Éliphas Lévi: The Professor of Transcendental Magic
According to most accounts, modern occultism was invented by Alphonse Louis Constant, who was born in Paris in 1810 and who wrote his books under the pseudonym Éliphas Lévi, supposedly the Hebrew equivalent of his birth name. At that time an atmosphere of the East clung to Jews, an exotic flavor of distant lands, strange practices, and magical lore, which appealed to Constant. His writing is full of portentous references to the secret mysteries of the Talmud, the Zohar, and other Hebrew texts. He was also a passionate, if unreliable, devotee of Kabbalah. Having a Hebrew name was undoubtedly good for his credibility as a Kabbalistic savant.
The son of a shoemaker, Constant grew up in humble surroundings near the Boulevard Saint Germain. Although he was dreamy and solitary, his quick mind impressed the parish priest, who helped to get Alphonse sent to the “little seminary” of Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet and from there to the seminary of Saint Sulpice. Here he studied for the priesthood until, as the story goes, he was eventually relieved of the cloth for “preaching doctrines contrary to the church.”
Exactly what those doctrines were is unclear, but it is very likely they had to do with sex. His doubt about the priesthood came in the form of a young girl he tutored for her first Holy Communion. The girl’s poor mother begged Constant to instruct her, saying that a man of his kindness couldn’t refuse. In the girl’s beautiful blue eyes he discovered the overwhelming need for human love—although he assures us the inspiration was not carnal. Suddenly, the idea of a life of cold renunciation repelled him, and he abandoned the priesthood just before taking his final vows.
After leaving Saint Sulpice, Constant earned his crust acting with a touring theatrical group. He was a talented artist and provided illustrations for a magazine called Beautiful Women of Paris and the Provinces. His drawings appear in his own books as well as others, including an edition of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo. He wrote several pamphlets of a radical socialist nature—more rhetorical than well argued—and supported himself as best he could on the periphery of the Parisian literary world.
In 1839, Constant met Alphonse Esquiros, author of a strange work of “high fantasy,” The Magician. It embodied, Lévi tells us, “all that the romanticism of the period conceived to be most bizarre.” This included a harem of dead ladies, a bronze automaton that preached chastity, and a hermaphrodite who was in love with the moon.
Esquiros invited Constant to visit a visionary prophet, “The Mapah,” an old man called Simon Ganneau, who was involved in a strange royalist messianic intrigue. Ganneau had the peculiar habit of wearing a woman’s cloak while he spoke to his disciples of the creation of the universe, the fall of man, and other occult revelations. Although he had originally gone to scoff, Lévi was impressed by the weird scene in the Mapah’s squalid attic.
In his Histoire de la magie (History of magic, 1860) Lévi describes Ganneau as “a bearded man of majestic demeanor…surrounded by several men, bearded and ecstatic like himself.” The woman’s cloak gave the prophet the “air of a destitute dervish,” and a white froth would gather on his lips when he warmed to his subject. Ganneau’s wife—motionless, “like an entranced somnambulist”—believed herself to be the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette. Not to be outdone, Ganneau claimed to be Louis XVII. Esquiros and Constant forgot their laughter and, taken with Ganneau’s message to give “the last word of revolution and to seal the abyss of anarchy,” they duly joined the converted.
One of the Mapah’s disciples started the revolution of 1848, at least according to Lévi. This intense young man, named Sobrier, who “believed himself predestined to save the world by provoking the supreme crisis of universal revolution,” began shouting on the streets of Paris. Accompanied by two “street arabs”—one with a torch, the other beating time—he went through the streets with half of Paris behind him. The mob stopped before the Hôtel des Capucines; a shot was fired and the riot broke out. If this story is true, esotericism in the nineteenth century had more of an effect on the exoteric world than is usually suspected.
Constant himself was imprisoned for eight months for writing a socialist tract called The Gospel of Liberty (1839). His personal life had its disappointments, too. In Evreux, he had seduced an assistant headmistress, who bore him an illegitimate child. The one glaring misdeed in a life otherwise devoted to social utopianism and mystical absorption occurred when Constant abandoned the teacher and became infatuated with her student, Noémie Cadiot. In 1846, at the age of thirty-six, Constant married Noémie, then seventeen years old. They had a daughter who died in childhood, and soon after the death, Noémie left him. Lévi was devastated, but Noémie’s desertion proved the catalyst that transformed the socialist dreamer into Éliphas Lévi, master of the mystic arts.
