The sixteenth path joins Chokmah, Wisdom, to Chesed, Mercy, running down the right-hand Pillar of Mercy from the supernal father to the sphere of loving-kindness. It carries the letter Vav, whose name means "nail" or "hook", the fastening that joins one thing to another, and which in Hebrew grammar is the conjunction "and", the letter that links words and clauses, an apt sign for a connecting path.
In the Sefer Yetzirah Vav is one of the twelve simple letters assigned to the twelve zodiac signs, and it is given to Taurus, the bull, the fixed earth sign of stability, fertility and endurance. The attribution of the letter to Taurus belongs to the ancient Jewish scheme in which the twelve single letters correspond to the twelve signs, the twelve months and twelve faculties of the human body, the alphabet serving as the framework on which the created order is built, each letter a specific channel of the divine formative power.