Kabbala Denudata (Knorr von Rosenroth, 1677)

The bottleneck. Sulzbach 1677 and Frankfurt 1684, in two volumes: Latin translations of the Zohar's Sifra di-Tzeniuta, Idra Rabba and Idra Zuta, extracts from Cordovero's Pardes Rimmonim, and Lurianic material largely by way of Naftali Bacharach's Emek ha-Melekh, with lexicons and dissertations.

For two centuries this was how Europe read the Kabbalah — and it is a translation, an anthology and an argument at the same time: a selection made by a Christian Hebraist who held that these books proved Christian doctrine, in a scholarly tradition much of which was conversionist in purpose.

Mathers' The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) is a translation of this book, not of the Aramaic. Everything the Golden Dawn built, and everything built on the Golden Dawn, therefore stands at two removes from the source language with a frame already applied at the middle step.