by Eliphas Levi
At what date Alphonse Louis Constant applied himself to the study of the occult arts and their literature is not less uncertain than are other events of his life. The statement, that in the year 1825 he entered a fateful path, which led him through suffering to knowledge, must not be understood in the sense that he underwent any kind of initiation at that period, which was indeed early in boyhood. It refers obviously to his enrolment among the scholars of Saint Sulpice, which, in a sense, led to suffering and perhaps ultimately to what passed with him for science, as it certainly obtained him education. The episode of the New Alliance—so Ganneau termed his system—connects at least with an obscure quality of illuminism and occult pretension, on the side of hallucina tion, and may have furnished the required impulse to the mind of the disciple; but in 1846 and 1847, certain pamphlets issued by Constant under the auspices of the Libraire Societaire and the Libraire Phalanstérienne show that his inclinations were still towards Socialism, tinctured by religious aspirations.1 The period which intervened between his wife's desertion2 and the publication of the Dogme de la Haute Magie in 1855 was that, probably, which he devoted less or more to occult study. In the interim he issued a large Dictionary of Christian Literature, 1851, which was extant for many years in one of the encyclopaedic series of the Abbé Migne; this work betrays no leaning towards occult science and indeed no acquaintance there with. What it does exhibit unmistakably is the intellectual insincerity of the author, for he assumes therein the mask of perfect orthodoxy and that accent in matters of religion which is characteristic of the voice of Rome. The Dogme de la Haute Magie was succeeded in 1856 by its companion volume the Rituel, both of which are here translated for the first time into English. It was followed in rapid succession by the Histoire de la Magie, 1860; La Clef des Grands Mystéres, 1861; a second edition of the Dogme et Rituel, to which a long and irrelevant introduction was unfortunately prefixed, 1861; Fables et Symboles, 1862; Le Sorcier de Meudon, a beautiful pastoral idyll, impressed with the cachet cabalistique; and La Science des Esprits, 1865. The two last works incorporate the substance of certain pamphlets published in 1846 and 1847.
The precarious existence of Constant's younger days was in one sense but faintly improved in his age. His books did not demand a large circulation, but they secured him admirers and pupils, from whom he received remuneration in return for personal or written courses of instruction. He was to be found commonly chez lui in a species of magical vestment, which may be pardoned in a French Magus, and his only portrait during lifetime—prefixed to this volume —represents him in that guise. He outlived the Franco German war, and as he had exchanged Socialism for a sort of transcendentalized Imperialism, his political faith— at its value—must have been tried as much by the events which followed the siege of Paris as was his patriotic enthusiasm by the reverses which culminated at Sédan. His contradictory life closed in 1875 amidst the last offices of the Church which had almost expelled him from her bosom. He left many manuscripts behind him, most of which by now have been published posthumously, and innumerable letters to his pupils—Baron Spedalieri alone possessed nine volumes—have been preserved in many cases, and offer not infrequently a curious undesigned commentary on the formal treatises.
No modern expositor of occult claims can bear any comparison with Éliphas Lévi, and among ancient expositors, though many stand higher in authority and are assuredly more sincere, all yield to him in living interest, for he is actually the spirit of modern thought forcing an answer for the times from the old oracles. Hence there are greater names, but there has been no influence so great during the last two centuries: no fascination in occult literature exceeds that of the French Magus. The others are surrendered to specialists and the typical serious students to whom dull and unreadable masterpieces are in effect dedicated, directly or not; but he has been read and appreciated, much as we read and appreciate new and pleasant verse which, through some conceit of the poet, is put into a vesture recalling Chaucer. Indeed, the writings of Éliphas Lévi stand, as regards the old line of supposed initiation, in relatively the same position as the Earthly Paradise of Mr William Morris stands to the Canterbury Tales. There is the recurrence to old conceptions, and there is the assumption of old drapery, but there is in each case a new and very modern spirit. The “Incommunicable Axiom” and the “Great Arcanum”, Azoth, Inri and Tetragrammaton, which are the vestures of the occult philosopher, are like the “cloth of Bruges and hogsheäds of Guienne, Florence gold cloth and Ypres napery” of the poet. In both cases it is the year 1850 et seq., in a mask of high fantasy. Moreover, “the idle singer of an empty day” is paralleled fairly enough by “the poor and obscure scholar who has recovered the lever of Archimedes”. The comparison is intentionally grotesque, but it obtains notwithstanding, and even admits of development, for as Mr Morris in a sense voided the raison d'être of his poetry and, in express contradiction to his own mournful question, endeavoured to “set the crooked straight” by betaking himself to Socialism, so Éliphas Lévi surrendered the wand of supposititious miracles and voided his Doctrine of Magic by devising a one-sided and insincere concordat with orthodox religion, and expiring in the arms of “my venerable masters in theology”, the descendants, and decadent at that, of the “imbecile theologians of the middle ages”.