In 1852, the year before Noémie’s desertion, Constant came under the influence of one of the most curious figures of the nineteenth century, the eccentric Polish émigré Józef Maria Hoene-Wronski. A soldier in the Polish and Russian armies, Hoene-Wronski studied at the observatory at Marseille between 1803 and 1810. There he developed a fantastically complex theory of the origin and structure of the universe. Communicating with the major astronomers and physicists of the time, Hoene-Wronski’s happy years in Marseille ended when he published the results of his research. These were so controversial that the faculty of the Institute of Marseille forced him to leave the observatory, and intellectual persecution dogged him for the rest of his life.
Absolutely committed, in the face of scorn, ridicule, and abject poverty, to his vision of universal and fundamental knowledge, Hoene-Wronski ignited the latent occultist in Constant. Hoene-Wronski’s Pythagorean theories held numbers to be the key to the mysteries of the universe. He was also preoccupied with a perpetual motion machine, “squaring the circle,” and an invention he called the prognomètre, a machine designed to make predictions.
But it was Hoene-Wronski’s messianisme—the name he gave to his synthesis of philosophy, religion, science, and politics—that truly inspired Constant. Charged with a new mission, Constant plunged into writing his first magical treatise, Dogme de la haute magie (Dogma of high magic, 1854). This, along with its second part, Rituel de la haute magie (Ritual of high magic, 1856), was ponderously translated into English by the British occultist A. E. Waite as Transcendental Magic (1896).
It was while writing this that Constant’s wife left him. Constant contributed to a leftist paper, the Revue progressive, owned by the Marquis de Montferrier; through this association, the Marquis became interested in the talented and beautiful Noémie. At first he invited her to write for the paper as well—which she did under the name of Claude Vignon—but she soon became his mistress. Immersed in his Kabbalistic studies, Constant did not notice what was going on until it was too late.
Devastated by his wife’s desertion, Constant lost himself in his studies. It was like some terrible initiation. When the Dogme appeared on the bookstalls of Paris, it was a sign that Alphonse, the social theorist and ex-abbé, was no more. The title page proclaimed his new identity, Éliphas Lévi. Thereafter he was known to his students and across Europe as the Professor of Transcendental Magic. The book’s opening was guaranteed to hook its readers. “Behind the veil of all hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines,” Lévi wrote, “behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practiced at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere concealed.”
As Colin Wilson remarks in The Occult, for all its sonorous power, what Lévi claims here is untrue. There is no single “secret doctrine” behind the various forms of occultism and mystical lore throughout history. Yet Lévi’s desire to see one is in keeping with the early nineteenth-century fascination with discovering the “roots” of things, natural and social. Discovering the sources of the Nile, of mythology, and of language—not to mention the origin of the species—occupied the best minds of the century. Freud’s attempt to root neurosis and dreams in sexuality can be seen as the last major undertaking of this sort.
But more important than Lévi’s erroneous belief in a primal ur-doctrine of magic is the expectation that this stirring if overly romantic passage creates. It suggests that behind the everyday world, behind the history written in textbooks and the “current events” found in newspapers, lies another world, one of deeper and more powerful meaning. This is one of the central themes that Lévi bequeathed to the occultists who have followed him.
Just decades later, the same motif can be seen in the writings of Madame Blavatsky and her tales of mystic Mahatmas who direct the evolution of mankind from secret places in the Himalayas; in G. I. Gurdjieff’s stories of hidden sanctuaries in Central Asia; and, later, in the tales of lost knowledge and vanished civilizations in the fictions of H. P. Lovecraft.
In 1853, after his wife’s desertion, the born-again magician packed a bag and set out for London, staying at a hotel in Bloomsbury. He carried letters of introduction to some of the most influential English occultists; as his career as a mage had scarcely begun, his reputation can hardly account for this. More than a century before the Internet, it seems, devotees of eccentric interests were already networking across considerable distances. It also implies that a formidable international occult cabal was well established in nineteenth-century Europe.
One of these contacts was Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (later Lord Lytton). Bulwer-Lytton was one of England’s most successful novelists, having already published works like The Last Days of Pompeii. Several occult novels—Zanoni, A Strange Story, and Vril: The Power of the Coming Race—are notable for their suffusion of occult lore and esoteric wisdom. The two got on well, inaugurating a deep and mutually influential friendship.
