Everything Is Made of Letters
A very old claim about how the world gets built, arriving at an awkward moment.
The Sefer Yetzirah is about thirteen hundred words long. Nobody knows who wrote it, and the guesses about when it was written span the better part of a thousand years. It makes one claim and then keeps making it: the world is built out of letters. Twenty-two of them. Not described by letters, not labelled with them. Built from them, the way a house is built from timber.
The sorting is where it gets strange. Three of the letters are called mothers and they carry the elements. Seven are doubles, each holding a thing and its reverse: life and death, wealth and poverty, wisdom and folly. Twelve are simples and they take the months and the signs. Somebody looked at an alphabet and saw a parts list for existence.
That was a comfortable thing to file under poetry ten years ago. It is less comfortable now, typed into a machine that produces argument, apology, images and fluent nonsense out of nothing but characters put in an order, in a decade when most of what happens to you arrives as a string of them. I’m not going to claim anyone predicted the transformer. I’m saying the central claim has stopped being counterintuitive, and when a strange old idea quietly stops being strange it’s worth going back to see what else it said while you weren’t listening.
The joke, if it’s a joke, is that the Sefer Yetzirah is the text traditionally associated with making a golem. A thing assembled out of clay and animated by putting letters in the right order, which then does what it’s told, and then keeps doing it.
The other twenty-two
The Major Arcana is twenty-two pictures. A fool at a cliff edge, a magician at a table, a woman between two pillars, on through a falling tower and a judgement and a world. They’re numbered, and the numbering isn’t filing. It’s a sequence a person is understood to move through, and the order is the argument: the tower has to come down before the star, the hanged man precedes death rather than following it.
Two systems, then. Both claiming twenty-two is enough to cover everything. One says here is what the world is made of. The other says here is what happens to you while you’re in it.
Somebody was always going to put them together. Before I tell you who, here is what it looks like when it’s done.
Eye
The letter Ayin means eye. It also means spring, the kind you drink from, which is a nice thing to know about a letter that ended up on the Devil.
In the picture most people know, the two figures at the Devil’s block are chained by collars loose enough to lift off over their heads. Nobody in that card is being held. Now put a letter that means eye on a card about a captivity you’re free to walk out of, and think about the last time you put your phone face down and picked it back up inside two minutes.
Nothing in that asks you to believe anything. It asks you to look at what the letter says and what the picture shows and notice they’re describing the same situation, which is one you’re probably in.
Who did it, and when
The version everyone now uses was assembled in London in the late 1880s by three men who called themselves the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Westcott was a coroner. Woodman was a retired physician. Mathers had no steady employment and did most of the actual thinking. They worked from Éliphas Lévi, some Freemasonry, a quantity of Christian Hermeticism, and Jewish texts they read in translation. Lévi had put Aleph on the Magician a generation earlier. The Golden Dawn moved the Fool to the front and shifted everything down by one, and that’s the scheme English-language tarot books have used ever since. Members of the order drew the decks the rest of us learned on. The letter assignments aren’t printed on the Waite-Smith cards but they’re in them, in what the figures hold and which way they’re facing.
You can tell that story as a debunking. I have told it that way. It isn’t wrong and it isn’t very curious, and it leaves you nowhere to go afterwards except marking a Victorian’s homework for twenty-two posts.
Assembly is what happens to every tradition that lasts. Somebody always sits down in a room and decides the order. The question isn’t whether the pairing is ancient. It’s whether it holds, and I think it holds because both systems were already doing the same job before anyone introduced them. The introduction only made that visible.
The timing interests me more than the mistakes. The Golden Dawn was founded in 1888. Hertz had confirmed electromagnetic waves the year before. Michelson and Morley had gone looking for the aether and come back with nothing. The educated public was being told, on the best authority available, that the senses are partial instruments and the air is thick with things arriving underneath them. Mathers wasn’t being unscientific by the standards of his decade. He was running the most exciting result of his age into the soul to see what came out the other side. People at the front edge of a machine age, reaching back for the oldest letters they could find. That’s not so far from where we’re standing.
Mouth
Peh means mouth, and it sits on the Tower. The crown coming off, figures in the air. A structure that took decades to build coming apart over something that got said. We’ve had a run of that. Institutions that looked load-bearing turning out to have been held up mostly by nobody having objected yet.
What this is
Twenty-two posts. One card and one letter each, Fool to World, in order. Each stands on its own, so coming in halfway costs you nothing.
Every time, I’m asking what the letter knows that the picture couldn’t hold, and what the two of them together have to say about a situation neither of their authors could have imagined.
If you want to read along, Westcott's 1887 translation is out of copyright. Then you're holding the document three men in a rented room were holding, and you can form your own view of what they did with it. It's an offer, not homework. The posts don't lean on it.
The images are from a deck I’ve been building: brass, glass, gearwork, a Victorian idea of a future that didn’t arrive. That isn’t styling. It’s the argument in a picture.
What I bring, and what I don’t
Fifty-odd years of reading cards, starting on a Rider-Waite because in those years that was the only deck anyone had. Three years of the Builders of the Adytum, weekly, by post, which is where I learned the correspondences and was told they were very old. Later, two years with a teacher who worked the letters through sound, in a room where tarot was never once mentioned.
Somewhere in the middle of that second stretch I started waking up already reciting the alphabet, not fully awake, partway through before I knew I was doing it. And for a while I’d be in a crowd and people would shimmer, as if I was looking at whatever was standing behind them rather than at them. I never got an explanation and I’ve stopped wanting one. The letters were old when three men in London found them, older than the tarot by well over a thousand years, and people have been going into them and coming back unable to say quite what they saw for most of that time. The cards have their own version of it, younger and louder. What I took from that teacher is that the letters aren’t labels, that the sounding of them is a vehicle and not a destination, and that behind each one is a world a serious person could spend a life inside. I’m not going to teach you any of it here. It isn’t mine to hand on, and it doesn’t survive being typed.
What I can do is set the two systems side by side and read them carefully in front of you.
What I can’t tell you is whether the fit between them is a discovery or a coincidence. I’ve had fifty years to settle that and haven’t.
Next, the Fool and Aleph. A letter that can’t be spoken on its own, on a card numbered zero. The man on it is walking off the end of an iron bridge, looking back at the brass dog barking behind him. The Golden Dawn put the first letter here. Lévi hadn’t. I think the Golden Dawn got this one right, and next time I’ll say why.
Westcott's 1887 translation, with his notes, is here. About forty minutes.
©2026 Gael MacLean