Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival

256 Pages·2011·78.23 MB·English

by  Christopher McIntosh

Eliphas Lévi
and the
French Occult Revival
CHRISTOPHER MCINTOSH
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First published 1972
Second impression, 1975
© Christopher McIntosh 1972, 2011
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McIntosh, Christopher, 1943–
Eliphas Lévi and the French occult revival / Christopher McIntosh.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in Western esoteric traditions)
Originally published: London : Rider, 1972.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 228–232) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3557-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-3556-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Lévi, Éliphas, 1810-1875. 2. Occultism—France. I.Title.
BF1598.C6M3 2011
130.92—dc22 2010031936
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
List of Illustrations 6
Preface 7
Introduction 11
PART ONE
The Age of Unreason
1. The Rebirth of Magic 17
2. The Occult and the Revolution 34
3. Revolutionary Cults 44
4. The Beginnings of Popular Occultism 49
5. Magnetisers and Mediums 55
6. The Holy King 61
PART TWO
Eliphas Lévi
7. The Early Years 73
8. The Radical 83
9. Enter Eliphas Lévi 96
10. The Magician 105
11. The Pundit 124
12. The Last Years 136
13. Eliphas Lévi: An Assessment 141
PART THREE
Towards the Kingdom of the Paraclete
14. The Heirs of Eliphas Lévi 157
15. TheWar of the Roses 171
16. The Magical Quest of J.-K. Huysmans 177
17. Writers and the Occult 195
18. Satanists and Anti-Satanists 206
19. The Indian Summer of Occultism 219
Appendix A 225
Appendix B 226
Select Bibliography 228
Index 233
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List of Illustrations
facing page
frontispiece Lévi’s celebrated
drawing of Baphomet or the
Goat of Mendès 6
1 Tarot figures from Court de Gébelin 32
2 Tarot figures from Court de Gébelin 33
3 The Devil, from Oswald Wirth’s Tarot 49
4 Hoene Wronski 80
5 Saint-Yves d’Alveydre 81
6 Eugène Vintras 96
7 Joseph-Antoine Boullan 97
8 Alphonse-Louis Constant in 1836 128
9 Constant in 1852 129
10 Constant as Eliphas Lévi in 1862 144
11 Frontispiece to Lévi’s Clés majeures
et clavicules de Salomon 145
12 Figures from Lévi’s Clés majeures 176
13 Joseph Péladan 177
14a Cartoons of Péladan 192
14b The symbol of the Cabalistic Order
of the Rosy Cross 192
15 Stanislas de Guaita 193
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Lévi’s celebrated drawing of Baphomet or the Goat of Mendès.
Often misunderstood as satanic, it is in fact a combination of
images representing Lévi’s doctrine of polarities.
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Preface to the New Edition
Bringing this book out again some four decades after it was first
published has revived memories of the experience of writing
it in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After publishing my first
book, The Astrologers and Their Creed (London: Hutchinson, 1969),
I was looking for another subject within the study of western
esotericism—a field that was then in its early infancy and still
largely outside the academic pale. Within the recent history of
esotericism Eliphas Lévi (alias Alphonse-Louis Constant) was an
important name. A few decades after his death he was enough
of a legend to get a lengthy mention in Somerset Maugham’s
novel The Magician (1908) and a briefer one in H.P. Lovecraft’s
novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (written in 1927, first
published in 1941), where he is referred to as “that cryptic soul
who crept through a crack in the hidden door and glimpsed the
frightful vistas of the void beyond” (op. cit., Part III, Ch. 6). Yet
very little had been published in English about Lévi’s life and
work. It seemed to me that the time had come to fill the gap
with a proper study of Lévi. The natural publisher was Rider,
then part of the Hutchinson group, especially as Lévi’s own works
had appeared in English under that imprint. My friend and editor
at Hutchinson, Dr. Daniel Brostoff, who was then in charge of
Rider, was receptive to the idea but suggested that I extend the
scope somewhat to include the wider occult revival in France, of
which Lévi was part. I followed his suggestion accordingly, and
when I began my research for the book I soon realized what an
immensely rich subject I was dealing with.
Various countries have had their esoteric heydays, but the one
that took place in France between approximately the late 18th
century and the early 20th was one of the most fruitful. At its
beginning stood a remarkable constellation of esoteric Freemasons,
illuminati, mystics, alchemists, and ritual magicians, from whose
milieu came movements such as Martinism. Their successors in
the 19th century, apart from Lévi himself, included the occultist
Papus (alias Dr. Gérard Encausse), whose influence stretched as far
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8 Preface to the New Edition/Acknowledgments
as the court of St. Petersburg, the counter-Pope Eugène Vintras,
