The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life is a diagram from the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition: ten spheres, called sephiroth (singular sephirah), joined by twenty-two lines called paths. It pictures the way the divine is thought to pour out, stage by stage, from the highest unity down into the physical world — and, read the other way, the way a soul might climb back. In the late nineteenth century the Golden Dawn laid the entire tarot over this diagram, and the result shapes most English-language decks today, including the Rider–Waite–Smith and the Thoth Tarot. You do not need the Tree to read the cards; many fine readers never learn it. But it explains a good deal of what is drawn on them.

The ten spheres and the numbered cards

The sephiroth are numbered from the top. The Golden Dawn gave each number of the four suits to the sphere of the same number, so the Aces sit at the crown and the Tens in the physical world:

This is why the Order read a number as a stage rather than a quantity: Fives, in severe Geburah, tend to be cards of strife and loss, while Sixes, in Tiphareth at the Tree's balanced heart, tend toward harmony and success. The Tree is drawn in three pillars — severity on one side, mercy on the other and balance between — and the spheres share in the character of their pillar. Pamela Colman Smith even set out the ten coins of the Ten of Pentacles in the Tree's own pattern.

The twenty-two paths and the trumps

The paths take their names from the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. An old Hebrew text, the Sefer Yetzirah, speaks of "thirty-two paths of wisdom": the ten spheres and the twenty-two letters. So the paths are numbered from 11 to 32, after the spheres. The Golden Dawn gave the twenty-two Major Arcana to the letters in order, beginning with The Fool, and so to the paths: the Fool is the 11th path, from Kether to Chokmah, at the very top; The High Priestess runs straight down the middle from Kether to Tiphareth; Temperance continues it from Tiphareth to Yesod; and The World, the 32nd path from Yesod to Malkuth, is the first path a climber takes upward out of the physical world. Each trump is then read as a passage between two states, coloured by the planet, sign or element that its letter carries.

The suits, the courts and the four worlds

The four suits are linked with the four letters of the divine name YHVH and with four "worlds" of Kabbalistic thought: Wands with fire and Atziluth, the world of emanation; Cups with water and Briah, creation; Swords with air and Yetzirah, formation; Pentacles with earth and Assiah, action. The court cards are placed on the Tree as a family: in the Golden Dawn's naming, the King — the mounted figure the Rider–Waite–Smith deck calls the Knight — at Chokmah, the Queen at Binah, the Prince — the Rider–Waite–Smith King — at Tiphareth, and the Princess — the Page — at Malkuth. Some modern writers instead place the Rider–Waite–Smith King at Chokmah; it is worth checking which convention a book is using.

Where schools disagree

The Golden Dawn's Tree is one version among several. Its arrangement of the paths, and the letter on each, came by way of the seventeenth-century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher; Jewish kabbalists have long used other diagrams and other assignments of letters to paths. The French tradition of Éliphas Lévi and Papus puts the Fool near the end of the letters, so every trump stands on a different path from the Golden Dawn's. Aleister Crowley exchanged the letters of The Emperor and The Star. And Arthur Edward Waite, who used the Tree in his own order, later wrote that he doubted the trumps and the letters truly belonged together. The Western esoteric "Qabalah" that the Order taught is also a distinct tradition from Jewish Kabbalah, which it borrowed from and reshaped.

Historians add that nothing connects the tarot to the Kabbalah before the 1780s: the cards began as a fifteenth-century Italian game. The Tree is best seen as a framework that later readers brought to the deck — a rich one, since much of the deck's later imagery was drawn with it in mind.

In a reading here

When a spread's interpretation is laid out here, each card's Golden Dawn correspondences are listed beside it — including, for a trump, its Hebrew letter and path on the Tree, and for a numbered card, its sephirah.

Related

• The Golden Dawn attributions
• Thoth Tarot
• Major Arcana
• Pip cards
• Court cards
• Aces
• Éliphas Lévi