Éliphas Lévi

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Éliphas Lévi was the pen name of Alphonse Louis Constant (1810–1875), a French author whose books of the 1850s and 1860s gathered the scattered materials of magic, Kabbalah, and tarot into a single system and gave that system its modern name. More than any single doctrine, it is this act of synthesis that made him the figure later occultists kept returning to.

Constant trained for the Catholic priesthood and reached the order of deacon before leaving the seminary; he never took final vows. The decades that followed were spent in radical socialist politics, in poverty, and in writing — two of his early tracts brought brief imprisonment. Only in middle age did he turn to the subject that fixed his reputation, adopting the Hebraized form of his given names, Éliphas Lévi, as both signature and second self. The major works appeared in close succession: Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854–56), translated into English as Transcendental Magic, followed by the Histoire de la magie (1860) and La Clef des grands mystères (1861).

What he assembled was less a discovery than an arrangement. He drew Renaissance magic, Christian Kabbalah, the symbolism of the tarot, and the recent vogue for mesmeric fluid into one scheme, presented as the recovery of a single ancient tradition. Two of its pieces proved especially durable. The first was the “astral light” — a subtle, plastic medium pervading the cosmos, on which will and imagination could supposedly act; he offered it as the mechanism behind magic, prophecy, and miracle alike, recasting older talk of spirits in a quasi-physical register suited to his century. The second was the explicit pairing of the twenty-two trumps of the tarot with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life — a correspondence presented as immemorial that is, on the evidence, his own. His horned, winged figure of the Baphomet, drawn as the “Sabbatic Goat,” became one of the most reproduced images in the whole literature.

How much of this is reconstruction and how much invention is the standing scholarly question, and recent work has stressed that Lévi built his “ancient tradition” from materials close to hand, including the socialist and Catholic currents of his own time. Whether his system describes anything real he treated as a settled matter; the modern reading is that its coherence is the coherence of a gifted compiler, and that its influence is real whatever its sources were. That influence ran directly into the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, into the work of the French occultist Papus, and through them into nearly every magical current that followed. Aleister Crowley, born the year Lévi died, claimed to be his reincarnation.

The word occultisme was barely in use when he began; by the time he died it named a movement, and the movement traced itself to him. He had wanted to be remembered as a magus. He is remembered, more exactly, as the man who decided what a magus would henceforth be.

→ In the library: Papus — The Tarot of the Bohemians (1910), in Lévi's lineage

→ Related: French Occultism · Astral Talismanic Magic · Kabbalah · Golden Dawn Lineage · Occultism · S L Macgregor Mathers