ELIPHAS LEVI ZAHED is a pseudonym which was adopted in his occult
writings by Alphonse Louis Constant, and it is said to be the
Hebrew equivalent of that name. The author of the Dogme et Rituel
de la Haute Magie was born in humble circumstances about the year
1810, being the son of a shoemaker. Giving evidence of unusual
intelligence at an early age, the priest of his parish conceived a
kindly interest for the obscure boy, and got him on the foundation
of Saint Sulpice, where he was educated without charge, and with a
view to the priesthood. He seems to have passed through the course
of study at that seminary in a way which did not disappoint the
expectations raised concerning him. In addition to Greek and Latin,
he is believed to have acquired considerable knowledge of Hebrew,
though it would be an error to suppose that any of his published
works exhibit special linguistic attainments. He entered on his
clerical novitiate, took minor orders, and in due course became a
deacon, being thus bound by a vow of perpetual celibacy. Shortly
after this step, he was suddenly expelled from Saint Sulpice for
holding opinions contrary to the teaching of the Roman Catholic
Church. The existing accounts of this expulsion are hazy, and
incorporate unlikely elements, as, for example, that he was sent by
his ecclesiastical superiors to take duty in country places, where
he preached with great eloquence what, however, was doctrinally
unsound; but I believe that there is n<r precedent for the
preaching of deacons in the Latin Church. Pending the appearance of
the biography which has been for some years promised in France, we
have few available materials for a life of the "Abbe"" Constant. In
any case, he was cast back upon the world, with the limitations of
priestly engagements, while the priestly career
was closed to him—and what he did, or how he contrived to support himself, is unknown. By the year 1839 he had made some literary friendships, including that of Alphonse Esquiros, the forgotten author of a fantastic romance, entitled " The Magician";* and Esquiros introduced him to Ganneau, a distracted prophet of the period, who had adopted the dress of a woman, abode in a garret, and there preached a species of political illuminism, which was apparently concerned with the restoration of la vraie UgitimiU. He was, in fact, a second incarnation of Louis XVII.—" come back to earth for the fulfilment of a work of regeneration." t Constant and Esquiros, who had visited him for the purpose of scoffing, were carried away by his eloquence, and became his disciples. Some element of socialism must have combined with the illuminism of the visionary, and this appears to have borne fruit in the brain of Constant, taking shape ultimately in a book or pamphlet, entitled " The Gospel of Liberty," to which a transient importance was attached, foolishly enough, by the imprisonment of the author for a term of six months. There is some reason to suppose that Esquiros had a hand in the production, and also in the penalty. His incarceration over, Constant came forth undaunted, still cleaving to his prophet, and undertook a kind of apostolic mission into the provinces, addressing the country people, and suffering, as he himself tells us, persecution from the ill-disposed. I But the prophet ceased
* M. Papus, a contemporary French occultist, in an extended study of the "Doctrine of Eliphas Levi," asks scornfully: " Who now remembers anything of Paul Augnez or Esquiros, journalists pretending to initiation, and posing as professors of the occult sciences in the salons they frequented ?" No doubt they are forgotten, but Eliphas Levi states, in the Histoire de la Magie, that, by the publication of his romance of " The Magician," Esquiros founded a new school of fantastic magic, and gives sufficient account of his work to show that it was in parts excessively curious.
A woman who was associated with his mission, was, in like manner, supposed to have been Marie Antoinette.—See Histoire de la Magie, 1. 7., c. 5.
