Golden Dawn: the second confluence

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London in 1888 by William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell Mathers, and William Robert Woodman. It became the most influential magical order in the modern Western world, teaching a graded system of initiation modelled on Freemasonry and open, unusually for its time, to both men and women.

It was a confluence in the same way Freemasonry had been. It drew together Christian Kabbalah, Hermetic philosophy, Solomonic grimoires, Rosicrucian legend, Masonic structure, and Eliphas Levi’s sequential Tarot correspondences into a single working system of ritual, meditation, and Tarot.

Here is the crux. The Golden Dawn claimed the Sefer Yetzirah as its authority, yet it reassigned the planetary attributions of the seven double letters that the Sefer Yetzirah actually sets out. Because almost every modern school of Tarot and Kabbalah descends from the Golden Dawn, that reassignment has been handed down ever since as though it were the original tradition.