Where The Chains Converge

Trace enough of these works back and the routes stop being various. Nearly every chain that begins in a game, a comic or a film and runs backward arrives, within four or five stops, at two Latin books and one Frenchman's table: Kircher's diagram of 1652, Knorr's anthology of 1677, and Lévi's weld of tarot to Hebrew letters in 1855.

⭐⭐⭐ THIS IS THE WING'S WHOLE ARGUMENT AND THE PLAYER FINDS IT RATHER THAN BEING TOLD IT. Trace three works and it looks like coincidence. Trace ten and the funnel is undeniable. The point is not that the artists were careless — most of them were working from the best books available in a public library. The point is that the "ancient Kabbalah" in modern culture is, overwhelmingly, seventeenth-century Christian Latin and one nineteenth-century correspondence table, and that the actual Hebrew and Aramaic tradition went on the whole time in languages the chain never passed through.