en.wikipedia.

org

Éliphas Lévi - Wikipedia

Authority control
18-22 minutes

Éliphas Lévi

Alphonse Louis Constant

Born
8 February 1810

Paris, First French Empire

31 May 1875 (aged 65)

Died
Paris, Third French Republic

Part of a series on
Hermeticism

Mythology

Hermes Trismegistus
Thoth
Poimandres

Hermetica

Corpus Hermeticum
"Three Parts of the Wisdom of the Whole Universe"

Alchemy
Astrology
Theurgy

Movements

Freemasonry
Rosicrucianism
Theosophy
Thelema
Ariosophy

Orders

Holy Royal Arch Freemasonry

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor
Hermetic Brotherhood of Light
Knights Templar
Knights Templar (Freemasonry)
Ordo Templi Orientis
Rosicrucian Order
Scottish Rite Freemasonry

Topics

Hermetic Qabalah
Influence and influences
Occult and divinatory tarot

People

Aleister Crowley

John Dee
Manly P Hall
Arthur Edward Waite
Thābit ibn Qurra
Paracelsus
Giordano Bruno
Ahmad al-Būni
Eliphas Levi
William Westcott
Franz Bardon
Jakob Böhme

v
t
 e

Éliphas Lévi Zahed, born Alphonse Louis Constant (8 February 1810 – 31 May 1875), was a
French occult author and ceremonial magician.[1]

"Éliphas Lévi", the name under which he published his books, was his attempt to translate or
transliterate his given names "Alphonse Louis" into the Hebrew language.

Life and work until 1848[edit]

Constant was the son of a shoemaker in Paris. In 1832 he entered the seminary of Saint Sulpice to
study to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood, but he fell in love and left in 1836 without being
ordained. He spent the following years among his socialist and Romantic friends, including Henri-
François-Alphonse Esquiros and so-called petits romantiques such as Gérard de Nerval and
Théophile Gautier. During this time he turned to a radical socialism that was decisively inspired by the
writings of Félicité de Lamennais, the former leader of the influential neo-Catholic movement who had
recently broken with Rome and propagated a Christian socialism. When Constant published his first
radical writing, La Bible de la liberté (1841, The Bible of Liberty), he was sentenced to an eight-month
prison term and a high fine. Contemporaries saw in him the most notorious "disciple" of Lamennais,
although the two men do not seem to have established a personal contact. In the following years,
Constant would describe his ideology as communisme néo-catholique and publish a number of
socialist books and pamphlets. Like many socialists, he propagated socialism as "true Christianity" and
denounced the Churches as corruptors of the teachings of Christ.[citation needed]

Important friends at that time include, next to Esquiros, the feminist Flora Tristan, the eccentric
socialist mystic Simon Ganneau, and the socialist Charley Fauvety. In the course of the 1840s,
Constant developed close ties to the Fourierist movement, publishing in Fourierist publications and
praising Fourierism as the "true Christianity". Several of his books were published by the Fourierist
Librairie phalanstérienne.[citation needed] An especially radical pamphlet, La voix de la famine (1846,
The Voice of Famine), earned Constant another prison sentence that was significantly shortened at the
request of his pregnant wife, Marie-Noémi Cadiot.[page needed]

In his Testament de la liberté (1848), Constant reacted to the atmosphere that would produce the
February Revolution. In 1848, he was the leader of an especially notorious Montagnard club known for
its radicalism. Although it has been claimed that the Testament marked the end of Constant's socialist
ambitions,[3] it has been argued that its content is in fact highly euphoric, announcing the end of the
people's martyrdom and the "resurrection" of Liberty: the perfect universal, socialist order. Like many
other socialists, the course of events, especially the massacres of the June Days uprising in 1848, left
him devastated and disillusioned. As his friend Esquiros recounted, their belief in the peaceful
realization of a harmonious universal had been shattered.