A vicious story, which has received recently some publicity in Paris, charges Constant with spreading a report of his death soon after his release from prison, assuming another name, imposing upon the Bishop of Eveux, to prophesy, presumably for want of an audience, and la vraie Ugitimitd was not restored, so the disciple returned to Paris, where, in spite of the pledge of his diaconate, he effected a runaway match with Mdlle. Noe'iny, a beautiful girl of sixteen. This lady bore him two children, who died in tender years, and subsequently she deserted him. Her husband is said to have tried all expedients to procure her return,* but in vain, and she even further asserted her position by obtaining a legal annulment of her marriage, on the ground that the contracting parties were a minor and a person bound to celibacy by an irrevocable vow. The lady, it may be added, had other domestic adventures, ending in a second marriage about the year 1872. Madame Constant was not only very beautiful, but exceedingly talented, and after her separation she became famous as a sculptor, exhibiting at the Salon and elsewhere under the name of Claude Vingmy. It is not impossible that she may be still alive; in the sense of her artistic genius, at least, she is something more than a memory.
At what date Alphonse Louis Constant applied himself to the study of the occult sciences is uncertain, like most other epochs of his life. The statement on page 142 of this translation, that in the year 1825 he entered on a fateful path, which led him through suffering to knowledge, must not be understood in the sense that his initiation took place at that period, which was indeed early in boyhood. It obviously refers to his enrolment among the scholars of Saint Sulpice, which, in a sense, led to suffering, and perhaps ultimately to science, as it certainly obtained him education. The episode of the New Alliance—so Gannean termed his system—connects with transcendentalism, at least and obtaining a licence to preach and administer the sacraments in that diocese, though he was not a priest. He is represented as drawing large congregations to the cathedral by his preaching, but at length the judge who had sentenced him unmasked the impostor, and the sacrilegious farce thus terminated dramatically.
* Including Black Magic and pacts with Lucifer, according to the silly calumnies of his enemies.
on the side of hallucination, 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 Phal-anste'rienne shew that his inclinations were still towards Socialism, tinctured by religious aspirations. The period which intervened between his wife's desertion* 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," which is still extant in the encyclopaedic series of the Abbe* Migne; this work betrays no leaning towards occult science, and, indeed, no acquaintance therewith. 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 Hituel, 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 Mysteres, 1861 ; a second edition of the Dogme et Rituel, to which a long and irrelevant introduction was unfortunately prefixed, 1862; Fables ct Symloles, 1864; 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 the amphlets 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 command a large circulation, but they secured him admirers and pupils, from whom he received remuneration
* I must not be understood as definitely attaching blame to Madame Constant for the course she adopted. Her husband was approaching middle life when he withdrew her—still a child—from her legal protectors, and the runaway marriage which began by forswearing was, under the circumstances, little better than a seduction thinly legalised, and it was afterwards not improperly dissolved.
in return for personal or written courses of instruction. He was commonly to be found chez lui in a species of magical vestment, which may be pardoned in a French magus, and his only available portrait —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 transcendentalised Imperialism, his political faith must have been as much tried by the events which followed the siege of Paris as was his patriotic enthusiasm by the reverses which culminated at Se"dan. 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, which are still in course of publication, and innumerable letters to his pupils—Baron Spedalieri alone possesses nine volumes—have been happily preserved in most cases, and are in some respects more valuable than the formal treatises.
No modern expositor of occult science can bear any comparison with Sliphas Levi, and among ancient expositors, though many stand higher in authority, 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 is no influence so great—no fascination in occult literature exceeds that of the French magus. The others are surrendered to specialists and the typical serious students to whom all dull and unreadable masterpieces are dedicated, directly or not; but he is read and appreciated, much as we read and appreciate new and delightful verse which, through some conceit of the poet, is put into the vesture of Chaucer. Indeed, the writings of filiphas Levi stand, as regards the grand old line of initiation, in relatively the same position as the " Earthly Paradise " of Mr William Morris stands to the " Canterbury Tales." There is the recurrence to the old conceptions, and there is the assumption of the old drapery, but there is in each case the new 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 hogsheads of Guienne, Florence gold cloth, and Ypres napery " of the poet. In both cases it is the year 1850 ct 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'etre of his poetry, and, in express contradiction to his own mournful question, has endeavoured to " set the crooked straight " by betaking himself to Socialism, so filiphas LeVi surrendered the rod of 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." But the one is, as the other was, a man of sufficient ability to make a paradoxical defence of a position which remains untenable. Students of ICliphas LeVi will be acquainted with the qualifications and stealthy retractations by which the somewhat uncompromising position of initiated superiority in the " Doctrine and Eitual," had its real significance read out of it by the later works of the magus. I have dealt with this point exhaustively in another place,* and there is no call to pass over the same ground a second time. I propose rather to indicate as briefly as possible some new considerations which will help us to understand why there were grave discrepancies between the " Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendent Magic" and the volumes which followed these. In the first place, the earlier books were written more expressly from the standpoint of initiation, and in the language thereof; they obviously contain much which it would be mere folly to construe after a literal fashion, and
* See the Critical Essay prefixed to " The Mysteries of Magic : a Digest of the Writings of Eliphas Levi." London : George Redway. 1886.
