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 the 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. He drew Renaissance magic, Christian Kabbalah, the symbolism of the tarot, and the mesmeric fluid of his own century into one scheme, presented as the recovery of a single ancient tradition. The signature itself was doctrine: “Éliphas Lévi Zahed” renders Alphonse Louis Constant into Hebrew, and from 1854 he wrote under it as signature and second self.

From the seminary

Constant was born in Paris on 8 February 1810, the son of the shoemaker Jean Joseph Constant. Schooled without fee at the petit séminaire of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet from 1825, he passed through philosophy at Issy to theology at Saint-Sulpice, rising by the clerical degrees in order: tonsure and minor orders, the subdiaconate — as a subdeacon he taught catechism — and ordination as deacon on 19 December 1835. In June 1836 he left Saint-Sulpice without going further: never ordained priest, though in canon law he remained a cleric, a circumstance that would mark his life thirty years on. Behind the break, as documented: attachment to Adèle Allenbach, a girl in his catechism class; the millenarian abbé Frère-Colonna; and a socialist conviction already forming.

The radical years

The decades that followed were spent in radical socialist politics, in poverty, and in writing. From 1838 the socialist feminist Flora Tristan was a friend, and the books he signed “Alphonse-Louis Constant” or “l’abbé Constant” fused a theology of the redeeming woman with the social hopes of Saint-Simon’s and Fourier’s heirs. La Bible de la liberté (1841) was seized within days of publication and cost him eight months in Sainte-Pélagie and a 300-franc fine; in prison he read Swedenborg for the first time. The corpus ran on through L’Assomption de la femme (1841), La Mère de Dieu (1844), and Le Livre des larmes (1845) to Le Testament de la liberté, published in the heat of 1848. After Tristan’s death he worked her last manuscript into L’Émancipation de la femme (1846), issued under her name. A second prosecution, over the pamphlet La Voix de la famine, ended on 3 February 1847 in a sentence of one year and a 1,000-franc fine; he served six months and was released on the petition of his pregnant wife.

That wife was Noémie Cadiot, married in 1846, afterward known as the writer and sculptor Claude Vignon. She left him in 1853, and in 1865 it was she who obtained a civil judgment of nullity — on the recorded ground that her husband’s clerical state had barred the marriage from the beginning. Their children died young: twins in infancy, a daughter, Marie, at seven.

The turn to magic

The turn was convergence, not conversion. After the failure of 1848 he earned his bread compiling a dictionary of Christian literature for the publisher Migne (1851). Late in 1852 he met the Polish mathematician and messianic philosopher Hoëné Wroński; a letter of 6 January 1853 signs him “sincere admirer and devoted disciple,” and from that brief discipleship — Wroński died within the year — came the Absolute, the “Law of Creation,” and the final synthesis of reason and revelation, though the magical books invoke the poet Mickiewicz at least as often. By 1854 the deacon-radical had become Éliphas Lévi: the Dogme volume of Dogme et rituel de la haute magie appeared that year in Paris, the Rituel volume in 1856; the pair reached English in 1896 as Transcendental Magic, in Arthur Edward Waite’s translation.

In spring 1854 Lévi first traveled to London, meeting the physician John Ashburner and the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of Zanoni, who became a friend. There — by the sole account that exists, his own, set down in the Rituel — an elderly Englishwoman, an adept by her own description, bound him to “the strictest secrecy” and supplied a complete magical cabinet; in July 1854 he performed the evocation of Apollonius of Tyana. The apparition left him shaken, and he never urged the operation on anyone. The familiar framing in which Bulwer-Lytton summons him to London and commissions the working is later legend, as Julian Strube has shown, and the disciple tradition codified in Paul Chacornac’s 1926 biography — Bulwer-Lytton as his door into Rosicrucian circles — is an attribution of the faithful, not a documented fact. The record holds the friendship, renewed on a second London stay in 1861 — and Strube’s caution that the journey “did not cause his preoccupation with magic”: the turn was complete before he sailed.

The doctrine

At the foundation of the system lies the astral light: in Lévi’s teaching the universal agent, one subtle, plastic, living medium pervading all things, known to the older schools under many names — the magnetic fluid of mesmerism, the star-body and shaping imagination of Paracelsus, the emanated light of the Kabbalists (most directly via Adolphe Franck’s La Kabbale, 1843), the world-soul of the Neoplatonists. Under one name, it is the medium in which images persist and influences travel — the mechanism behind magic, prophecy, and miracle alike, the older language of spirits recast in a register fitted to a century of electricity and magnetism.

Upon that medium acts the will. Magic, by Lévi’s definition, is the action of an enlightened will upon the astral light. Imagination is “the eye of the soul,” forming what the will then fixes; and the will — trained, concentrated, confirmed by acts — is the lever of every operation. His most consequential displacement lies here: magical power moves out of external rite and demonic compact into disciplined interiority — the making of a magus is the making of a will.

And the key of the whole edifice is the tarot. Lévi paired the twenty-two trumps with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the twenty-two paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, set the four suits on the divine name and the pips on the Sephiroth, and read the deck as the hieroglyphic alphabet of the universal doctrine. The bare notion of a trumps-and-letters correspondence was older — the Comte de Mellet had floated it, in reverse order, in Antoine Court de Gébelin’s Monde primitif in 1781, and Etteilla had built a cartomantic practice without any letter scheme — but the workable, coherent system, Aleph on the Juggler through Tav on the World, is Lévi’s own, presented as immemorial. The deck’s longer history is traced under tarot and cartomancy; the fusion’s later career runs through Hermetic Qabalah, where the Golden Dawn’s transposition of Strength and Justice and Crowley’s reassignment of the Star are revisions Lévi never made.

