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Éliphas Lévi
Éliphas Lévi was the pen name of Alphonse-Louis Constant (1810–1875), a Parisian writer who did more than anyone to turn the tarot from a fortune-teller's tool into a subject of esoteric philosophy. In his best-known work, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie ("Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic"), published in two parts between 1854 and 1856, he presented the twenty-two trumps of the tarot as a hidden alphabet of wisdom, matched letter for letter to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Almost every later occult system of the cards — French and English alike — starts from that idea.
His life
Constant trained for the Catholic priesthood at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice and was ordained a deacon, but left before becoming a priest. In the 1840s he wrote radical socialist and religious pamphlets, and was imprisoned for some of them. In the early 1850s he turned to magic and the Kabbalah, taking the name Éliphas Lévi — a Hebrew rendering of his own first names. After Dogme et rituel came Histoire de la magie (1860) and La Clef des grands mystères (1861). He taught private pupils, visited London, and was read by the English occultists who later founded the Golden Dawn. Arthur Edward Waite translated Dogme et rituel into English in 1896 as Transcendental Magic.
What he said about the tarot
Lévi rejected Etteilla's redesigned deck and his theories, and went back to the traditional Tarot de Marseille. He called the tarot a universal key — a book that could teach everything — and organised Dogme et rituel itself in twenty-two chapters to match the trumps. Building on the comte de Mellet's essay of 1781 and on older Christian kabbalists, he gave Aleph, the first letter, to the first trump, the Bateleur (The Magician), and so on in order, placing the unnumbered Mat (The Fool) between XX and XXI under Shin, the twenty-first letter. The World then takes Tau, the last.
He also drew his own versions of two cards, which proved influential: a Chariot drawn by two sphinxes, one light and one dark, and the goat-headed figure he called Baphomet, which shaped many later pictures of The Devil. Both images reappear, recast, in the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.
Two schools
Lévi's ordering became the French tradition, carried on by Papus in Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889) and by the artist Oswald Wirth, whose trumps of 1889 were drawn under the guidance of Stanislas de Guaita. In London the Golden Dawn kept Lévi's principle but moved the Fool to the front, under Aleph, so that every other letter — and every planet and sign that follows from the letters — moves one place. Under Lévi and Papus The Tower is linked with a different letter and a different astrology than in the Golden Dawn's scheme; the Golden Dawn also exchanged Strength and Justice. Readers of Marseille decks often follow the French scheme, readers of English decks the Golden Dawn's; neither is the only correct one.
In the tradition
Historians are clear that the tarot did not begin as a kabbalistic or magical document: it appears in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game, with nothing to connect its trumps to Hebrew letters before the 1780s. Lévi's correspondence is therefore best understood as something he and his successors brought to the cards, not something found in them. That does not make it useless — a great deal of later tarot symbolism was deliberately built on it — but it is a nineteenth-century creation, not an ancient secret.