what filiphas LeVi 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 modern transcen-dentalist on the technical exaggerations of the secret sciences. For the proof we need travel no further than the introduction to " The Doctrine of Magic," and to the Hebrew manuscript cited therein, as to the powers and privileges of the magus. Here the literal interpretation would be insanity; these claims conceal a secret meaning, and are trickery in their verbal sense. They are what filiphas LeVi 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" (p. 223). But this consideration is not in itself sufficient to take account of the issues that are involved; it will not explain, for example, why filiphas Levi, who consistently teaches in the " Doctrine and Ritual" that the dogmas of so-called revealed religion are nurse-tales for children, should subsequently have insisted on their acceptation in the sense of the orthodox Church by the grown men of science, and it becomes necessary here to touch upon a matter which, by its nature, and obviously, does not admit of complete elucidation.
The precise period of study which produced the " Doctrine and Eitual of Transcendent 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 filiphas LeVi as constitutionally capable of profound or extensive book study. Intensely suggestive, he is at the same time without much evidence of depth; splendid in generalisation, 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 philosophical 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 much 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 appro-fondir. 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. It does not therefore seem unreasonable to affirm that had LeVi been left to himself, he would not have got far in occult science, because his Gallic vivacity would have been blunted too quickly by the horrors of mere research; but he did somehow fall within a circle of initiation which curtailed the necessity for such research, and put him in the right path, making visits to the Bibliotheque Rationale and the Arsenal of only subsidiary importance. This, therefore, constitutes the importance of the " Doctrine and Eitual"; disguised indubitably, it is still the voice of initiation; of what school does not matter, for in this connection nothing can be spoken plainly, and I can ask only the lenience of deferred judgment from my readers for my honourable assurance that I am not speaking idly. The grades of that initiation had been only partly ascended by filiphas Levi when he published the " Doctrine and Ritual," and its publication closed the path of his progress : as he was expelled by Saint Sulpice for the exercise of private judgment in matters of doctrinal belief, so he was expelled by his occult chiefs for the undue exercise of personal discretion in the matter of the revelation of the mysteries. Now, these facts explain in the first place the importance, as I have said, of the " Doctrine and Eitual," because it represents a knowledge which cannot be derived from books ; they explain, secondly, the shortcomings of that work, because it is not the result of a full knowledge; why, thirdly, the later writings contain
no evidences of further knowledge ; and, lastly, I think that they materially assist us to understand why there are retractations, qualifications, and subterfuges in the said later works. Having gone too far, he naturally attempted to go back, and just as he strove to patch up a species of modus vivendi with the church of his childhood, so he endeavoured, by throwing dust in the eyes of his readers, to make his peace with that initiation, the first law of which he had indubitably violated. In both cases, and quite naturally, he failed.
