Éliphas Lévi and high magic: the Renaissance reread in Paris

If modern occultism has a founding father, many historians point to Éliphas Lévi. Behind the pseudonym, derived from a Hebraised rendering of his own name, was Alphonse-Louis Constant, born in Paris in 1810 and died in the same city in 1875. With him the magic of the Renaissance, that of Agrippa, Paracelsus and Guillaume Postel, was rethought as a coherent system and presented to the bourgeois public of the Second Empire as an ancient and forgotten science.

From seminarian to magician

Constant studied at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice and was made a deacon, but gave up the priesthood before ordination. In the 1840s he made his name as a socialist and utopian writer, and some of his political writings even earned him prison. Only after 1848, disillusioned with politics, did he devote himself entirely to the study of Kabbalah, Hermeticism and magic, reading the Renaissance authors in the great Parisian libraries.

His main work, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, appeared in two volumes between 1854 and 1856. It was followed by the Histoire de la magie in 1860 and La Clef des grands mystères in 1861. In these books Lévi reviewed the magicians of the past, judging them with a freedom that did not always take account of the historical facts.

A new synthesis

Lévi took from Agrippa and his successors the idea of a universe made of correspondences and the conviction that the human will, once trained, could act upon it. But he added elements that were absent from the Renaissance: the theory of the «astral light», a universal fluid that echoed Mesmer's magnetism, and above all the systematic link between the twenty-two major arcana of the tarot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

This association, which has no documentary basis in Renaissance tarot, born in the courts of fifteenth-century northern Italy as a card game, enjoyed enormous success and passed almost intact into English and French occultism at the end of the century. It is a good example of how the reception of Renaissance magic was also invention: a legacy reworked and reinterpreted rather than faithfully transmitted.

London, Apollonius and diffusion

In 1854 Lévi stayed in London, where he frequented the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton and his circle. In the Rituel he recounts having attempted in that city the evocation of Apollonius of Tyana, the Pythagorean philosopher of the first century, and describes the outcome with great caution, admitting that he did not know whether he had seen an apparition or an effect of his own imagination.

The London stay also had literary consequences. Bulwer-Lytton, who had already published the esoteric novel Zanoni in 1842, brought out A Strange Story in 1862, in which magical and alchemical themes resurface. The dialogue between the French magician and the English novelist helped to create the climate in which, in London, Renaissance magic ceased to be an antiquarian curiosity and was once again practised in small circles.

Lévi's works were translated into English by Arthur Edward Waite, who in 1896 published the Dogme et rituel under the title Transcendental Magic. Through Waite and through the founders of the Golden Dawn, Lévi's interpretation of the magical tradition entered the heart of English-speaking esotericism. Many twentieth-century readers came to know Agrippa precisely through Lévi's filter, which made him the ancestor of a system the philosopher of Cologne had never imagined.