The twentieth path joins Chesed, Mercy, to Tiphareth, Beauty, descending the right side of the Tree from the sphere of loving-kindness to the harmonising centre. It carries the letter Yod, the smallest of the Hebrew letters, little more than a point, from which in the Kabbalistic teaching all the other letters are formed, the seed and origin of the alphabet, and the first letter of the ineffable divine name. Its name means "hand".
In the Sefer Yetzirah Yod is one of the twelve simple letters assigned to the twelve zodiac signs, and it is given to Virgo, the virgin, the mutable earth sign of discernment, service, harvest and the careful attention to detail. The attribution of the letter to Virgo belongs to the ancient Jewish scheme in which the twelve single letters correspond to the signs and months; the tiny, precise, seed-like Yod, the point from which all proceeds, suits the analytic and discriminating character of the virgin sign.