It remains for me to state what I feel personally to be the chief limitation of LeVi, namely, that he was a tran-scendentalist but not a mystic, and, indeed, he was scarcely a transcendentalist in the accepted sense, for he was fundamentally a materialist —a materialist, moreover, who at times approached perilously towards atheism, as when he states that God is a hypothesis which is "very probably necessary "; he was, moreover, 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 sacramentally, 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 presumptions of analogy. I submit that this is not the doctrine of occult science, nor the summum "bonum of the greater initiation; that transcendental pneumatology is more by its own; hypothesis than an alphabetical system argued kabbalis-tically; and that more than mere memories can on the same assumption be evoked in the astral light. 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 takes us to the bottom step of the ladder of the invisible hierarchy and instructs 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. An annotated translation exceeded the scope of the present undertaking, but there is much in the text which follows that offers scope for detailed criticism, and there are points also where further elucidation would be useful. One of the most obvious defects, the result of mere carelessness or undue haste in writing, is the promise to explain or to prove given points later on, which are forgotten subsequently by the author. Instances will be found on p. 65, concerning the method of determining the appearance of unborn children by means of the pentagram; on p. 83, concerning the rules for the recognition of sex in the astral body; on p. 9*7, concerning the notary art; on p. 100, concerning the magical side of the Exercises of St Ignatius; on p. 123, concerning the alleged sorcery of Grandier and Girard; on p. 125, concerning Schroepffer's secrets and formulas for evocation; on p. 134, concerning the occult iconography of Gaffarel. In some cases the promised elucidations appear in other places than those indicated, but they are mostly wanting altogether. There are other perplexities with which the reader must deal according to his judgment. The explanation of the quadrature of the circle on p. 37 is a childish folly; the illustration of perpetual motion on p. 55 involves a mechanical absurdity ; the doctrine of the perpetuation of the same physiognomies from generation to generation is not less absurd in heredity ; the cause assigned to cholera and other ravaging epidemics, more especially the reference to bacteria, seems equally outrageous in physics. There is one other matter to which attention should be directed; the Hebrew quotations in the original — and the observation applies generally to all the works of Le'vi— swarm with typographical and other errors, some of which it is impossible to correct, as, for example, the passage cited from Eabbi Abraham on p. 266. So also the Greek conjuration, pp. 277 and 278, is simply untranslatable as it stands, and the version given is not only highly conjectural, but omits an entire passage owing to insuperable difficulties. Lastly, after careful consideration, I have judged it the wiser course to leave out the preliminary essay which was prefixed to the second edition of the " Doctrine and Ritual "; its prophetic utterances upon the mission of Napoleon III. have been stultified by subsequent events; it is devoid of any connection with the work which it precedes, and, representing as it does the later views of Levi, it would be a source of confusion to the reader. The present translation represents, therefore, the first edition of the Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, omitting nothing but a few unimportant citations from old French grimoires in an unnecessary appendix at the end. The portrait of Levi is from a carte-de-visite in the possession of Mr Edward Maitland, and was issued with his " Life of Anna Kingsford," a few months ago.
was closed to him—and what he did, or how he contrived to support himself, is unknown. By the year 1839 he had made some literary friendships, including that of Alphonse Esquiros, the forgotten author of a fantastic romance, entitled " The Magician";* and Esquiros introduced him to Ganneau, a distracted prophet of the period, who had adopted the dress of a woman, abode in a garret, and there preached a species of political illuminism, which was apparently concerned with the restoration of la vraie UgitimiU. He was, in fact, a second incarnation of Louis XVII.—" come back to earth for the fulfilment of a work of regeneration." t Constant and Esquiros, who had visited him for the purpose of scoffing, were carried away by his eloquence, and became his disciples. Some element of socialism must have combined with the illuminism of the visionary, and this appears to have borne fruit in the brain of Constant, taking shape ultimately in a book or pamphlet, entitled " The Gospel of Liberty," to which a transient importance was attached, foolishly enough, by the imprisonment of the author for a term of six months. There is some reason to suppose that Esquiros had a hand in the production, and also in the penalty. His incarceration over, Constant came forth undaunted, still cleaving to his prophet, and undertook a kind of apostolic mission into the provinces, addressing the country people, and suffering, as he himself tells us, persecution from the ill-disposed. I But the prophet ceased
* M. Papus, a contemporary French occultist, in an extended study of the "Doctrine of Eliphas Levi," asks scornfully: " Who now remembers anything of Paul Augnez or Esquiros, journalists pretending to initiation, and posing as professors of the occult sciences in the salons they frequented ?" No doubt they are forgotten, but Eliphas Levi states, in the Histoire de la Magie, that, by the publication of his romance of " The Magician," Esquiros founded a new school of fantastic magic, and gives sufficient account of his work to show that it was in parts excessively curious.
