Transcendental Magic (Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie)

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.

Levi's book is in two parts and the structure carries an argument. The first part, the Dogme, sets out the doctrine; the second, the Rituel, sets out the practice. Each has twenty two chapters, matched one to one, and the number is the number of the Hebrew letters and of the tarot trumps. Chapter by chapter the two halves correspond, so that a reader moving between them is being shown that theory and operation are the same thing seen twice.

That device is Levi's central claim in structural form: that the tarot, the Hebrew alphabet and the Kabbalah are one key, and that the whole of magic can be arranged on it. The claim was not inherited. Court de Gebelin had linked the tarot to Egypt, and Etteilla had used it for divination, but joining the twenty two trumps to the twenty two letters and making that the master correspondence is Levi's, and every subsequent Western system does it because he did.

The book also contains the drawing of the Baphomet, a goat headed figure Levi composed as an emblem of the reconciliation of opposites, which has since escaped the book entirely and means, in general use, almost the opposite of what he intended.

The book was translated into English by A. E. Waite, who disagreed with a good deal of it and said so in his notes, so most English readers have met Levi through an editor arguing with him in the margins.