May 31

The Lever of Archimedes: The Life & Death of Éliphas Lévi

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He described himself as “a poor and obscure scholar” who had “found the lever of Archimedes.” In exchange, Éliphas Lévi continued, he required nothing; his discoveries were “for the good of humanity alone, asking nothing whatsoever in exchange.”

The “lever” of which Lévi spoke, of course, was magic.

The legendary occultist was born Alphonse Louis Constant on February 8, 1810 in Paris, and died in the same city on this day in 1875. He was sixty-five years old, and had spent nearly his entire life bringing a modernity to occultism. And as for being both “poor” and “obscure,” he died as he lived: modestly, surrounded by manuscripts, having spent the last quarter century writing books that no respectable publisher particularly wanted. Following his death, however, the works of Éliphas Lévi would almost singlehanded reshape the entire Western esoteric tradition.

The Deacon Turned Magus

Aleister Crowley, born the year Lévi died, claimed for the rest of his life to be the reincarnation of the fallen occultist. And how could he not? The similarities in both men were legion—from their tumultuous personal lives to their esoteric ambitions. Decades before Crowley’s revelation of the Book of the Law and its ushering of Thelema, Lévi had already constructed a complete philosophical system connecting Kabbalah, Hermeticism, alchemy, astrology, and ceremonial practice into a unified architecture of the invisible world. No one had done this in quite this way before—and no one who came after him (including Crowley, Blavatsky, Dion Fortune, the Golden Dawn and virtually every serious practitioner of the Western magical tradition since) was left untouched by what he built.

But the story of how a Parisian shoemaker's son became the most influential occultist of the nineteenth century is as labyrinthian than any of his most esoteric principles. During his life, Lévi, at different times, found himself in a seminary, prison, a marriage that ended in annulment, and periods of near poverty. As Alphonse Constant, he entered the Saint-Sulpice seminary in 1832 with the intention of becoming a Catholic priest. Ultimately, he was ordained a deacon, having balked at the priesthood a week away from his final vows. The details are vague, although Lévi’s first major biographer, A.E. Waite (yes, that one) offered two possible versions: one involving Lévi’s “strange views on doctrinal subjects,” and his deficiency in “gifts of silence” (in other words, a heretic with a big mouth); the other reason, simply “doubts and scruples” (meaning, celibacy wasn’t for him).

But Lévi’s aborted ordination wasn’t necessarily from a lack of faith. Instead, he left Saint-Sulpice with a mastery of Catholic theology and sacramental practice, as well as a deep working knowledge of ecclesiastical Latin and an intimate familiarity with its symbols and rituals. An inert theologian (but not necessarily a Catholic one), he spent the rest of his life arguing that these symbols encoded a deeper and more ancient wisdom than the Church itself cared to acknowledge—and that the same wisdom could be found, once you knew where to look, in the Hebrew Kabbalah, the Tarot, the Hermetic texts, and the alchemical tradition. Still considering himself “a man of the cloth,” with a legitimate spiritual calling, Lévi was known to continue wearing his cassock for eight years even after leaving the seminary.

In some sense, he never entirely took it off.

The decades following his abandonment of Catholicism were financially difficult for him: he was imprisoned in 1841 for writing and distributing a pamphlet filled with his “heretic” philosophies—most of which was considered politically dangerous. In 1846, he married a girl of sixteen (although she left him seven years later for a marquis, and the marriage was eventually annulled); children died in infancy; he was imprisoned again in 1855, this time for writing a satirical song about Napoleon III. By the time he reached forty, Lévi considered himself a bit of a failure—until he discovered and dedicated himself fully to ancient esoteric teachings.

Lévi later described the period around 1850 as a serious period of both financial and spiritual dire straights; however, it charged a sense of urgency within him that led to his greatest and most memorable writing. In 1853, he visited London and met members of the burgeoning British Spiritualist movement and, although he found the entire experience somewhat underwhelming (based on his reputation, they had expected him to perform “wonders,” he noted with dry amusement, “as if [he] were a charlatan.” Yet, the journey confirmed his sense that there was a hunger in the educated world for what he had to offer. Inspired, he returned to Paris and began to write about the history of ancient mysticism, convinced it was the true calling he’d always faintly heard.

It was also around this time that “Alphonse Louis Constant” officially became “Éliphas Lévi Zahed,” both as a new “pen name,” and to signify the next chapter of his life and career. He’d fashioned the new name through a simple the translation of his given names into Hebrew.