A woman who was associated with his mission, was, in like manner, supposed to have been Marie Antoinette.—See Histoire de la Magie, 1. 7., c. 5.
A vicious story, which has received recently some publicity in Paris, charges Constant with spreading a report of his death soon after his release from prison, assuming another name, imposing upon the Bishop of Eveux, to prophesy, presumably for want of an audience, and la vraie Ugitimitd was not restored, so the disciple returned to Paris, where, in spite of the pledge of his diaconate, he effected a runaway match with Mdlle. Noe'iny, a beautiful girl of sixteen. This lady bore him two children, who died in tender years, and subsequently she deserted him. Her husband is said to have tried all expedients to procure her return,* but in vain, and she even further asserted her position by obtaining a legal annulment of her marriage, on the ground that the contracting parties were a minor and a person bound to celibacy by an irrevocable vow. The lady, it may be added, had other domestic adventures, ending in a second marriage about the year 1872. Madame Constant was not only very beautiful, but exceedingly talented, and after her separation she became famous as a sculptor, exhibiting at the Salon and elsewhere under the name of Claude Vingmy. It is not impossible that she may be still alive; in the sense of her artistic genius, at least, she is something more than a memory.
At what date Alphonse Louis Constant applied himself to the study of the occult sciences is uncertain, like most other epochs of his life. The statement on page 142 of this translation, that in the year 1825 he entered on a fateful path, which led him through suffering to knowledge, must not be understood in the sense that his initiation took place at that period, which was indeed early in boyhood. It obviously refers to his enrolment among the scholars of Saint Sulpice, which, in a sense, led to suffering, and perhaps ultimately to science, as it certainly obtained him education. The episode of the New Alliance—so Gannean termed his system—connects with transcendentalism, at least and obtaining a licence to preach and administer the sacraments in that diocese, though he was not a priest. He is represented as drawing large congregations to the cathedral by his preaching, but at length the judge who had sentenced him unmasked the impostor, and the sacrilegious farce thus terminated dramatically.
* Including Black Magic and pacts with Lucifer, according to the silly calumnies of his enemies.
on the side of hallucination, 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 Phal-anste'rienne shew that his inclinations were still towards Socialism, tinctured by religious aspirations. The period which intervened between his wife's desertion* 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," which is still extant in the encyclopaedic series of the Abbe* Migne; this work betrays no leaning towards occult science, and, indeed, no acquaintance therewith. 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 Hituel, 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 Mysteres, 1861 ; a second edition of the Dogme et Rituel, to which a long and irrelevant introduction was unfortunately prefixed, 1862; Fables ct Symloles, 1864; 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 the amphlets 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 command a large circulation, but they secured him admirers and pupils, from whom he received remuneration
* I must not be understood as definitely attaching blame to Madame Constant for the course she adopted. Her husband was approaching middle life when he withdrew her—still a child—from her legal protectors, and the runaway marriage which began by forswearing was, under the circumstances, little better than a seduction thinly legalised, and it was afterwards not improperly dissolved.
in return for personal or written courses of instruction. He was commonly to be found chez lui in a species of magical vestment, which may be pardoned in a French magus, and his only available portrait —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 transcendentalised Imperialism, his political faith must have been as much tried by the events which followed the siege of Paris as was his patriotic enthusiasm by the reverses which culminated at Se"dan. 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, which are still in course of publication, and innumerable letters to his pupils—Baron Spedalieri alone possesses nine volumes—have been happily preserved in most cases, and are in some respects more valuable than the formal treatises.
