מ ם

The letter מ (final form ם) is the thirteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, with a gematria value of 40. Its name, Mem, means “water,” and it represents the primordial, fluid substance from which all life emerges.

Position on the Tree of Life

On the Tree of Life, מ corresponds to Path 23, which connects Chesed (Mercy) to Geburah (Severity). This path, the fourth of the “simple” letters, embodies the dynamic, dissolving power of water. It is the letter of the High Priestess in the Tarot, a card of hidden knowledge, intuition, and the unconscious—all realms associated with the ocean of the subconscious.

Astrological and planetary correspondence

In the Hermetic Qabalah, מ is attributed to the element of Water, not to a planet. It is the letter of life and death, of the amniotic fluid that nurtures the embryo and the seawater that returns all to the primal state. Its number 40 reflects the forty days and nights of the Flood, the forty years of wandering in the desert, and the forty weeks of human gestation.

Historical context

The origin of מ is ancient; its pictograph in Proto-Sinaitic and early Hebrew scripts was a wavy line or a crude image of water, representing the ocean, the Deep (Tehom). In the Sefer Yetzirah, the second of the three “mother letters” (א, מ, ש), Mem is the principal letter of the element Water. It silent, deep, and formative. The Bahir and later Zoharic texts describe Mem as containing the mystery of the upper waters and the lower waters, separated at creation by the firmament. In European Hermeticism, Mem became the glyph for the dissolving salt of alchemy—the solvent that reduces compounds back to the Prima Materia. It is also the letter that begins the word Malkuth (Kingdom), the final sephirah, anchoring the divine flow into material reality.

In Liber 777

In the 777 tables, at Path 23 (scale step 23), the named subject is the Hebrew letter מ (Mem) in both its medial and final forms. Within that table row, the letter itself is the cell value, without additional correspondences attributed to it beyond its own nature as the water-letter.