The Weld · tarot onto the letters

Twenty-two Hebrew letters, twenty-two tarot trumps, joined by Lévi in 1855. Not in the Zohar, not in the Sefer Yetzirah, not in any Jewish source in seven centuries of Kabbalah, and not in the minds of the fifteenth-century Italians who invented the cards as a trick-taking game.

The hinge of the entire Western occult tradition, and it is one man's idea in one book. It is also ingenious — twenty-two and twenty-two is a real and suggestive coincidence. The problem was never the idea; it is that it has been sold as ancient ever since.