THE ATLAS OF THE ORDER THAT TOOK

Éliphas Lévi

Lévi

nature

A French seminarian who could not take final vows, a socialist pamphleteer who went to prison for it, a failing writer who reinvented himself under a Hebraised version of his own name — and became the most influential occultist of the nineteenth century.

THE HINGE. In 1855 he welded the twenty-two tarot trumps onto the twenty-two Hebrew letters. Nobody had done it before — not the Zohar, not the Sefer Yetzirah, not the Italians who invented the cards as a card game. Every "Qabalistic tarot" on earth is the working-out of his table.

The Tarot is a monumental and singular work, simple and strong as the architecture of the pyramids.

rhymes with

sephirahyesod

whyYesod gathers everything above it and passes it down in one channel — which is precisely Lévi's function in this lineage. Nothing reaches the modern world except through him.