Éliphas Lévi

Who they were

Éliphas Lévi (1810–1875), born Alphonse Louis Constant, was a French occultist whose books did more than anyone else's to create the modern Western esoteric tradition.

Almost everything the nineteenth and twentieth centuries believed about magic, tarot and Kabbalah passed through him. He is the hinge between medieval and Renaissance material and everything that followed: the Golden Dawn, Waite, Crowley, Blavatsky, and by descent the tarot deck in most people's cupboards.

Where they came from

He was a shoemaker's son, educated for the priesthood at Saint-Sulpice, and ordained a deacon. He never became a priest — he fell in love, and left.

The next two decades were political rather than mystical. He wrote radical socialist and Christian utopian tracts, was twice imprisoned for his publications, associated with the socialist circles of the 1840s, and married a woman seventeen years younger whose family later had the marriage annulled. He was, in short, a failed cleric and a jailed pamphleteer well into middle age.

He turned to occultism around 1850, adopted the Hebraised form of his name, and began publishing the works that made him.

What they taught

Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854–56), followed by Histoire de la magie (1860) and La Clef des Grands Mystères (1861), present a unified system: a single ancient tradition underlying Kabbalah, magic, tarot, alchemy and the mysteries, recoverable by the initiate.

The tarot–Hebrew correspondence. His single most consequential move was to declare that the twenty-two trumps of the tarot correspond to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and thus to the twenty-two paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

This connection is now so embedded that it is routinely assumed to be ancient. It is not. It is Lévi's, from the 1850s, offered as a rediscovery of something the ancients had known — and, as the tarot article sets out, the cards were a fifteenth-century Italian game. Every esoteric tarot deck since, including the Rider-Waite-Smith, is built on his scheme.

The astral light. He popularised the idea of a universal subtle medium — a plastic fluid filling space, imprinted by imagination and will, through which magic operates. It runs onward into Theosophy's astral plane and into a century of talk about energy and vibration.

Baphomet. The winged goat-headed figure with a torch between its horns, one arm raised and one lowered, breasts and a caduceus at the belly — the image that appears on album covers, in horror films and in every argument about satanic symbolism — was drawn by Lévi in 1856 as an illustration in Dogme et Rituel. He intended it as a symbol of the reconciliation of opposites, not as a devil. Its subsequent career is entirely independent of him.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the influence is enormous and largely unrecognised by the people it reaches. A great deal of what presents itself as immemorial occult tradition is a French autodidact writing in the 1850s.

We can say his historical claims are unfounded. There was no continuous ancient tradition transmitting tarot-Kabbalah correspondences; he constructed the system and attributed it backwards. Whether he believed his own attribution is genuinely unclear, and probably was to him.

We can say he was a brilliant synthesiser rather than a scholar. He read widely and connected material — Renaissance magic, Kabbalah, Mesmerism, Catholic sacramental theology, revolutionary politics — into something coherent and compelling. Coherence is what made it spread.

We can say the political history matters and is usually omitted. Lévi's occultism grew out of utopian socialism, not away from it: his early tracts argue for the redemption of the poor, and his magic retains a strong flavour of a universal reconciliation to come. The nineteenth-century occult revival had radical roots that its twentieth-century inheritors mostly dropped.

We cannot say he was a charlatan in the ordinary sense. He made no great money, held no initiations, founded no order, and lived modestly. He wrote books, and the books did the work.

Further reading

• Transcendental Magic (Waite's translation of Dogme et Rituel, 1896) — the English text that carried him into the anglophone tradition.
• Christopher McIntosh, Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival (1972) — the standard study.