Students of Éliphas Lévi will be acquainted with the qualifications and stealthy retractions by which the position of initiated superiority in the Doctrine and Ritual had its real significance read out of it by the later works of the Magus. I have dealt with this point exhaustively in a digest of Lévi's writings which passed through two considerable editions, and though it is now out of print, there is no call to go over the same ground a second time.1 Moreover, I am awaiting the opportunity which will be created when his Life appears ultimately in France to reconsider his position as an expositor of so-called occult science and philosophy. Meanwhile, I propose to indicate as briefly as possible some new considerations which will help us to understand why there were amazing discrepancies between the Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic and the volumes which followed on these. In the first place, the earlier books were written more expressly from the stand point of initiation, as conceived by their writer, and in the language thereof; they contain obviously much which it would be mere folly to construe after a literal fashion, and what Éliphas Lévi wrote at a later period is not so much discrepant with his earlier instruction—though it is this also—as the qualifications placed by a professed transcendentalist in the second half of the nineteenth century on the technical exaggerations and miraculous pretensions of occult claims and records. For the proof we need travel no farther than his original introduction to The Doctrine of Magic, or take the Hebrew manuscript cited therein, as to the powers and privileges of the Magus.2 Here the literal interpretation would be insanity; these claims conceal another meaning of what is called the moral kind and are trickery in their verbal sense. They are what Éliphas Lévi himself terms “hyperbolic”, adding: “If the sage do not materially and actually perform these things, he accomplishes others which are much greater and more admirable”. They remind us of the alchemist who is said to have confessed finally that the Philosophical Stone signified “contentment”. It is this idea substantially which Levi offers in more exalted form as the term and crown of adeptship. But no such interpretation is in itself sufficient to take account of the issues that are involved; it will not explain, for example, why Éliphas Lévi, who consistently teaches in the Doctrine and Ritual that the dogmas of so-called revealed religion are nurse-tales for children, should have insisted subsequently on their acceptation in the sense of the orthodox Church by the grown men of science.
Secondly, the precise period of reflection which produced the Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic as its first literary result is not indicated with any certainty, as we have seen, in the life of the author, nor do I regard Éliphas Lévi as constitutionally capable of profound or extensive book-study. Intensely suggestive on the me
re surface, he is at the same time without evidence of depth; splendid in ready generalization, he is without accuracy in detail, and it would be difficult to cite a worse guide over mere matters of fact. His History of Magic is a case in point; as a philo sophical survey it is admirable, and there is nothing in occult literature to approach it for literary excellence, but it swarms with historical inaccuracies; it is in all respects an accomplished and in no way an erudite performance, nor do I think that the writer ever concerned himself with any real reading of the authorities whom he cites. The French verb parcourir represents his method of study, and not the verb approfondir. Let us take one typical case. There is no occult writer whom he cites with more satisfaction, and towards whom he exhibits more reverence, than William Postel, and of all Postel's books there is none which he mentions so often as the Clavis Absconditorum a Constitutione Mundi; yet he had read this minute treatise so carelessly that he missed a vital point concerning it, and apparently died unaware that the symbolic key prefixed to it was the work of the editor and not the work of Postel. I am citing one case only and have termed it typical, being representa tive of things analogous by the score and hundreds which could be sited throughout his volumes. One explanation is that his Gallic vivacity would have been blunted too quickly by the horrors of mere research. But there is a second which is more to our purpose. He had reached certain lights, otherwise principles of interpretation, which in his view were keys to the whole occult subject, and, for one of his temperament, they curtailed the necessity of research, making visits to the Bibliothéque Nationale and the Arsenal of only subsidiary importance.
