Éliphas Lévi

Alphonse-Louis Constant (1810–1875) — a French seminarian who could not take final vows, a socialist pamphleteer who went to prison for it, a failed husband and a failing writer, who reinvented himself with a Hebraised version of his own name and became the most influential occultist of the nineteenth century.

In Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1855) he did the thing everything downstream rests on: he joined the twenty-two tarot trumps to the twenty-two Hebrew letters. He also gave the world the Baphomet image, the phrase "astral light," and a style of grand synthetic correspondence-making that the Golden Dawn simply industrialised.

He is the true hinge of this wing, and he predates the Order by thirty-three years. Anyone who says "the Golden Dawn invented Qabalistic tarot" has skipped him.