Path 16

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.

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Hierophant, the card of tradition, teaching and sacred authority, whose steady and conservative character matches its zodiacal sign Taurus, the fixed earth sign ruled by Venus. The pairing suits the letter Vav's sense of joining and binding, the Hierophant as the one who links heaven and earth, teacher and pupil, in an established tradition. The correspondence of Hebrew letters to tarot trumps was proposed by Eliphas Levi and codified by the Golden Dawn from 1888, as recorded in Liber 777. The layers should be distinguished as always.

The path from Chokmah to Chesed, the letter Vav, and its attribution to Taurus derive from Jewish sources, the Sefer Yetzirah in particular, while the identification with the Hierophant is Hermetic Qabalah, a Western magical and divinatory overlay of the Victorian period that has no place in and no authority from the Jewish mystical tradition.