Eliphas Lévi

Éliphas Lévi was born Alphonse Louis Constant on 8 February 1810 in Paris, the son of a shoemaker. He was educated at the expense of the Church — first at a parish school, then at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, where he trained for the priesthood. He never took holy orders; a combination of his radical political views, his romantic entanglements and his heterodox theological opinions led to his departure from the seminary in the 1830s. He would spend the rest of his life in the ambiguous position of a man deeply formed by Catholic theology and ritual who had rejected the institution of the Church.

Throughout the 1840s Constant was active in radical socialist politics — writing pamphlets and a book called The Gospel of Liberty that landed him briefly in prison. He married Noémie Cadiot in 1846 (the marriage was turbulent and eventually failed). He was associated with various utopian and socialist thinkers of the period and was in many ways a man of the revolutionary left before his turn toward occultism.

The transformation came in the early 1850s. Constant — now writing under the Hebrew translation of his name, Éliphas Lévi — immersed himself in the study of Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, ceremonial magic and the Tarot. In 1854 he visited London, where he performed a ritual evocation of the spirit of Apollonius of Tyana (which he described in remarkable detail but with characteristic ambiguity about what actually occurred). In 1855 he published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie — the book that created modern Western occultism.

The remaining twenty years of his life were devoted to writing and to correspondence with an international network of students and admirers. He was widely regarded as the foremost occult authority in Europe. He died in Paris on 31 May 1875 — the same year, it is often noted, that Aleister Crowley was born. Crowley later claimed to be Lévi's reincarnation, a claim he made somewhat seriously.

In 1856, in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Lévi published an engraving that would become the most reproduced and most misunderstood image in the history of Western occultism. The figure he called the Baphomet of Mendes — also described as the Sabbatic Goat — is a seated, winged, hermaphroditic figure with the head of a goat, human body, cloven hooves, a torch between the horns, a crescent moon on the forehead, a caduceus rising from the lap, and one hand pointing upward while the other points down, bearing the Latin words SOLVE (dissolve) on the right arm and COAGULA (coagulate) on the left.

Lévi was explicit that this was a philosophical symbol, not a deity or a figure of worship. Each element has a specific meaning within his magical system: the goat head represents the reconciliation of animal instinct with divine intelligence; the wings represent spiritual aspiration; the hermaphroditic body represents the union of opposites; the torch between the horns represents the light of intelligence shining from the material world; SOLVE et COAGULA represents the alchemical process of dissolution and reconstitution; the upward and downward pointing hands represent the Hermetic principle of correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm.

The image was subsequently used by Anton LaVey as the basis for the Sigil of Baphomet — the official symbol of the Church of Satan (a goat's head within a pentagram, pointing downward). This association with Satanism is almost entirely responsible for the popular understanding of Baphomet as a Satanic symbol. In Lévi's own system, Baphomet is explicitly not Satanic — it is a symbol of the synthesis of opposites and the equilibrium of forces. The Church of Satan appropriated the image for their own purposes, inverting its original philosophical meaning.

The word "Baphomet" itself predates Lévi by centuries — it appears in the Templar trial records as the alleged idol worshipped by the Knights Templar. Whether any such idol existed remains unproven. Lévi invented a symbolic figure to fit the name; the two have been conflated ever since.

Lévi's influence on subsequent Western esotericism is comprehensive and direct. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1887) built its entire magical curriculum on Lévi's synthesis — the Tarot-Kabbalah connection, the system of correspondences, the theory of the magical will. Its founders William Westcott and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers were steeped in Lévi; their student Aleister Crowley was obsessed with him.

Aleister Crowley translated Lévi's The Key of the Great Mysteries into English and explicitly styled himself as Lévi's magical heir — claiming reincarnation, adopting his terminology and radicalising his conception of the will into Thelema. Arthur Edward Waite — who translated Transcendental Magic into English and designed the Rider-Waite Tarot — was both deeply indebted to Lévi and deeply critical of him. Papus (Gérard Encausse) was Lévi's most direct French successor and the founder of the Martinist Order. Helena Blavatsky corresponded with Lévi and incorporated elements of his system into Theosophy while criticising others.

Every Tarot deck designed in the Western esoteric tradition — from Rider-Waite to Thoth to the Marseille-influenced decks — carries Lévi's mark. Every system of Western ceremonial magic draws on his framework. Every contemporary practitioner who uses the Tree of Life as an organisational structure for magical work is working within a tradition Lévi created. He is the indispensable pivot point of the modern Western magical tradition.