Text: The 22nd and final Hebrew letter, Tau (T or Th), is an ancient form of the Cross. All students of comparative religion and art know well how universally employed has been this much venerated, disputed and execrated emblem. Volumes could easily and profitably be written upon every one of its manifold significations, among which the 2 of utmost importance are the ideals of unification and of sacrifice. As Tau (the sign of the cross) stands at the end of the sacred alphabet it immediately suggests a finished work or completed initiation, therefore has it been continually affirmed that an initiate dies upon the cross to his old estate when he attains hierophancy and quickly rises to a new and far more glorious condition than any he has enjoyed previously. Taking up the cross and following the Master involves passing through all the initiatory stages of hieroglyphically portrayed by the employment of the 22 Hebrew letters in an esoteric or mystical manner. Alchemy rightly understood, as it was by Paracelsus and other profound philosophers in Europe a few centuries ago, was no mere art of converting copper, silver, and other less valuable metals into material gold, though we by no means deny the possibility of literal transmutations in chemical or alchemical laboratories. The last letter of the Hebrew alphabet suggests death upon the cross as a gateway to a new and higher life and closely associated with its deeper meanings is the truth conveyed in those sublime utterances of some great seer and sage of ancient Israel, "Better is the end of a thing than its beginning" and "Better is the day of birth." Such sublime sayings as the latter of these are apt to strike the unthinking as pessimistic, because the shallow mind thinks not of death (properly transition) as only a step out of one state of conscious existence into another. Death and end, in the Kabbalistic meaning of those words, refer only to the termination of some certain stage or process in development, literally the achievement of some definite end we have had in view, then having reached that end we are ready for an entirely new beginning, but one that would have been impossible for us had it not been for all the disciplinary experience which preceded it and led up to it.

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Source: 72