Peh

Peh is the mouth — its pictograph is the open mouth, and a tooth is sometimes read inside it — and its value is eighty. Among the seven double letters of the Sefer Yetzirah, each with a hard and a soft sound, Peh is assigned to Mars, the planet of edge and of force. It is the letter of speech, and the tradition marks it as the most double-edged of instruments: the mouth can bless and can demolish with the same breath.

Where the path is fastened is not agreed. This site uses the GRA arrangement, which runs Peh across the base of the Tree between Severity and Splendor — the measuring judgement and the articulate mind. The later Golden Dawn attribution, noted here as an alternative, sets it between Victory and Splendor instead. On the path the letter spans feeling and statement: in the moment of utterance, surging emotion is cast into fixed words, and every opening of the mouth is a small act of forging — heat poured into a mould that will hold its shape once it cools. The tension of walking it is that speech both relieves and commits, that what is said cannot be quite unsaid, and that the same power which builds another up can bring them down.

When Peh is drawn, hold it as contemplation, not a prediction of what you will say or hear. In the spirit of hitbonenut, recall something you spoke lately and watch how the feeling behind it hardened as it took words — whether the words were true to the heat or betrayed it. Ask where speech would build and where silence would guard more faithfully. The letter tells no fortune; it only sets your attention on the forge at the front of your face.