and the colourful Rosicrucian magus Joséphin Péladan, organizer
of a cultural movement including art exhibitions that were closely
connected with the Symbolist school of painting.
Any of these figures would deserve a biography to himself, but
I chose to give pride of place to Lévi because of his particularly
seminal influence both within France and internationally. Many
of his ideas were admired by Madame Blavatsky and passed into
Theosophy. The magicians of the Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn were strongly influenced by him, as were writers such
as Huysmans, Baudelaire and W.B. Yeats. And Aleister Crowley
believed himself to be Lévi’s reincarnation. As an artist he also has
his place in esoteric history, if only because of his famous drawing
of Baphomet or the Goat of Mendès, which has been reproduced
innumerable times in books and magazines dealing with magic
and the occult. This drawing was not included in the first edition
of this book, but I have now made good the omission, and the
picture is shown in Fig. 1. In the iconography of esotericism it
has become one of those instantly recognized images like—in a
wider context—Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, Salvador Dali’s melting
watches or Munch’s The Scream. I even saw a plaster version of
it in bright red, placed in the middle of a sort of Voodoo altar
that had been set up as a museum exhibit. It is often—quite
mistakenly—interpreted as a satanic image, and here I would like
to correct this misconception.
The image symbolizes the process of working with the “Astral
Light,” a key concept for Lévi. The Astral Light is another name
for the notion of an invisible, all-pervading fluid or medium on
which thoughts can be imprinted and through which phenomena
can be influenced. For Lévi it is the basis of all magical workings.
In order to work with the Astral Light the magician has to be
balanced between the forces and polarities that surround him,
and it is this balance that is conveyed in the Baphomet image. The
goat represents dense, earth-bound nature, but has angel’s wings
representing heavenly nature. It has female breasts but a male
phallus. The four elements are shown by the hooves resting on
the globe (earth), the fish scales on the belly (water), the wings
(air) and the torch rising from the head (fire). Darkness and light
are present in the black and white crescent moons and in the
black and white serpents curled around the caduceus-like phallus.
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Preface to the New Edition/Acknowledgments 9
The right arm points up, the left down, and the words written
on the arms, “SOLVE” and “COAGULA” refer to the two key
operations necessary to working successfully with the Astral Light.
First the light must be fixed and concentrated (coagula) and then
projected as a flow of energy (solve). In the centre of the goat’s
forehead is a pentagram, which for Lévi represents the dominion
of will over the Astral Light. To see how quickly Lévi’s drawing
was misinterpreted one only needs to look at the 15th trump
card, Le Diable, in the Tarot pack designed by Oswald Wirth and
published in 1889 (Fig. 3). Here a grotesque caricature of Lévi’s
Baphomet appears as the Devil. It now has bat’s wings instead of
angel’s wings, and the arms are pointing in the wrong directions—
coagula should of course point to the earth and solve to heaven,
as in Lévi’s drawing. Wirth’s picture was the forerunner of many
subsequent distortions of Lévi’s image.
It may seem surprising that—at least to my knowledge—no
movement or school has emerged to perpetuate Lévi’s ideas.
This may be because it is rather difficult to extract a coherent
message from his works. Lévi’s writings poured from his pen in
an inspired but often careless flow, and he hardly ever re-read or
corrected drafts and printed proofs. Consequently his books are
often rambling, verbose, badly structured and marred by mistakes.
Nevertheless, if one perseveres with them one finds that they
contain some fascinating ideas, which must have appeared new
and exciting to his contemporaries and which continue to speak
to many readers of today.
The appearance of this edition gives me the opportunity to add
an important bibliographical reference. At the time this book first
appeared it contained the only biography of Lévi in English, but in
1975 the University of Alabama Press published Eliphas Lévi: Master
of Occultism by Thomas A. Williams, an excellent and most engaging
study of Lévi and his ideas. In his preface, Williams, an American
professor of romance languages, wrote: “Occult and esoteric thought
has become an inescapable part of our contemporary intellectual
climate. It is time for all of us to find out something—something
reliable—about it … but even as we set out to educate ourselves
in this dark domain we confront a basic question: where do we
begin? The path is dim and the forest obscure.”
Today the path is a good deal less dim and the forest is
progressively being charted, as esotericism becomes increasingly
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