But by far the most important event of Lévi’s London visit was his famous invocation of the ghost of Apollonius of Tyana, one of the greatest magicians of antiquity. Lévi’s account reads like something out of a supernatural thriller. The ceremony, commissioned by a mysterious woman in black, took three weeks to prepare and is described in his Rituel de la haute magie (Ritual of high magic, 1856). Apparently, the giant figure that appeared before the altar did not look how Lévi imagined Apollonius would. Lévi fainted, and his right arm, touched by the phantom, was numb for days after.
“Am I to conclude from this that I really evoked, saw, and touched the great of Apollonius of Tyana?” Lévi asks. Unwilling or unable to explain the “physical laws” by which this could happen, Lévi nevertheless maintained that he did see and did touch the apparition, “clearly and distinctly, apart from dreaming, and that this is sufficient to establish the real efficacy of magical ceremonies.”
Lévi’s reputation as a true mage flourished, and other volumes followed, including La clef des grands mystères (The key of the great mysteries, 1861). The “esotourists” and occult travelers that visited him in his Paris apartments were usually greeted by a rotund man of red complexion, medium height, small, piercing eyes, prodigious bald cranium, full black beard and moustache, wrapped in his ubiquitous monk’s robe. The rooms themselves were jammed with occult bric-a-brac. On an altar covered in sumptuous drapery and gilt vessels sat a Hebrew roll of the Law. Above this hung a golden triangle with the ineffable Tetragrammaton (YHVH, the Hebrew name of God) emblazoned on it. Talismans, skulls, and his magical apparatus jostled for space in his small chambers with a life-size painting of a woman representing Holy Kabbalah and with Hoene-Wronski’s prognomètre. The atmosphere was at once priestly and theatrical.
Lévi’s fame as a master of the occult mysteries brought him a clutch of eager and supportive students. When the Englishman Kenneth Mackenzie—alleged adept and member of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia—visited, Lévi greeted him wearing a felt hat which, Lévi said, he was compelled to wear owing to “an affliction of the head.” In the course of a conversation on the Tarot, Mackenzie noticed a figurine of the Egyptian goddess Isis. He remarked to Lévi that it was an especially fine piece of work; Lévi replied that the item was quite ordinary in Paris, being a very large tobacco jar.
Lévi’s students included two Polish noblemen, Counts Alexander Braszynsky and Georges de Mniszech, as well as another Pole, named Nowakowski, who worked as a doctor in Berlin, and who was drawn to the occult through a fascination with the dervishes. But Lévi’s closest disciple was an Italian nobleman, Baron Nicolas-Joseph Spedalieri; Lévi’s letters to him fill nine volumes.
France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 brought Lévi misery. Not only had Lévi nourished high hopes for France as the savior of civilization, but the siege of Paris made his life very difficult. The Commune that followed was no better received by Lévi, who in his last years had lost much of his revolutionary fire.
Toward the end, his days were painful; the headaches and dizzy spells increased; he suffered from dropsy and gangrenous feet, and he spent long, sleepless nights in his armchair. Stoical, Lévi faced the approach of the Great Unknown with courage, surrounded by friends and helpers.
At two o’clock in the afternoon of May 3, 1875, Éliphas Lévi, once described as “the last of the magi,” passed from his armchair in the Rue de Sèvres into the Ain Soph, the unmanifest Limitless Light of the Kabbalists. He left his manuscripts, books, and scientific instruments, including his prognomètre, to his disciple de Mniszech.
The year of his death is worth noting, for it was one predicted for him. In a letter to Baron Spedalieri, dated 1865, Lévi told of a memorable visit by a curious character, one Juliano Capella. Although the two had never met, Capella told Lévi: “I know your entire life, past, present, and future. It is regulated by the inexorable law of numbers,” a claim that echoed the insights of Hoene-Wronski. “You are a man of the pentagram,” Lévi’s uninvited guest continued, “and the years marked by the number five are always fateful ones for you.” Capella then announced that 1875 would mark “the natural end” of Lévi’s life.
One wonders if the Professor of Transcendental Magic ever employed his prognomètre to corroborate this unfortunately accurate prediction.