Éliphas Lévi

Alphonse-Louis Constant, alias Éliphas Lévi in 1874

Éliphas Lévi, also Éliphas Lévi Zahed was the pseudonym under which from 1854 on the catholic cleric Alphonse-Louis Constant (February 8, 1810, Paris - May 31, 1875, ibid.) wrote and published scriptures of occult and magical contents. Lévi is said to have been the re-founder of occultism in the 19th century.

Life

Per aspera ...

Alphonse-Louis's father was a shoemaker living in what is today the 6th Arrondissement in Paris, on the left bank of the Seine. The family's material conditions were very limited, but the parson at the church of Saint-André-des-Arts was running a school free of charge for the poor, at which Alphonse-Louis too would receive basic education. After that, and several intermediary steps later, last of which the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, in 1835 he became ordained sub-deacon, and from then on he was himself entrusted with teaching appointments. With one of his schoolgirls (whom in his confusion he took for a reincarnation of Virgin Mary) he fell in immortal love, and left the seminary for her just before he was to be ordained priest. But alas, she ran out on him.

Portrait of the young man, 1836

Overcome with disappointment when he quit his education, his mother took her life a few weeks later. For Alphonse there commenced a time of aimless searching. Within just one year he made the acquaintance of Honoré de Balzac, developed his gifts of visual arts by collaborating on the chorus line "Les Belles Femmes de Paris", made friends with the militant socialist Flora Tristan, and yet at the same time he carried on dreaming of a future as a priest. This dream guided his way to St. Peter's Abbey, a Benedictine monastery whose library of 20,000 volumes gave him the chance of making himself acquainted with scriptures from the early Christianity, by ancient gnostics, and by religious mystics as well. It was here that he authored a first booklet of his own entitled "Le Rosier de Mai" which was as pious as romantic, and rhapsodized about matters of love in so romantic and vivid a way that it was deemed better to expell him from the monastery.

Following an intervention in his support by the archbishop of Paris, Denis Auguste Affre, Constant finally was given an appointment as warden at the college of Juilly, east of Paris. However, his seniors treated him badly, but now all the wrath broke out of him, and he wrote a first raging pamphlet, La Bible de la liberté. With its publication in February 1841 he not only provided for a outright scandal throughout the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but at the court in Versailles as well. He was arrested, and sentenced in May 1841 to eight months of imprisonment, with an additional fine of 300 Francs. Since he couldn't afford the money he served eleven months, a time which he used for studying the works of the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg.

After Constant's discharge bishop Affre recommended him to his colleague in Evreux, where from February 1843 on he preached in so successful a way that his fellow ministers jealously announced the death of abbé Constant in the newspapers. Despite a swift denial another scandal couldn't be avoided, however, the bishop kept his hand upon him, and commissioned him with the realisation of a mural painting in a nunnery. At about the same time he nearly became a member of the secretive Rosicrucian Order. Friends of his father's vouched for him, by which he might even have prospects of the rank of a Grand Master. Unfortunately nothing of that came about, and the painting too would not be finished. Because when in 1844 his second sweeping blow appeared, La Mère de Dieu, his relationship with the bishop experienced a rapid deterioration, and Constant returned to Paris.

Deeply churned up by the death of his friend Flora Tristan he published L'Émancipation de la femme ou le Testament de la paria, followed a year later (1845) by his pacifist manifesto La Fête-Dieu ou le Triomphe de la paix religieuse. After all, he occupied himself busily with the humanistic, and the utopian ideas of the time, particularly Saint-Simonianism and the theories of Charles Fourier. Neither of them could convince him: Saint Simon teaches religion without religiousness, which he found repulsive. And Fourier's approach of man's necessity for acting out his drives he considered absurd and foolish. He was 35 now, and still his search continued.

