Hebrew Letters

He engraved them, carved them, weighed them, permuted them — and with twenty-two letters He founded the world.

The twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alef-bet are, in the Kabbalah, nothing less than the instruments of creation. The Sefer Yetzirah — the Book of Formation, the tradition's oldest surviving text — describes God engraving, carving, weighing, and permuting the letters, and building all that exists out of their combinations. On this view the alphabet is not a notation invented to record the world; the world is a text spelled out of a prior alphabet. Each letter is simultaneously a sound, a number, a pictograph, and a channel of creative force — which is why the mystic who studies the letters is studying the grammar of reality itself.

Because every letter is also a number, every word carries a hidden arithmetic. This is gematria: words that share a sum share a secret kinship, and the tradition mines these equivalences endlessly — ahavah (love) and echad (one) both counting thirteen, and together making twenty-six, the number of the four-lettered Name. The five letters that take a final form (kaf, mem, nun, pe, tzadi) extend the count past four hundred.

The Sefer Yetzirah sorts the letters into three classes. The three mothers — Aleph, Mem, Shin — are the elemental trinity of Air, Water, and Fire. The seven doubles — Bet, Gimel, Dalet, Kaf, Pe, Resh, Tav — each take a hard and a soft pronunciation, carry a pair of opposed qualities, and correspond to the seven classical planets. The twelve simples carry the twelve signs of the zodiac and twelve human faculties. In the Golden Dawn synthesis this same alphabet is laid onto the twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life and the twenty-two trumps of the Major Arcana — each letter a path, each path a card, so that the alef-bet, the Tree, and the tarot are three notations for one structure.

The Sefer Yetzirah divides the twenty-two into three classes — the elemental mothers, the planetary doubles, and the zodiacal simples:

flowchart TD
    AB["The 22 letters — tools of creation"]
    AB --> MOTHERS["3 Mothers — the elemental trinity"]
    AB --> DOUBLES["7 Doubles — the classical planets"]
    AB --> SIMPLES["12 Simples — the zodiac signs"]
    MOTHERS --> ALEPH["Aleph — Air"]
    MOTHERS --> MEM["Mem — Water"]
    MOTHERS --> SHIN["Shin — Fire"]

The Twenty-Two Letters

The letters run from Aleph to Tav as the paths run from the eleventh (Kether to Chokmah) to the thirty-second (Yesod to Malkuth) — the full descent from the first breath to the sealed world, and the ladder back up.

Related

• Kabbalah — the tradition in which the letters are the tools of creation
• Tree of Life — the twenty-two paths the letters name
• Major Arcana — the twenty-two trumps the letters carry
• Merkabah — the older mysticism of ascent the letter-work grew alongside
• The Shekhinah — the indwelling presence the final He of the Name carries
• Spirituality Hub