Tav · ת

Truth is spelled with the first letter, the middle letter, and the last — because anything less than the whole way is not yet true.

Correspondences

Essence

Tav is the last letter — the mark, the sign, the seal set on a finished thing. In the oldest script it was drawn as a simple cross, the sign made on the foreheads of the faithful in Ezekiel's vision, the mark that distinguishes and protects. It is the final letter of emet, truth, a word the sages loved to anatomize: aleph, mem, tav — the first, middle, and last letters of the alphabet — because truth must hold from beginning to end, while sheker, the lie, huddles its letters together in one corner of the alphabet and cannot stand. The seal of the Holy One, the Talmud says, is truth; tav is that seal.

It is a double letter under Saturn — the slowest planet, the lord of endings, limits, and time — bearing the pair of grace and indignation, the two faces of every final judgement. Its number is four hundred, the greatest single-letter value, the alphabet's full measure.

On the Tree it is the thirty-second and last path, joining Yesod to Malkuth — foundation descending into the kingdom, the final step by which the whole current of emanation arrives in the manifest world. Its trump is The World, the dancer in the wreath, the completed Great Work. And because the alphabet is a circle, tav's ending is not a wall but a hinge: the seal turns, and the next breath is Aleph again.

Related

• Shin — the previous letter, the fire before the seal
• Aleph — the next letter, as the circle closes and begins again
• The World
• Kabbalah
• Tree of Life