22 paths, letters and cards
Aleister Crowley, who passed through the Golden Dawn, set these attributions out in 777 (1909). His tables number the paths 11 to 32, after the ten Sephiroth, and give each path the two Sephiroth it joins. Some of his card names differ from modern decks: The Juggler for The Magician, The House of God for The Tower, and The Angel or Last Judgement for Judgment.
| Path | Letter | Card | Joins |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | Aleph | The Fool | Keter (Crown) and Chokmah (Wisdom) |
| 12 | Bet | The Magician | Keter and Binah (Understanding) |
| 13 | Gimel | The High Priestess | Keter and Tiphereth (Beauty) |
| 14 | Daleth | The Empress | Chokmah and Binah |
| 15 | He | The Emperor | Chokmah and Tiphereth |
| 16 | Vav | The Hierophant | Chokmah and Chesed (Mercy) |
| 17 | Zayin | The Lovers | Binah and Tiphereth |
| 18 | Chet | The Chariot | Binah and Geburah (Strength) |
| 19 | Tet | Strength | Chesed and Geburah |
| 20 | Yod | The Hermit | Chesed and Tiphereth |
| 21 | Kaf | Wheel of Fortune | Chesed and Netzach (Victory) |
| 22 | Lamed | Justice | Geburah and Tiphereth |
| 23 | Mem | The Hanged Man | Geburah and Hod (Splendor) |
| 24 | Nun | Death | Tiphereth and Netzach |
| 25 | Samekh | Temperance | Tiphereth and Yesod (Foundation) |
| 26 | Ayin | The Devil | Tiphereth and Hod |
| 27 | Peh | The Tower | Netzach and Hod |
| 28 | Tzadi | The Star | Netzach and Yesod |
| 29 | Qoph | The Moon | Netzach and Malkuth (Kingdom) |
| 30 | Resh | The Sun | Hod and Yesod |
| 31 | Shin | Judgment | Hod and Malkuth |
| 32 | Tav | The World | Yesod and Malkuth |
Strength and Justice
In older decks Strength is card XI and Justice card VIII. The Golden Dawn put Strength on the path of Tet and Justice on the path of Lamed, which follows the order of the Hebrew letters but not the old card numbers.
The Rider Waite deck renumbered the two cards to fit the Golden Dawn.
Strength is traditionally the eleventh card and Justice the eighth, but the influential Rider–Waite Tarot switched the position of these two cards in order to make them a better fit with the astrological correspondences…
Wikipedia, "Major Arcana"
How the paths are used
In this system the Sephiroth describe the nature of the divine, and the paths describe ways of knowing it, as Dion Fortune put it in The Mystical Qabalah. Practitioners in the Golden Dawn line meditate on a card to work with its path, and some readers lay out Tarot spreads shaped like the Tree. Earlier, Éliphas Lévi had built his own Kabbalistic reading of the trumps on the Tarot de Marseille, which Decker, Depaulis and Dummett (1996) call “tortuous”, and other occultists such as Oswald Wirth placed the Fool and the letter Shin differently from the Golden Dawn.
