Vav and the Hierophant: The Tarot Overlay

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.