Modern French

Modern French belongs to the Romance branch of the Indo-European family, descended from the Vulgar Latin of Roman Gaul, and it is the language in which a large part of the modern Western esoteric tradition was first written.

The nineteenth century French occult revival is the clearest case. Eliphas Levi wrote his systematic treatments of ceremonial magic and of tarot symbolism in French in the 1850s and 1860s, and English-language occultism met them only once they had been translated, decades later and through translators with purposes of their own. The tarot of the Golden Dawn, and through it most of the twentieth century's, rests on a French foundation reached at one remove.

Behind that revival lies an older French grimoire literature, magical books compiling ritual instructions, invocations and tables of correspondence, of which the Grimorium Verum and its seventeenth and eighteenth century companions are the best known. Those in turn draw on Latin and vernacular manuscript traditions, so the French is itself a layer rather than a beginning.

French Catholic and Huguenot Protestant theological writing forms a third body, and the same question applies to all three: whether a given text was written in French or arrived in it. The answer changes what a disputed phrase is evidence of, and it is a fact about the text rather than about the person reading it.

The French esoteric corpus falls into two connected parts. The nineteenth century occult revival is the more visible. Eliphas Levi's French-language treatment of ceremonial magic and of tarot symbolism proved highly influential on English-language occultism once translated, and the systems built in London and Paris in the decades afterwards took their structure from his French rather than from any older source directly.

Behind him stands the French grimoire literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, magical books compiling ritual instructions, invocations and symbolic correspondences, of which the Grimorium Verum is the most often cited. These drew on earlier Latin and vernacular magical manuscript traditions, which is why a French grimoire is best read as a stage in a longer transmission rather than as an origin.

French Catholic and Huguenot Protestant theological writing belongs to the same language but to a different world, and it is worth naming beside them because the French of a devotional treatise and the French of a grimoire were being written in one country at one time, sometimes for the same readers.

A modern French translation of a text composed in another language is not part of any of this. The distinction is not pedantry: it decides whether a French phrase is an author's own or a translator's, and those two questions are answered by different means.