Meaning
Vav, the nail or hook, fastens Wisdom to Mercy at the top of the right-hand pillar. With the Hierophant, trump V, and Taurus, the Golden Dawn made it the path where insight becomes teaching and tradition. In our own words, it is the binding link: knowledge made steady enough to be handed on, and for the same reason slow to change. A reading, not a calling.
The letter
Vav is the sixth letter, worth 6. The traditional gloss is a nail or a hook, and scholars of the early alphabet read it as a hook. The Sefer Yetzirah counts Vav among the twelve simple letters, and every version we read gives it Taurus; the Golden Dawn kept the sign. Lévi put the Lovers on Vav; the Golden Dawn has the Hierophant, the card Marseille decks call the Pope.
On the Tree
On Kircher's tree the path runs vertically down the Pillar of Mercy, on the viewer's right, from Chokmah to Chesed. With path 18, Cheth, on the other pillar, it is one of the two paths that carry the top three spheres down the sides of the Tree to the next pair, Chesed and Geburah. On the Gra and Ari trees of Jewish Kabbalah the simple letters are on the diagonals, so Vav is elsewhere, and the Jewish trees carry no tarot. The Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom calls it "the Triumphal or Eternal Intelligence", two names for one path in Westcott's English.
A person whose personality or soul card is the Hierophant has this path marked. The Hierophant is also the soul card of anyone whose personality card is Temperance, 14. The joining of Greer's cards and the Golden Dawn's paths is our own; it gives no one a path to walk.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- Sign
- Taurus: the same in every version of the Sefer Yetzirah we read, kept by the Golden Dawn sourced
- On the Jewish trees
- The Gra and Ari trees put the simple letters on the diagonal paths, so Vav need not be here sourced
- Birth card on this path
- Marked when a person's personality or soul card is the Hierophant (Greer's method on the Golden Dawn's table) our construction
- Our keywords
- Teaching, tradition, the binding link our construction
How the schools read it
- Sefer Yetzirah (2nd to 9th century)
- One of the twelve simple letters, with the sign Taurus.
- Lévi and the French school (1854 to 1856)
- VI The Lovers on Vav.
- The Golden Dawn (1888; *777*, 1909)
- V The Hierophant, with the sign Taurus.
- EsoTerrier
- Insight becoming teaching and custom, steady enough to be handed on, and slow to change.
Claims about it
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Path 16 and the attributions on this page are Kabbalah.
falseWhat the record shows: The Tree comes from Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition, which has no tarot and its own ways of drawing and reading it. The tables here are the Hermetic Qabalah's, compiled by Agrippa, Mathers and the Golden Dawn.
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A birth card on Path 16 is the path a person is walking, or is tasked with, for life.
unverifiedWhat the record shows: No tradition gives anyone a path. Placing Greer's birth cards on the Golden Dawn's paths is our own combination, and the page reads the path, nothing more.
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The letter of Path 16 is a vibrational frequency that sets a person's energy.
falseWhat the record shows: The Sefer Yetzirah says the letters were engraved, weighed and combined to make the world: a creation account, not physics. Nothing about a letter is measured, and nothing about a person follows from it.
