Pe · פ

The word leaves the mouth as a bird leaves the hand: nothing you do afterward can call it back.

Correspondences

Essence

Pe is the mouth — the organ of speech, the gate where inner becomes outer and can never be taken back. The scribes hide a teaching in its shape: the white space inside the glyph forms a concealed bet, a house within the mouth, because every word carries a whole dwelling of meaning inside it. The eye of ayin receives; the mouth of pe releases — and the alphabet places them in that order deliberately, for one should see before one speaks. Speech is the human share in creation, the same instrument by which the worlds were spoken into being, and therefore the most dangerous tool an ordinary person handles daily.

It is a double letter under Mars, bearing the pair of power and servitude — the two conditions speech produces, depending on who commands whom, the tongue or its owner. Its bent form פ stands within the word; the final ף drops straight down below the line, the word fully discharged.

On the Tree it is the twenty-seventh path, joining Netzach to Hod — victory to splendour, the lowest horizontal beam, the wall on which every tower of the personality is built. Its trump is The Tower, struck open by lightning: the shattering word, the utterance that breaks a false structure in one syllable. Pe teaches that the mouth builds and demolishes with the same breath, and asks only that you know which you are doing.

Related

• Ayin — the previous letter, the eye that should precede the mouth
• Tzadi — the next letter, the hook of the righteous
• The Tower
• Kabbalah
• Tree of Life