The Book That Launched the Occult Revival

Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, published in two volumes in 1854-56 by Eliphas Levi (the pen-name of the former Catholic deacon Alphonse-Louis Constant), is commonly taken as the founding work of the modern occult revival. In it Levi synthesised Kabbalah, the tarot, ceremonial magic and Christian mysticism into a single doctrine-and-practice, and two of his moves proved especially durable: he systematically linked the twenty-two trumps of the tarot to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, welding tarot to Kabbalah in a way that has shaped esoteric tarot ever since; and he articulated the doctrine of the astral light, a universal magical fluid. His famous image of Baphomet, the "Sabbatic Goat," dates from this book.

Levi's learning was broad but loose, and later scholars have noted that many of his historical claims are unreliable; his importance is not as a historian but as a synthesiser whose vision was taken up wholesale by the Theosophical and Golden Dawn currents, and so stands behind most of what followed. A. E. Waite translated him into English as Transcendental Magic.