Life and work after 1848[edit]

In December 1851, Napoleon III organized a coup that would end the Second Republic and give rise
to the Second Empire. Similar to many other socialists at the time, Constant saw the emperor as the
defender of the people and the restorer of public order. In the Moniteur parisien of 1852, Constant
praised the new government's actions as "veritably socialist," but he soon became disillusioned with
the rigid dictatorship and was eventually imprisoned in 1855 for publishing a polemical chanson
against the Emperor. What had changed, however, was Constant's attitude towards "the people." As
early as in La Fête-Dieu and Le livre des larmes from 1845, he had been skeptical of the uneducated
people's ability to emancipate themselves. Similar to the Saint-Simonians, he had adopted the
theocratical ideas of Joseph de Maistre in order to call for the establishment of a "spiritual authority"
led by an élite class of priests. After the disaster of 1849, he was completely convinced that the
"masses" were not able to establish a harmonious order and needed instruction (a concept similar to
other socialist doctrines such as the "revolution from above", the Avantgarde, or the Partei neuen
Typs).[need quotation to verify]

Constant's activities reflect the socialist struggle to come to terms both with the failure of 1848 and the
tough repressions by the new government. He participated on the socialist Revue philosophique et
religieuse, founded by his old friend Fauvety, wherein he propagated his "Kabbalistic" ideas, for the
first time in public, in 1855-1856 (notably using his civil name). The debates in the Revue do not only
show the tensions between the old "Romantic Socialism" of the Saint-Simonians and Fourierists, they
also demonstrate how natural it was for a socialist writer to discuss topics like magic, the Kabbalah, or
the occult sciences in a socialist journal.

It has been shown that Constant developed his ideas about magic in a specific milieu that was marked
by the confluence of socialist and magnetistic ideas. Influential authors included Henri Delaage (1825–
1882) and Jean du Potet de Sennevoy, who were, to different extents, propagating magnetistic,
magical, and kabbalistic ideas as the foundation of a superior form of socialism. Constant used a
system of magnetism and dream magic to critique what he saw as the excesses of philosophical
materialism.[need quotation to verify]

Lévi began to write Histoire de la magie in 1860. The following year, in 1861, he published a sequel to
Dogme et rituel, La clef des grands mystères ("The Key to the Great Mysteries"). In 1861 Lévi revisited
London. Further magical works by Lévi include Fables et symboles ("Stories and Images"), 1862, Le
sorcier de Meudon ("The Wizard of Meudon", an extended edition of two novels originally published in
1847) 1861, and La science des esprits ("The Science of Spirits"), 1865. In 1868, he wrote Le grand
arcane, ou l'occultisme Dévoilé ("The Great Secret, or Occultism Unveiled"); this, however, was only
published posthumously in 1898.[citation needed]

Constant resumed the use of openly socialist language after the government had loosened the
restrictions against socialist doctrines in 1859. From La clef on, he extensively cited his radical
writings, even his infamous Bible de la liberté. He continued to develop his idea of an élite of initiates
that would lead the people to its final emancipation. In several passages he explicitly identified
socialism, Catholicism, and occultism.

The magic propagated by Éliphas Lévi became a great success, especially after his death. That
Spiritualism was popular on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1850s contributed to this success.
However, Lévi diverged from spiritualism and criticized it, because he believed only mental images and
"astral forces" persisted after an individual died, which could be freely manipulated by skilled
magicians, unlike the autonomous spirits that Spiritualism posited.[page needed] His magical teachings
were free from obvious fanaticisms, even if they remained rather murky; he had nothing to sell, and did
not pretend to be the initiate of some ancient or fictitious secret society. He incorporated the Tarot
cards into his magical system, and as a result the Tarot has been an important part of the
paraphernalia of Western magicians.[12] He had a deep impact on the magic of the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn and later on the ex–Golden Dawn member Aleister Crowley. He was also the first to
declare that a pentagram or five-pointed star with one point down and two points up represents evil,
while a pentagram with one point up and two points down represents good. Lévi's ideas also
influenced Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society.[need quotation to verify] It was largely through
the occultists inspired by him that Lévi is remembered as one of the key founders of the 20th-century
revival of magic.[citation needed]

Socialist background and alleged initiation[edit]

It was long believed that the socialist Constant disappeared with the demise of the Second Republic
and gave way to the occultist Éliphas Lévi. It has been argued recently, however, that this narrative
was constructed at the end of the nineteenth century in occultist circles and was uncritically adopted
by later scholarship. According to this argument, Constant not only developed his "occultism" as a
direct consequence of his socialist and neo-catholic ideas, but he continued to propagate the
realization of "true socialism" throughout his entire life.[14]

