The Weld · tarot onto the letters, 1855

The hinge of the entire Western occult tradition, and it is one man's idea, in one book, in 1855. There are twenty-two Hebrew letters. There are twenty-two tarot trumps. Éliphas Lévi put them together in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie — and nobody had done it before. Not the Zohar. Not the Sefer Yetzirah. Not any Jewish source in seven centuries of Kabbalah. Not the fifteenth-century Italians who invented the cards as a trick-taking game with no occult content whatever.

Every "Qabalistic tarot" in every bookshop on earth is the working-out of that single correspondence table. The Golden Dawn inherited it, rearranged it, and shipped it to the twentieth century; Waite's deck put it into millions of hands.

It is worth being fair: the pairing is ingenious. Twenty-two and twenty-two is a real and suggestive coincidence, and Lévi did something imaginative with it. The problem was never the idea — it is that it has been sold as ancient ever since, and it is 1855.