It is not very much astonishing that his private affairs weren't running smoothly either. In the small town Choisy-le-Roi, located a few kilometers outside of Paris and since 1840 at the railway to Orleans, he used to meet with a warden of a girls' school (presumably, see note). But while they were making plans to marry, and she was pregnant from him, one of her girl friends fell in love with Alphonse, the underage maiden Marie-Noémi Cadiot. Some fiery love letters later she escaped and hid herself in his garret. Seeing himself put before the choice between marrying her or face trial for seducing a minor - what was left for him? On July 13, 1846, they married. She gave birth to a daughter whom he adored and who would die aged seven in 1854. Soon after which Marie-Noémi would leave him. The descendants of the warden he left so unfaithfully live to this very day.

The revolution of February 1848 brought more liberties for Alphonse-Louis too. Just one year ago he had once more been convicted for one of his pamphlets, La Voix de la famine, now nothing could hamper his roaming the political stage any longer. He headed the left-wing magazine Le Tribun du peuple which died after the fourth issue, founded a political workers' association named (in revolutionary tradition) Le Club de la montagne, then in June, when the political reaction felt uneasy about the latest developments and tried to turn back the wheels, he nearly got killed by a firing squad. Luckily they took someone else for him and shot the wrong chap. He tried to be elected to the National Assemply, but a friend of his made the race, after which the friendship broke. Under financial aspects however the couple Constant was well off now, because Marie-Noémi was emancipating herself. She published literary feuilletons, and received lessons from the sculptor James Pradier who had already been promoted by the Roi Citoyen and now helped her open the doors to the Parisian society. In this wake of hers Alphonse too was commissioned by the government with two paintings for the ministry of the interior.

... ad occultum

Is it allowed to judge a person, having come to know so little about him and in so compact a way? Maybe not, but one may have an impression of him, and this one may express. And if now, in 1850, Alphonse-Louis Constant were confronted with the notion that for all intents and purposes his life so far had been stranded he would flatly deny such a view, apalled perhaps and blustering, and yet all the while secretly suspecting that so completely wrong the thought might not have been. Because, what had he achieved as yet? His theological and (church) political scriptures had earned him not much more than troubles and the inconveniences of the penal system, his pastoral career wasn't worth much talking about, his political engagements remained without success, and all his artistical pursuit kept being a hobby-horse rather, if at all. One can imagine that all of this was beginning to prey on his mind.

Baphomet, drawing in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, 1856

But through all these years there existed another thread, woven into the fabric of his life. It started during his stay at Solesmes (1838-39), was spun a little longer by the convict's study of Swedenborg in 1841, nearly became extended with the almost achieved degree of Grand Master to the Rosicrucians at Evreux, strengthened itself just lately (1850/ 51) during a study of Rosenroth's Kabbala denudata, and now at last became visible for Alphonse himself as leitmotiv and anchor for his further life: mysticism, theosophy, in general the occult knowledge. He recalled the name Éliphas Lévi Zahed, once bestowed on him by the Rosicrucians and allegedly representing a translation of his name into Hebrew, and chose it for his pseudonym. About this time he started the composition of his later opus magnum Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. He had found his way.

In spring 1854 Lévi went on a journey to London where he made the acquaintance of the in his days famous writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Over their common interest in the occult they became friends. Through Bulwer-Lytton's influence he comes again in contact with Rosicrucian circles, where he succeeds in several evocations, of which the most outstanding was that of Apollonios of Tyana. During the London times his private affairs too came to an amicable settlement: the young woman he left in Choisy-le-Roi forgave him, and he accepted the illegitimate child as his own. At the same time Marie-Noémi left their common residence.

Back in Paris, he in 1854 published the first volume of Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. His intensive occupation with the Kabbala he documented in a number of essays, all of which he published in the Revue philosophique et religieuse, a periodical he founded in 1855 together with the Belgian writer Camille Lemonnier and the French philosopher Charles Fauvety, and which they co-productively managed over the three years of its existence. For his diversion he wrote a couple of chansons. In one of these he compared Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, meanwhile emperor Napoléon III, with Caligula. That - we know him by now - earned him another term in prison. (Anyway, some of the chansons he managed to place in Le Mousquetaire, a magazine Alexandre Dumas published at that time.)