No modern expositor of occult science can bear any comparison with Sliphas Levi, and among ancient expositors, though many stand higher in authority, 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 is no influence so great—no fascination in occult literature exceeds that of the French magus. The others are surrendered to specialists and the typical serious students to whom all dull and unreadable masterpieces are dedicated, directly or not; but he is read and appreciated, much as we read and appreciate new and delightful verse which, through some conceit of the poet, is put into the vesture of Chaucer. Indeed, the writings of filiphas Levi stand, as regards the grand old line of initiation, in relatively the same position as the " Earthly Paradise " of Mr William Morris stands to the " Canterbury Tales." There is the recurrence to the old conceptions, and there is the assumption of the old drapery, but there is in each case the new 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 hogsheads of Guienne, Florence gold cloth, and Ypres napery " of the poet. In both cases it is the year 1850 ct 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'etre of his poetry, and, in express contradiction to his own mournful question, has endeavoured to " set the crooked straight " by betaking himself to Socialism, so filiphas LeVi surrendered the rod of 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." But the one is, as the other was, a man of sufficient ability to make a paradoxical defence of a position which remains untenable. Students of ICliphas LeVi will be acquainted with the qualifications and stealthy retractations by which the somewhat uncompromising position of initiated superiority in the " Doctrine and Eitual," had its real significance read out of it by the later works of the magus. I have dealt with this point exhaustively in another place,* and there is no call to pass over the same ground a second time. I propose rather to indicate as briefly as possible some new considerations which will help us to understand why there were grave discrepancies between the " Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendent Magic" and the volumes which followed these. In the first place, the earlier books were written more expressly from the standpoint of initiation, and in the language thereof; they obviously contain much which it would be mere folly to construe after a literal fashion, and
* See the Critical Essay prefixed to " The Mysteries of Magic : a Digest of the Writings of Eliphas Levi." London : George Redway. 1886.
what filiphas LeVi 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 modern transcen-dentalist on the technical exaggerations of the secret sciences. For the proof we need travel no further than the introduction to " The Doctrine of Magic," and to the Hebrew manuscript cited therein, as to the powers and privileges of the magus. Here the literal interpretation would be insanity; these claims conceal a secret meaning, and are trickery in their verbal sense. They are what filiphas LeVi 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" (p. 223). But this consideration is not in itself sufficient to take account of the issues that are involved; it will not explain, for example, why filiphas Levi, who consistently teaches in the " Doctrine and Ritual" that the dogmas of so-called revealed religion are nurse-tales for children, should subsequently have insisted on their acceptation in the sense of the orthodox Church by the grown men of science, and it becomes necessary here to touch upon a matter which, by its nature, and obviously, does not admit of complete elucidation.
The precise period of study which produced the " Doctrine and Eitual of Transcendent 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 filiphas LeVi as constitutionally capable of profound or extensive book study. Intensely suggestive, he is at the same time without much evidence of depth; splendid in generalisation, 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 philosophical 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 much 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 appro-fondir. 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. It does not therefore seem unreasonable to affirm that had LeVi been left to himself, he would not have got far in occult science, because his Gallic vivacity would have been blunted too quickly by the horrors of mere research; but he did somehow fall within a circle of initiation which curtailed the necessity for such research, and put him in the right path, making visits to the Bibliotheque Rationale and the Arsenal of only subsidiary importance. This, therefore, constitutes the importance of the " Doctrine and Eitual"; disguised indubitably, it is still the voice of initiation; of what school does not matter, for in this connection nothing can be spoken plainly, and I can ask only the lenience of deferred judgment from my readers for my honourable assurance that I am not speaking idly. The grades of that initiation had been only partly ascended by filiphas Levi when he published the " Doctrine and Ritual," and its publication closed the path of his progress : as he was expelled by Saint Sulpice for the exercise of private judgment in matters of doctrinal belief, so he was expelled by his occult chiefs for the undue exercise of personal discretion in the matter of the revelation of the mysteries. Now, these facts explain in the first place the importance, as I have said, of the " Doctrine and Eitual," because it represents a knowledge which cannot be derived from books ; they explain, secondly, the shortcomings of that work, because it is not the result of a full knowledge; why, thirdly, the later writings contain
no evidences of further knowledge ; and, lastly, I think that they materially assist us to understand why there are retractations, qualifications, and subterfuges in the said later works. Having gone too far, he naturally attempted to go back, and just as he strove to patch up a species of modus vivendi with the church of his childhood, so he endeavoured, by throwing dust in the eyes of his readers, to make his peace with that initiation, the first law of which he had indubitably violated. In both cases, and quite naturally, he failed.