According to the narrative developed by the occultist Papus (Gérard Encausse) and cemented by the
occultist biographer Paul Chacornac, Constant's turn to occultism was the result of an "initiation" by
the eccentric Polish expatriate Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński. However, it has been argued that
Wronski's influence had been brief, between 1852 and 1853, and superficial. However, this narrative
had been developed before Papus and his companions had any access to reliable information about
Constant's life. This becomes most obvious in the light of the fact that Papus had tried to contact
Constant by mail on 11 January 1886 – almost eleven years after his death. The two did know each
other, as evidenced in Constant's 6 January 1853 letter to Hoene-Wroński, thanking him for including
one of Constant's articles in Hoené-Wroński's 1852 work, Historiosophie ou science de l’histoire. In the
letter Constant expresses his admiration for Hoené-Wroński's "still underappreciated genius" and calls
himself his "sincere admirer and devoted disciple".[16] Later on, the construction of a specifically
French esoteric tradition, in which Constant was to form a crucial link, perpetuated this idea of a clear
rupture between the socialist Constant and the occultist Lévi. A different narrative was developed
independently by Arthur Edward Waite, who had even less information about Constant's life.

Also, a journey to London that Constant made in May 1854 did not cause his preoccupation with
magic, although he seems to have been involved in practical magic for the first time. Instead, it was
the aforementioned socialist-magnetistic context that formed the background of Constant's interest in
magic. The relationship between Constant and the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton was not as intimate
as it is often claimed.[19] In fact, Bulwer-Lytton's famous novel A Strange Story (1862) includes a rather
unflattering remark about Constant's Dogme et rituel.[21]
Definition of magic[edit]
Lévi's works are filled with various definitions for magic and the magician:

Magic

"To practice magic is to be a quack; to know magic is to be a sage."

"Magic is the divinity of man conquered by science in union with faith; the true Magi are Men-
Gods, in virtue of their intimate union with the divine principle."[22]

Magician

"He looks on the wicked as invalids whom one must pity and cure; the world, with its errors and
vices, is to him God's hospital, and he wishes to serve in it."
"They are without fears and without desires, dominated by no falsehood, sharing no error, loving
without illusion, suffering without impatience, reposing in the quietude of eternal thought... a
Magus cannot be ignorant, for magic implies superiority, mastership, majority, and majority
signifies emancipation by knowledge. The Magus welcomes pleasure, accepts wealth, deserves
honour, but is never the slave of one of them; he knows how to be poor, to abstain, and to suffer;
he endures oblivion willingly because he is lord of his own happiness, and expects or fears nothing
from the caprice of fortune. He can love without being beloved; he can create imperishable
treasures, and exalt himself above the level of honours or the prizes of the lottery. He possesses
that which he seeks, namely, profound peace. He regrets nothing which must end, but remembers
with satisfaction that he has met with good in all. His hope is a certitude, for he knows that good is
eternal and evil transitory. He enjoys solitude, but does not fly the society of man; he is a child with
children, joyous with the young, staid with the old, patient with the foolish, happy with the wise. He
smiles with all who smile, and mourns with all who weep; applauding strength, he is yet indulgent
to weakness; offending no one, he has himself no need to pardon, for he never thinks himself
offended; he pities those who misconceive him, and seeks an opportunity to serve them; by the
force of kindness only does he avenge himself on the ungrateful..."
"Judge not; speak hardly at all; love and act."

Cultural references[edit]
H. P. Lovecraft referred to Lévi twice in his novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
Angela Carter referred to Lévi in the short story "The Bloody Chamber".
Anthony Powell quotes Lévi in his novel The Military Philosophers. In his novel The Kindly Ones
which, like The Military Philosophers is part of the sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time,
Powell has the character Dr. Trelawney refer to Lévi in this way: "The great Eliphas Levi, whose
precepts I quote to you, said that one who is afraid of fire will never command salamanders."[23]
Fernando Pessoa mentions him in his occult writings.[citation needed]

Selected writings[edit]
 La Bible de la liberté (The Bible of Liberty), 1841
Doctrines religieuses et sociales (Religious and Social Doctrines), 1841
L'assomption de la femme (The Assumption of Woman), 1841
La mère de Dieu (The Mother of God), 1844
Le livre des larmes (The Book of Tears), 1845
Le testament de la liberté (The Testament of Liberty), 1848
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, (Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual), 1854–1856
Histoire de la magie, (The History of Magic), 1860
La clef des grands mystères (The Key to the Great Mysteries), 1861
Fables et symboles (Stories and Images), 1862
La science des esprits (The Science of Spirits), 1865
Le grand arcane, ou l'occultisme dévoilé (The Great Secret, or Occultism Unveiled), 1868
Magical Rituals of the Sanctum Regnum, 1892, 1970
The Book of Splendours: The Inner Mysteries of Qabalism

