A. E. Waite

Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942) — scholar, mystic, translator, and the single most successful transmitter in this entire lineage, by a margin nothing else comes close to.

In 1909 he designed a tarot deck and commissioned the artist Pamela Colman Smith to draw it. Its innovation was to illustrate the minor arcana with full scenes rather than pips, which made the cards readable without memorisation — and it carries the Order's path-attributions, its Kabbalistic frame, and its two pillars behind the High Priestess.

The result: millions of people hold this wing's Kabbalah in their hands every day and call it a tarot deck. More human beings have encountered the sephirot through this object than through every Jewish source combined. That is not a criticism of the deck; it is simply the shape of the transmission, and it should be said out loud.

Waite himself, it is worth noting, was more cautious about the tarot-Kabbalah weld than his own deck implies, and quarrelled with the Order's magical direction — he wanted a mystical society, not a magical one.