Egyptian-Hebrew stream·Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation)·Chapter V — The Twelve Simples
The single letters as the twelve months, signs, and faculties
The twelve simple letters as the twelve months of the year, the twelve zodiacal signs, the twelve human faculties (sight, hearing, smell, speech, taste, sexual love, work, motion, anger, laughter, thought, sleep).
Source context
- Theme
- Twelve simple letters, their assignment to zodiacal signs, months, and bodily organs, and the twelve diagonal borders structuring world, time, and soul
Steiner
not engaged in the GA corpus
Cross-tradition
- Pythagorean-Platonic cosmologyThe Pythagorean and Platonic assignment of numerical and geometric structure to the cosmos — particularly the twelve-fold division of the zodiacal sphere — offers cross-tradition congruence with the Sefer Yetzirah's twelve-letter governance of spatial diagonals and temporal cycles.
- Vedic / Jyotisha astrologyThe Vedic system's twelve rāśis (zodiacal signs) correlated with bodily regions and seasonal periods exhibits cross-tradition congruence with Chapter V's triadic mapping of letters onto cosmos, year, and body.
- Hellenistic astral medicine (iatromathematics)Hellenistic melothesia — the doctrine assigning zodiacal signs to specific body parts — runs structurally parallel to Chapter V's attribution of twelve simple letters to twelve human organs and the twelve months.
CHAPTER V
1The simple letters are twelve, namely: He, Vau, Zain, Heth, Teth, Yod, Lamed, Nun, Samech, Oin, Tzaddi, and Quoph; they represent the fundamental properties, eight, hearing, smell, speech, desire for food, the sexual appetite, movement, anger, mirth, thought, sleep, and work. These symbolize also twelve directions in space: northeast, southeast, the east above, the east below, the northwest, southwest, the west above, the west below, the upper south, the lower south, the upper north, the lower north. These diverge to all eternity, and an as the arms of the universe.
2These twelve letters, he designed, formed, combined, weighed, and changed, and created with them the twelve divisions of the heavens (namely, the zodiacal constellations), the twelve months of the year, and the twelve important organs of the frame of man, namely the right and left hands, the right and left feet, two kidneys, the liver, the gall, the spleen, the intestines, the gullet, and the stomach.
3Three mothers, seven double and twelve simple, these are the twenty-two letters with which I H V H Tetragrammaton, that is our Lord of Hosts, exalted, and existed in the ages, whose name is Holy, created three fathers, fire and spirit and water, progressing beyond them, seven heavens with their armies of angels; and twelve limits of the universe.