There was a time when I accepted the evidence of lying witness and believed that Éliphas Lévi had come somehow within a circle of occult initiation and had proceeded a certain distance through its supposititious Grades; that the publication of his Doctrine and Ritual had closed his path of progress for its undue exercise of personal discretion in the revelation of occult hypotheses—e.g. the Astral Light; that the imperfections of this work might be explained by supposing the school to have other grades of knowledge than those into which he had entered; that the doors being closed upon him accounted for his later books offering no further developments of the occult subject; and lastly, that the virtual retractations and subterfuges contained therein might have signified an attempt to make peace with the alleged school for his violation of its affirmed law of secrecy. The deponents in question represented the initiation in question, and, as I have since had an opportunity of searching all their warrants, I know now that it was not extant in the days that Lévi wrote. The hypothesis of a universal glass of vision and an agent of magical power was neither the invention of Lévi nor the secret of a nineteenth century sanctuary of occult knowledge: it belongs to the records of the past. On the vague and scattered intimations of these records, which are in alchemical and magical books, Lévi went to work and produced those developments which will be found in the pages that follow, and there is no question that he believed himself to have discovered the key of all occult phenomena, the master-explanation of all occult theorems. It was in the enthusiasm consequent hereon that he wrote the Doctrine and Ritual, inspired for the most part with the certitude of a professional Magus, though his indomitable scepticism intervenes from time to time, as those who read will see.
For Éliphas Lévi, more especially at the period of his initial occult enterprise, was fundamentally a materialist—a materialist, moreover, who at times approached perilously towards atheism, as when he stated that God is a hypothesis which is “very probably necessary”; he was, further, a disbeliever in any real communication with the world of spirits. He defines Mysticism as the shadow and the buffer of intellectual light, and loses no opportunity to enlarge upon its false illuminism, its excesses and fatuities. There is therefore no way from man to God in his system, while the sole avenues of influx from God to man are sacramental, and in virtue merely of a tolerable hypothesis. Thus man must remain in simple intellectualism if he would rest in reason; the sphere of material experience is that of his knowledge; and as to all beyond it, there are only the pre sumptions of analogy and the consolations of an aspiring heart. Now it is possible apparently for a purely sceptical philosopher to become an occultist and yet remain a sceptic, seeing that Lévi did so, but it remains that a view like this answers to no occult beliefs or even pretences that have prevailed throughout the centuries, while much less is it the summum bonum of any greater initiation. Occult pneumatology is more by its own hypothesis than an alphabetical system argued kabalistically; and more than mere memories can on the same assumption be evoked in the Astral Light. Set forth at its best, the standpoint of occult metaphysics would be rather that the hierarchic order of the visible world has its complement in the invisible hierarchy, which analogy leads us to discern, being at the same time a process of our perception rather than a rigid law governing the modes of manifestation in all things seen and unseen. Initiation may take us to the bottom step on the ladder of the invisible hierarchy and instruct us in the principles of ascent, but the ascent rests personally with ourselves. The voices of some who have preceded can be heard above us, but they are of those who are still upon the way, and they die as they rise into the silence, towards which we also must ascend alone, where initiation can no longer help us, unto that bourne from whence no traveller returns, and the influxes are sacramental only to those who are below.
It follows that Éliphas Lévi invented an occult philosophy before he explained occultism; that it is his own and no other's; that when in his later books he added, revised and altered—amidst many contradictions in the process—we are confronted only with the shifting moods of a brilliant mind which had no certain anchorage, outside a hypothesis for explaining certain phenomena. To this he adhered always, but on the larger occult claims, the Magnum Opus, the Universal Medicine and so forth he allegorized more and more, and while that tendency may have brought him nearer to one side of Hermetic truth it voided more and more the aggressive occult dogmatism of his Doctrine and Ritual. Here is the canon of criticism concerning the man and his work; the position is curious, but it is quite simple, and to my thinking it is this which makes him interesting—because he is sui generis. There is no consequence whatever in the modern occult philosopher per se—such as Dr Papus, Stanislas de Guaita and a cloud of later writers more fatuous than these—that we should take them seriously, as exhaustively they have taken themselves. But Éliphas Lévi has shown us that outside the circle of physical and normal mental science, there is only a dark borderland which is a realm of all intellectual folly and all hallucination, and that the proper province of true occult philosophy is to apply this touchstone of rational criticism to all which comes forth therefrom and to those who explore therein. There was a time when he thought otherwise—a moment, a year or just so long as it took him to write Le Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, for the exposition of his hypothetical dis covery concerning Astral Light. With his whole mind and his whole heart he accepted and cleaved to this because it helped him to explain everything in occult phenomena without assuming veridic elements at the root of any. But he felt later on that the iridescent verbiage of these volumes had credited too much to the fascination of their subject, and in later writings he applied a pumping process to all that he had said of this order—and left Browning's “vacuity”.