See also[edit]
Victor Hennequin
Magic (paranormal)
Occultism
Tarot

Notes and references[edit]

1. ^ Christopher McIntosh, Éliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival, 1972.
2. ^ Chacornac, Paul (1989) [1926]. Eliphas Lévi. Paris. p. 119.
3. ^ Josephson, Jason Ānanda (May 2013). "God's Shadow: Occluded Possibilities in the Genealogy
of Religion". History of Religions, Vol. 52, No. 4, 321. doi:10.1086/669644.
JSTOR 10.1086/669644.
4. ^ Strube, Julian (29 March 2016). "Socialist religion and the emergence of occultism: a
genealogical approach to socialism and secularization in 19th-century France". Religion. 0 (3):
359–388. doi:10.1080/0048721X.2016.1146926. ISSN 0048-721X.
5. ^ Rafał T. Prinke, Uczeń Wrońskiego - Éliphas Lévi w kręgu polskich mesjanistów, Pamiętnik
Biblioteki Kórnickiej, Zeszyt 30., Red. Barbara Wysocka. 2013, p. 133
6. ^ C. Nelson Stewart, Bulwer Lytton as Occultist 1996:36 notes that the one surviving letter from
Lévi to Lytton "would appear to be addressed to a stranger or to a very distant acquaintance" (A.
E. Waite).
7. ^ Bulwer Lytton, Edward Jones (1862). A Strange Story. 2. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz. p. 249.
“Hence the author of Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, printed at Paris, 185-53 — a book less
remarkable for tis learning than for the earnest belief of a scholar of our own day in the reality of
the art of which be records of history — insists much on the necessity of rigidly observing Le
Ternaire, in the number of persons who assist in an enchanter's experiments.”
8. ^ Lévi, Éliphas; Blavatsky, H. P. (2007). Paradoxes of the Highest Science. Wildside Press LLC.
p. 15. ISBN 9781434401069.
9. ^ Powell, Anthony (1962). The Kindly Ones (University of Chicago Press electronic edition 2010
ed.). University of Chicago Press. p. 192. ISBN 0-226-67739-7. Retrieved 2 July 2020.

Sources[edit]
Josephson-Storm, Jason (2017), The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of
the Human Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6
 Strube, Julian (2016), Sozialismus, Katholizismus und Okkultismus im Frankreich des 19.
Jahrhunderts: Die Genealogie der Schriften von Eliphas Lévi, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG,
ISBN 9783110478105

Further reading[edit]
Bowman, Frank Paul (1969). Eliphas Lévi, visionnaire romantique. Presses Universitaires de
France.
Chacornac, Paul (1926). Eliphas Lévi: Rénovateur de l'Occultisme en France. Chacornac frères.
McIntosh, Christopher (1975). Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival. Rider.
Mercier, Alain (1974). Eliphas Lévi et la pensée magique au XIXe siècle Alain Mercier. Seghers.
Strube, Julian (2016). "Socialist Religion and the Emergence of Occultism: A Genealogical
Approach to Socialism and Secularization in 19th-Century France". Religion.
doi:10.1080/0048721X.2016.1146926.

External links[edit]
Works by Éliphas Lévi at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Éliphas Lévi as Alphonse Louis Constant at Internet Archive
Works by or about Éliphas Lévi at Internet Archive
Online books by Lévi at About.com via the Wayback Machine
"19 Unpublished Fables" by Éliphas Lévi—Free download
New English translation (2014) of Dogma of High Magic by Éliphas Lévi
Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual (Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie) trans. A. E.
Waite translation (PDF parts 1 and 2)
The Key of Mysteries (HTML)
The Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum (HTML, multiple formats)
Extensive biography in French
Lévi, Éliphas. Clefs Majeurs et Clavicules de Salomon ("Major Arcana and Keys of Solomon") –
text online. Retrieved 19 October 2006
Josephson, Jason Ānanda (May 2013). "God's Shadow: Occluded Possibilities in the Genealogy
of 'Religion'", History of Religions, Vol. 52, No. 4. pp. 309–339. JSTOR 10.1086/669644.
doi:10.1086/669644.