One image condensed it all: the Baphomet, the “Sabbatic Goat” he drew with his own hand as frontispiece to the Rituel volume of 1856. The name came down from the medieval trials of the Templars, the figure from the goat of Mendes and the iconography of the witches’ sabbath; the meaning, on Lévi’s insistence, anything but satanic. Every element states the reconciliation of contraries the astral light works in nature — the two crescents, the body both male and female, the torch of intelligence between the horns, solve et coagula written on the forearms. It became one of the most reproduced images in the whole literature; the inverted-pentagram “sigil” later derived from it for modern Satanism breaks with its maker’s intent.

The late teaching

The books continued: Histoire de la magie (1860), his universal history; La Clef des grands mystères (1861), the summa that Aleister Crowley — not Waite — would English as The Key of the Mysteries in 1913; Fables et symboles (1862), whose subtitle still promised “universal magnetism”; and La Science des esprits (1865), his polemic against the spiritualism newly arrived from America. Table-turning, he held, was a disordered traffic in the astral light, not converse with the dead; after 1854 he set his face against the séance. He belonged for a time to Grand Orient freemasonry, and left that too.

His deepest late teaching went out by post. In July 1861 Baron Spédalieri, an Italian in Marseille who had bought Dogme et rituel from a local bookseller, wrote to its author; the correspondence ran past a thousand letters between 24 October 1861 and 14 February 1874 — a course in occult philosophy in everything but name, the chief monument of his last period. After his death it mattered still: from 1881 Spédalieri supplied unpublished Lévi manuscripts to Helena Blavatsky, a paper bridge from the private circle into the milieu of Theosophy.

From May 1864 Lévi lived in three rooms at 155 rue de Sèvres; bronchitis and dropsy wore him down through 1874, and he died there on 31 May 1875, aged sixty-five. The standard account of the end, descending from his disciples and repeated in Waite’s biographical preface, has him dying “fortified by the last rites of the Church” — fitting for a man who insisted to the last that the high magic was the true and scientific form of Christianity.

The word and the heirs

Occultisme was barely in use when he began — first attested in 1842, in Richard de Radonvilliers’ dictionary of neologisms, then used by the Masonic writer Jean-Marie Ragon in 1853. Lévi popularized rather than coined it, and as a movement’s name it consolidated only in the 1880s and 1890s, in the occult Paris of the fin-de-siècle revival — a movement that traced itself to him. Papus styled himself Lévi’s “continuator” and built the orders of French occultism around the inheritance — though Strube has shown how much of that lineage was raised after the fact: Papus even attempted séance contact with the dead Constant in January 1886. What they inherited, they called by his word: occultism.

In England the absorption was just as direct. Kenneth Mackenzie called on Lévi in Paris in 1861, and his framework passed into the cipher manuscripts behind the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; S. L. MacGregor Mathers codified the tarot teaching in the order’s Book T, Westcott translated a Lévi manuscript as The Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum (1896), and its “rising on the planes” and doctrine of the talisman presuppose the astral light at every step. Blavatsky cited him among her most-used Western authorities in Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, taking the astral light and the correspondences while complaining of his Hebrew and his churchliness; her claimed 1873 Paris studentship has never been verified. Through these channels his system ran into nearly every magical current that followed.

Waite, his great translator — Transcendental Magic (1896), The History of Magic (1913), the anthology The Mysteries of Magic (1886) — moved from enthusiasm to severity, calling Lévi a “literary brigand” for unattributed borrowing, above all from Franck’s La Kabbale, a charge Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s “The Beginnings of Occultist Kabbalah” (2010) has since substantiated philologically; yet he still ranked Lévi the “authoritative exponent-in-chief” of the magical revival. Crowley, born 12 October 1875, claimed outright to be Lévi’s reincarnation, prefacing Magick in Theory and Practice (1929) with eight points of evidence; he put the interval between Lévi’s death and his own birth at about six months, though the calendar yields closer to four and a half. Christopher McIntosh reads the claim as deliberate lineage-building; it measures what Lévi had become. 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.

Sources and scholarship

How much of the system was reconstruction and how much invention remains the standing scholarly question. For Lévi its reality was beyond question; the modern reading is that its coherence is that of a gifted compiler, and its influence real whatever its sources were. Christopher McIntosh’s Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival (London: Rider, 1972; reprinted Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), the standard English biography, carries the whole arc: https://sunypress.edu/Books/E/Eliphas-Levi-and-the-French-Occult-Revival. The major revision is Julian Strube’s. His monograph Sozialismus, Katholizismus und Okkultismus im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016; German, untranslated) argues that the socialist Constant and the magus Lévi were never two men — the occult books carry the 1840s religion of social redemption forward in an esoteric idiom (https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110478105/html). In English, the argument stands in “Socialist Religion and the Emergence of Occultism,” Religion 46, no. 3 (2016): 359–388 (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0048721X.2016.1146926), and in the open-access “The ‘Baphomet’ of Eliphas Lévi: Its Meaning and Historical Context,” Correspondences 4 (2016): 37–79 (https://correspondencesjournal.com/15303-2/), which restores the goat to its political theology.

The founding texts are public domain in their first editions, digitized by the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, volume I (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k205564w) and volume II, with the Baphomet plate (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2055658); Histoire de la magie, with the plates of the 1860 edition (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k75611x); La Clef des grands mystères (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5510884x); and the suppressed 1841 La Bible de la liberté, anchor of the continuity argument (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k117377b). Fables et symboles, its full title still invoking “universal magnetism,” is on Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Eliphas_Levi_-_Fables_et_Symboles.pdf).

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

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