It remains for me to state what I feel personally to be the chief limitation of LeVi, namely, that he was a tran-scendentalist but not a mystic, and, indeed, he was scarcely a transcendentalist in the accepted sense, for he was fundamentally a materialist —a materialist, moreover, who at times approached perilously towards atheism, as when he states that God is a hypothesis which is "very probably necessary "; he was, moreover, 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 sacramentally, 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 presumptions of analogy. I submit that this is not the doctrine of occult science, nor the summum "bonum of the greater initiation; that transcendental pneumatology is more by its own; hypothesis than an alphabetical system argued kabbalis-tically; and that more than mere memories can on the same assumption be evoked in the astral light. 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 takes us to the bottom step of the ladder of the invisible hierarchy and instructs 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. An annotated translation exceeded the scope of the present undertaking, but there is much in the text which follows that offers scope for detailed criticism, and there are points also where further elucidation would be useful. One of the most obvious defects, the result of mere carelessness or undue haste in writing, is the promise to explain or to prove given points later on, which are forgotten subsequently by the author. Instances will be found on p. 65, concerning the method of determining the appearance of unborn children by means of the pentagram; on p. 83, concerning the rules for the recognition of sex in the astral body; on p. 9*7, concerning the notary art; on p. 100, concerning the magical side of the Exercises of St Ignatius; on p. 123, concerning the alleged sorcery of Grandier and Girard; on p. 125, concerning Schroepffer's secrets and formulas for evocation; on p. 134, concerning the occult iconography of Gaffarel. In some cases the promised elucidations appear in other places than those indicated, but they are mostly wanting altogether. There are other perplexities with which the reader must deal according to his judgment. The explanation of the quadrature of the circle on p. 37 is a childish folly; the illustration of perpetual motion on p. 55 involves a mechanical absurdity ; the doctrine of the perpetuation of the same physiognomies from generation to generation is not less absurd in heredity ; the cause assigned to cholera and other ravaging epidemics, more especially the reference to bacteria, seems equally outrageous in physics. There is one other matter to which attention should be directed; the Hebrew quotations in the original — and the observation applies generally to all the works of Le'vi— swarm with typographical and other errors, some of which it is impossible to correct, as, for example, the passage cited from Eabbi Abraham on p. 266. So also the Greek conjuration, pp. 277 and 278, is simply untranslatable as it stands, and the version given is not only highly conjectural, but omits an entire passage owing to insuperable difficulties. Lastly, after careful consideration, I have judged it the wiser course to leave out the preliminary essay which was prefixed to the second edition of the " Doctrine and Ritual "; its prophetic utterances upon the mission of Napoleon III. have been stultified by subsequent events; it is devoid of any connection with the work which it precedes, and, representing as it does the later views of Levi, it would be a source of confusion to the reader. The present translation represents, therefore, the first edition of the Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, omitting nothing but a few unimportant citations from old French grimoires in an unnecessary appendix at the end. The portrait of Levi is from a carte-de-visite in the possession of Mr Edward Maitland, and was issued with his " Life of Anna Kingsford," a few months ago.