1. Crowley discussed the arrow in detail in Chapter XIV of The Book of Thoth, pp. 101 - 139. It is also part of his vision (pp. 139 - 142) but its significance there is occult and personal.

2. ‘Ninna’ is the Sumerian word for owl, and Inanna was also know as ‘Nin-ninna’. Baring and Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess, Viking, 1991, p. 216.

3. For example, ‘The Snowy Owl’ in Under the North Star, p. 16; ‘Owl’ in What is the Truth?, pp. 96-7; ‘Owl’ in The Cat and the Cuckoo, p. 24.

4. This is especially so in ‘The owl-flower’ in the Alchemical Cave Drama of Cave Birds, which occupies a place in that sequence which is almost exactly parallel to that of the Path of Temperance on the Cabbalistic Tree. I discuss the alchemical meaning of this poem in detail in Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest, pp. 129 - 130.

5. The illustration I refer to is in William Blake’s later version of The Gates of Paradise. This book was an emblem book depicting a spiritual journey as a journey through life and in the later version, which Blake intended “For the Sexes” rather than “For Children”, he included two pages on which he listed “The Keys of the Gates”.

6. It is quite usual for the four Worlds to be linked with the four Mother elements in this way. And, since the four Cabbalistic Worlds always overlap, it is quite common for them to be shown on a single, compound Sephirothic Tree, with the Atziluthic World occupying the topmost part of the Tree and the World of Assiah at the bottom. Only in the Atziluthic World and in the World of Assiah do parts of the Sephirothic Tree not overlap but extend, respectively, into the Heavens or into the Underworld.

7. Colin Low’s discussion of Yesod is very detailed and he calls it this. Notes on Kabbalah, p. 36.

8. SPJ 4 July 1958 and 9 July 1958.

9. ‘The Hanged Man and the Dragonfly’, WP 92.

10. ‘Sylvia Plath and her Journals’, WP 179-9.

11. Faas, UU 204 - 5.