The Dogma & the Astral Light

In 1854 and 1856, Lévi published the two volumes of what would become his seminal work: Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie—Dogma and Ritual of High Magic (later translated into English by A.E. Waite under its most recognized titled, Transcendental Magic). Structured around twenty-two chapters, each corresponding to one of the Major Arcana of the Tarot and one of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the book proved to be a milestone in occult philosophy. This correspondence—Tarot to Kabbalah—was Lévi’s own invention, presented with magnificent confidence as an ancient secret he had recovered, and would forever link the two separate systems into a symbiotic tool inspiring nearly every occultist to follow.

Lévi’s correspondence was far from arbitrary; it was wholly unprecedented in either tradition. A.E. Waite, known for his own lifetime dedication to Tarot scholarship and interpretation, later called it, “an invention of extraordinary fertility.”

The other central contribution made within Transcendental Magic was Lévi’s concept of the “Astral Light”: a universal medium—Lévi’s own version of the Stoics’ pneuma and the Hermeticists’ spiritus mundi—that permeated all of space, recorded all impressions, and served as the medium through which magical operations were performed. According Lévi, a magician who could sense, direct, and concentrate the Astral Light could cause change in the material world (thus considering magic itself a practical technology, as later elaborated upon in the philosophies of Chaos Magick). Lévi elaborated that the Astral Light was “the great magical agent” whose “currents and ebbs constitute what the alchemists called the Great Work.”

In a way, Lévi’s “Astral Light” can be interpreted as the philosopher’s stone itself—the universal solvent, the secret fire of the alchemists, and the electrical fluid that mesmerists had been calling “animal magnetism.” (Lévi was writing in the age of Mesmer’s late influence and the early discoveries of electromagnetism, and he understood that the new science was describing, in materialist language, what the magical tradition had always called the life-force of the universe.)

The Golden Dawn, which absorbed his system wholesale, would build its entire theory of magical practice on this foundation.

Baphomet

There is one image associated with Éliphas Lévi that has outlasted everything else he produced, and its history is almost as interesting as the man himself:

For Dogme et Rituel, Lévi created an illustration he called “the Baphomet of Méndes”: a winged, androgynous, goat-headed figure seated on a throne between two pillars, one arm pointing up and one pointing down (“as above, so below”), bearing a caduceus, adorned with a pentagram on the forehead, and crowned with a torch between the horns. The name Baphomet came from medieval accusations against the Knights Templar, who were allegedly caught worshipping an idol by that name at their dissolution in 1307—accusations almost certainly fabricated by Philip IV of France, who coveted their wealth and status.

Lévi took the name and, characteristically, transformed it into something philosophically different, making the former idol a symbol of the reconciliation of opposites, of the balance between masculine and feminine, light and dark, matter and spirit, the earthly and the divine. It was never intended as a symbol of evil but, rather, as intended as a symbol of magical equilibrium—the alchemical coincidentia oppositorum. (Lévi was explicit about this: “This sign expresses the perfect harmony of mercy with justice.” The upward-pointing arm directs toward the divine; the downward-pointing arm toward the material world. The torch between the horns is the light of intelligence.) However, over time, the image has been notoriously adopted by Satanists, conspiracy theorists, and heavy metal album designers—much to the chagrin of genuine magicians and practitioners. (The Satanic Temple’s bronze Baphomet statue, erected as a counterpoint to Ten Commandments monuments outside American courthouses, is philosophically descended from Lévi’s illustration in an 1854 French occult encyclopedia, and one wonders if Lévi would have found this development amusing, or philosophically inappropriate.)

The Legacy of the Lever

Lévi died on May 31, 1875, and was buried at Ivry Cemetery. His grave was subsequently disinterred and his remains placed in a common grave—the final indignity of a life that had known financial precarity from beginning to end. But his books survived and remain both popular and influential to this day: Dogme et Rituel, Histoire de la Magie, La Clef des Grands Mystères, and the posthumously published Le Grand Arcane not only circulated through the esoteric world upon their initial publications, but continue to inspire occultists around the world today.

Helena Blavatsky, who co-founded the Theosophical Society the same year Lévi died, absorbed his system and built upon it; William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, founding the Golden Dawn in 1888, used Lévi’s Tarot-Kabbalah synthesis as one of the foundational pillars of the Order’s magical system; the aforementioned A.E. Waite—who translated Lévi into English and was somewhat ambivalent about his accuracy and scholarship—nonetheless shaped the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot on the framework Lévi had created. And Aleister Crowley, never to be outdone, translated and annotated some of Levi's works ... before declaring himself Lévi reincarnated.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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