Yetzirah Tarot: The World of Formation, Air and the Suit of Swords

Yetzirah tarot is the tarot read at the level of formation, the third of the four Kabbalistic worlds. After the pure emanation of Atziluth and the first creation of Briah, Yetzirah is where things take shape, the way a potter shapes clay. In the Golden Dawn and the Thoth Tarot it belongs to Air, to the suit of Swords and to the Princes. It is also, in a precise sense, the world that the whole Major Arcana comes from. This article explains why.

It is the third of four articles on the Kabbalistic worlds, after Briah Tarot: The World of Creation, Water and the Suit of Cups.

What Yetzirah means: the world of formation

The name comes from the Hebrew verb yatzar, to form or to shape. It is the verb of the second creation story in Genesis (2:7), where God forms the human being from the dust of the ground, like a potter at the wheel. In the classic text of the four worlds, Isaiah 43:7, it is the second verb: "I have formed him".

Briah created a "something". Yetzirah gives that something a shape, a pattern and a relation to other shapes. It is the world of the angels in their choirs, of images, of the imagination. The Golden Dawn identified it with the "astral light", the plane of images where visions and dreams take form.

In the divine name YHVH, Yetzirah is the letter Vav. Vav means "nail" or "hook", the peg that joins two things, and its number is six. On the Tree of Life Yetzirah is linked with the six sefirot from Chesed to Yesod, gathered around Tiphareth, the heart. Later Kabbalah calls this group Zeir Anpin, the "Small Face", the Son.

Air, Swords and the Princes

The Golden Dawn's attributions follow from this.

• Element: Air, the medium of thought and speech.
• Suit: Swords, the instruments that divide and define.
• Letter: Vav, the hook that connects.
• Court card: the Prince, called the Son.
• Part of the soul: Ruach, which means breath, wind and spirit, the mind and character.

The Prince of Swords, the Air of Air, is the purest picture of this world in the Thoth deck. Crowley shows him in a chariot pulled by small winged children who pull in different directions. He holds a sword to create and a sickle to cut down what he has made. It is a portrait of the mind: brilliant, restless, endlessly forming and dissolving patterns.

The heart of the suit makes the same point. The Six of Swords sits on Tiphareth, the centre of Zeir Anpin, and the Thoth deck calls it "Science". At the very centre of the world of formation stands knowledge organised into a coherent form.

The Major Arcana are Yetziratic

Here is the connection that makes this world special for the tarot. The Kabbalistic text that gives the trumps their meanings is the Sefer Yetzirah, the "Book of Formation". It describes how the world was formed through ten sefirot and twenty-two letters. It also gives each letter its element, planet or zodiac sign.

The Golden Dawn called these "Yetziratic attributions". When the tarot links The Fool to Air, the Magus to Mercury or the Hermit to Virgo, it is using correspondences that come, by name, from the world of formation. The whole astrological structure of the Major Arcana is Yetziratic.

This makes sense. Trumps are images, and images are the substance of Yetzirah. Each trump is a formed picture of a force: not the force itself, which lives in the higher worlds, and not yet the deed, which belongs to Assiah. When you look at a Thoth trump, you are looking into the world of formation.

Pathworking: the trumps as doors in Yetzirah

The Golden Dawn turned this into a practice. In what later occultists called pathworking, a student sits quietly, imagines a trump as a door and steps through it in the imagination, travelling the path of the Tree it represents. The Golden Dawn practised related work as "rising on the planes" and scrying in the spirit vision.

All of this happens, in Kabbalistic terms, in Yetzirah, the astral world of images. The trumps are the formed doors of that world. You can try a simple version:

1. Choose one trump, for example The Lovers, Zain and Gemini, a trump of Air.
2. Look at it for a minute, then close your eyes and see it as a doorway.
3. Step through and note what you see, hear and feel. Do not force a story.
4. Write it down afterwards and compare it with the card's traditional meaning.

The practice trains exactly the faculty that Yetzirah rules: the power to form and read images.

Yetzirah tarot in practice: reading the pattern

Each card lives in all four worlds. The Yetziratic reading asks: what pattern or image is forming here?

1. Look at the shapes, not only the meanings. Yetzirah is the world of images: notice the colours, directions and figures on the card and what they suggest.
2. Read the story the mind is telling. Swords show thoughts, plans and words. Ask which belief or narrative is taking shape around the question.
3. Notice Air in the spread. Swords, the Princes and the airy trumps, the Fool, the Lovers, Adjustment and the Star, show where thinking is active.
4. Watch the hooks. Like Vav, some cards join others. A Prince often links two parts of the reading into one story.

Take the Seven of Swords, "Futility", drawn about a project at work. In Assiah it may warn of half-hearted effort. In Yetzirah it points at the pattern behind it: a story in the mind that the project is doomed before it starts. Change the pattern and the outcome may change too.

A world of shaping

Yetzirah is the world closest to our daily experience of the mind. Every plan, picture and word we form lives there before it becomes action. The Kabbalah does not treat it as an illusion, but as the necessary middle: the place where a created meaning finds a form it can wear.

For the tarot it is the natural home of the cards themselves. The next and final article in this series descends to Assiah Tarot: The World of Action, Earth and the Suit of Disks, the world of action and of the suit of Disks.