Then in 1859, at long last (he was 49 years old now), the economical breakthrough: the publication of his History of Magic brings a return of 1,000 Francs, at today's purchasing power an equivalent of more than 30,000 Euros. But l'Histoire de la magie isn't just the economical success, it also gets him recognition in wide sections of the "esoteric" France, among them the physician Fernand Rozier who would become a student of Lévi's. Eventually in March 1861 he was accepted in the Masonic Lodge La Rose du parfait silence who soon after grant him the degree of a Master. In the same year La Clef des grands mystères appears, last part of the trilogy that starts with Histoire de la magie and of which Dogme et rituel de la haute magie was conceived the second part.

Lévi works a lot now, mainly as teacher for the high aristocracy, and that he even teaches the bishop of Evreux on the kabbalah does speak for his professional reputation. He is doing well financially, every surplus he invests in his growing library. During a further visit to London Eugène Vintras is introduced to him, a workingman convinced of being a reincarnation of the prophet Elijah. Lévi on the contrary, all expert now, considers him more a gifted psychic, an interesting object of study anyway. This same year marks the start of a correspondence with the Italian baronet Spedalieri, about whom nothing seems to have been passed on to us except that he became Lévi's most important patron and in reverse received in over 1,000 letters a course on the kabbalah. This exchange of letters lasted for almost thirteen years.

Portrait from 1872

The years beginning with 1861 are the most fruitful for his authorship. Le Sorcier de Meudon (1861) is followed one year later by Fables et symboles, containing extensive analyses of the symbolisms of Pythagoras, of the gospels, the talmud, and other sources. In 1865 he publishes Science des esprits, and Pierre Larousse asks him to contribute an essay on the kabbalah for his Grand Dictionnaire. At the same time he starts working on a monograph about the Zohar, however this work won't be published until after his death.

His private life, however, is running less pleasantly meanwhile. Indeed, he makes up his mind to care more for his son, and gets the mother's approval for it, but after six years an ultimate discord drives the parents apart, and neither his son nor the mother he will ever see again. Adding to this headaches develop, tormenting him more and more frequently. Then in 1870 the siege of Paris cuts off all contributions from his students, and when he serves in the National Guard a heart disease manifests. In May 1861, with the episode of the Commune finally being over, Lévi once again finds himself at the end of all material resources.

Éliphas Lévi on his deathbed, 1875

Although he still continues working (in December 1871 already he completes the Grimoire franco-latomorum on rites of the French freemasons), but his physical status deteriorates increasingly. His heart disease repeatedly causes him to faint - he were not the one he is. of course, would he not report of ecstatic visions during his blackouts. But the path of life he had found only so late he cannot leave: in 1873 L'Évangile de la science comes into existence, followed by the Catéchisme de la paix in January 1875, the last of his works. He wrested it from life still (or was it death already?), fighting against chronic bronchitis, permanent fever, water retention in the legs, and recurrent shortages of breath. On May 31, 1875 Éliphas Lévi dies at the age of 65.

Reception

In the Paris of the Second Empire Éliphas Lévi was a well known person. In the beginning a rather casual interest, his pursuit of esoteric matters later earned him a singular knowledge, almost tailor-made for a society that could no longer believe in the solacements from the church, yet neither in those science would offer. Although the political revolutions which had been turning the French society literally upside down for six decades finally found a temporary slowdown under Napoléon III, neither his imperialistic foreign policy nor the pomp of his self-stagings could resolve the deeply rooted feeling of uncertainty. People sensed something had been lost, and albeit only a small minority actually wanted to turn back the clock there was a widespread, diffuse longing - for a modern past, for a "like back then, but today". Esotericism appeared to offer a solution of this dilemma. By applying methods and forms of representation of the natural sciences on conceptions of the supernatural a connection between these two seemingly emerged, and the occult sciences took shape.