Nun · נ

The fish does not fear the deep; the deep is where it was given its life.

Correspondences

Essence

Nun is the fish — in Aramaic the word means exactly that — the life that moves hidden beneath the surface of mem's waters. It is the letter of perpetuity through descent: the fish is invisible, prolific, and utterly at home in the element that would drown everything else. The tradition reads its two forms as a moral diagram — the bent nun within the word is the faithful one bowed in this world, the straight final ן is the same soul standing upright in the world to come. Falling and rising are one letter.

Its number is fifty, the number of the Fifty Gates of Understanding and of the Jubilee, the fiftieth year when everything bound is released and returns to its source. A simple letter under Scorpio — the sign of death, depth, and regeneration — its Sefer Yetzirah faculty is motion: nun never holds still, because what stops moving in deep water sinks.

On the Tree it is the twenty-fourth path, joining Tiphareth to Netzach — beauty descending into victory. Its trump is Death, the great card of transformation that almost never means dying: it means the fish's own wisdom, that life continues by passing through what appears to end it. Nun is the seed rotting in the ground, the name of the one who fell (the sages say the bent nun bows for the fallen) and the promise that the fall is not the final posture.

Related

• Mem — the previous letter, the waters the fish swims in
• Samekh — the next letter, the prop that upholds the fallen
• Death
• Kabbalah
• Tree of Life