Éliphas Lévi

Alphonse-Louis Constant trained for the Catholic priesthood and got as far as deacon before leaving in 1836. He spent the next fifteen years as a radical journalist and pamphleteer, was imprisoned more than once for his politics, and only in the 1850s reinvented himself as Eliphas Levi Zahed, a Hebraized form of his own two names. The magician was a second career built on the wreckage of a first.

This matters for reading him. Levi did not inherit a tradition; he assembled one. Christopher McIntosh's study traces the components, Catholic sacramental theology, Swedenborg, Mesmer's magnetic fluid, Fabre d'Olivet, Court de Gebelin's tarot speculations, and the Kabbalah he read in Christian translation rather than in Hebrew. What he added was the organising nerve to put them into one system and write it in prose that people wanted to read.

Two of his inventions became so standard that they are now mistaken for ancient doctrine. The first is the Astral Light, a universal plastic medium that transmits magical effect, a Mesmerist fluid given a cosmological job. The second is the correspondence of the twenty-two tarot trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. That pairing is not medieval, not Egyptian and not Jewish; Decker and Dummett date it to Levi and his immediate French predecessors. Nearly every esoteric tarot system since, including the Golden Dawn's, is a variation on his scheme or a deliberate rearrangement of it.

The most reproduced image in modern occultism began as a frontispiece: the goat headed, winged, androgynous figure Levi drew for his Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. He did not intend a portrait of the devil, whose personal existence he denied, and he did not call the figure Satan. His caption and his text name it the Baphomet of Mendes, the sabbatic goat, and he explains it as a pantacle, a deliberately composite symbol of the equilibrium of opposites in the astral light: one arm raised and one lowered with solve and coagula written on the flesh, male and female in one body, animal and human, the torch of intelligence between the horns, the caduceus at the belly. It is a diagram of his central doctrine, that a single plastic medium, the astral light, underlies all magical action and can be fixed or dissolved by the trained will, and that every attribute of the accusers' devil is a misread symbol of that force.

The drawing's afterlife escaped him completely. Church polemic and later popular culture took it as the face of devil worship; the Church of Satan set a version of it in its sigil; and the word Baphomet, which Levi had lifted from the confessions extracted from the Templars five centuries earlier, became permanently welded to his goat. The misreading is itself instructive: Levi built an emblem that requires interpretation, and the world, as he himself taught it would, saw in the astral mirror what it brought.