Where the Twenty-Two Letters Come From: Lévi's 1856 Attribution

The question this part asks

The eliphas levi tarot question for this part is narrow. What exactly did Éliphas Lévi assign when he wrote the twenty-two Hebrew letters onto the twenty-two trumps, and how does his order differ from the order the later decks inherited? The series is about the whole line, from Lévi to Book T. This part is the first link in that line.

The thesis of the series is that the Thoth deck's letter, planetary and decan system is a nineteenth-century reconstruction, not an ancient inheritance. This part tests the first claim in that thesis. Lévi made the attribution. He made it in the 1850s. And he made it a certain way, with a certain order, and the order is not the one the reader usually assumes.

Who made the attribution

Éliphas Lévi was the name Paul Dupray took for his occult work. The work that matters for the tarot is Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, published in 1856, and the longer treatise that carried the tarot plates, La Clé des Mystères, the Key of the Mysteries. The plates in those books are the twenty-two cards, each with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet on it.

That is the act that starts the whole line. Before Lévi, the trumps had no letters. The letters arrived with him. He is the source. Every later deck that puts letters on the trumps, including the Thoth deck, is working from the attribution Lévi made in the 1850s. The Thoth deck did not invent the letters. It inherited them, and the inheritance runs back to this one book.

The twenty-two keys

In La Clé des Mystères, Lévi presents the trumps not as a reading system but as a set of twenty-two keys. Each card is a key, and each key carries a letter. The letters are the Hebrew alphabet, and the alphabet is the point. Lévi is not decorating the cards. He is saying that the cards are the letters, and the letters are the cards.

This is a different claim from "the cards have meanings." A meaning is what a card tells you. A letter is what a card is. Lévi's move is to make the trumps a script. The twenty-two cards are twenty-two characters of a writing, and the writing is the Hebrew alphabet. The Fool, the unnumbered card, is the place where the script begins and the place where it is not yet a character.

The arrangement is specific, and it is the point of this part. In Lévi's table, the Fool carries no letter, because the Fool is the zero, the beginning before the first character. The Magician carries Aleph. The High Priestess carries Beth. The Empress carries Gimel. The order runs down the trumps in the order Lévi's book lays them out, and each letter is chosen for the meaning it already carries in the Hebrew tradition. Aleph is the beginning, the breath, the one. Beth is the house, the second. Gimel is the camel, the going. The letters are not picked to fit the cards. The cards are picked to fit the letters, and the letters are the older object.

That is the inversion a reader of the Thoth deck should hold. The deck feels like it has cards with letters on them. In Lévi's system, it is the other way around. There is a writing, and the writing has twenty-two characters, and each character is a card. The cards are the alphabet made visible. The alphabet is not the cards made legible. The direction of the attribution matters, and the direction is from letter to card.

Lévi's order

Here is where the attribution is a choice, and the choice is the order. Lévi did not assign the letters to the trumps in the order the Hebrew alphabet is written. He assigned them in the order his system required, and that order is the order of the twenty-two keys as he arranged them in the book.

The order is not the book order of the alphabet, and it is not the deck order of the trumps. It is Lévi's own order, the order of the keys. A later deck, taking the letters from Lévi, can keep his letters and still rearrange his order. That is what the Golden Dawn did. It kept the letters and changed the order, and the change is the subject of a later part of this series.

For this part, the fact is the attribution. Lévi gave the trumps their letters. He gave them a specific order. And that specific order is a nineteenth-century arrangement, made by one man, in the 1850s. It is not an ancient order. It is a choice.

Why the order matters

The order matters because the letters are not a label. A label sits on the card and can be moved. A letter, in Lévi's system, is the card's name, and the name carries the letter's own meaning. The letter Aleph carries a meaning, and when Aleph is on the Fool, the Fool is the meaning of Aleph. The letter is not decoration. It is identity.

That is why a change of order is a change of meaning, not a change of label. If a later deck moves Aleph off the Fool and onto another card, it has not relabelled the deck. It has re-assigned the identities. The Golden Dawn's rearrangement is not a cosmetic edit. It is a different attribution, built on the same letters.

The mistake the order prevents

A common reading of the tarot's history is that the letters were always there. The deck is an ancient object, the letters are Hebrew, the Hebrew is old, therefore the attribution is old. That is the mistake this part is here to correct. The attribution is not old. It is 1856. The deck existed before the letters. The letters are later than the deck, and they are later than the reading tradition that used the deck for centuries without them.

The Marseille pattern, the deck the reader usually knows, has no letters on the trumps. The trumps are images. The images are the deck. The letters are a layer added in the nineteenth century, and the layer is Lévi's. When a reader of the Thoth deck sees a letter on a trump, they are looking at a nineteenth-century addition, not at the ancient card. The card is older. The letter is Lévi.

That is not a demotion of the letter. A letter added in the 1850s can be as real as a letter that was always there. But it is a letter with a date, and the date is the point. The letter is Lévi's, in Lévi's order, for Lévi's system. And the system is a reconstruction, made in the nineteenth century, of something that looked like an ancient inheritance.

The eliphas levi tarot attribution in one line

In one line: Lévi gave the trumps their letters, in a specific order, in the 1850s, for his own system. The Thoth deck's letters are his. The order the Thoth deck uses is a later choice. The system is a reconstruction. That is the first link of the series, and it holds.

The reconstruction

This is the first link in the series' thesis, and the link holds. The letters on the trumps are not an ancient inheritance. They are Lévi's attribution, made in the 1850s, in a specific order, for a specific system. The Thoth deck's letters are Lévi's letters. The order the Thoth deck uses is a later choice, made by the Golden Dawn and then carried into Crowley's deck.

So the letter system of the Thoth deck is a reconstruction. It is reconstructed in three steps: Lévi makes the attribution in the 1850s. The Golden Dawn takes the letters and rearranges the order in the 1880s and 1890s. Crowley takes the Golden Dawn's order and draws it into the Thoth deck in the 1930s and 1940s. Each step is a choice, and the choices are what the deck carries.

What this gives the reader

A reader of the Thoth deck holds the letters as if they were ancient. They are not. They are a nineteenth-century attribution, made by Lévi, rearranged by the Golden Dawn, and drawn by Crowley. That does not make them less real. A reading is a reading whether the letters are ancient or recent. But it makes them honest. The letters are a choice, and the choice is the chain from Lévi to Book T.

Read the letters as a line, not as a layer. The line runs from Lévi's 1856 attribution, through the Golden Dawn's rearrangement, to the Thoth deck's drawing. Each link is a person and a date. That is what the letter system of the deck actually is.

For the order the Golden Dawn changed, see the next part of this series. For the letters as the deck's script, see the companion article on the twenty-two letters and the tarot. Tarot and Kabbalah: How the 22 Trumps Became the Hebrew Letters For the Fool as the unnumbered card, see the article on tzimtzum. Tzimtzum and the Fool: A Card for the Withdrawal of Light

The sources are the Wikipedia entry on Éliphas Lévi and Lévi's own Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1856), with the tarot plates in La Clé des Mystères.