Angel Bearing the Keys to the Mysteries. 17th century.
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An 1856 depiction of the Sabbatic Goat from Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie by Éliphas Lévi.
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Éliphas Lévi’s Kabbalistic Tarot
By Kirk Elser
It may be difficult for today’s tarot aficionado to imagine the twenty-two trumps of the major arcana without their customary correspondence to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and by extension the twenty-two paths connecting the sephirot of the Kabbalistic tree of life. However, as a cursory examination of some of the increasingly popular older decks—the Sola Busca, the Visconti-Sforza, or the Marseilles Tarot—will show, Hebrew letters have only relatively recently come to be affixed to the images of the major arcana as we know it in its current iteration. For this innovation we have to thank the great 19th century French professor of Transcendental Magic, Éliphas Lévi [who emulated the seed of the idea first published by the Comte de Mellet, whose article, titled Recherches sur les Tarots, et sur la Divination par les Cartes des Tarots (Research on the Tarots, and on Divination by the Tarots), about the supposed origins of the Tarot was included in Court de Gébelin’s Le Monde Primitive]...
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