The Man Who Revived the Occult
Modern occultism owes its rebirth to one figure above all others. He dubbed himself Eliphas Lévi.
Understanding occult history requires accepting history as it really existed not as I might want it to romantically exist.
That does not imply that novelty is wrong. Nor does it mean that because an idea is old and widely repeated it is necessarily true — or because an idea is new, novel, or reformed it is necessarily trifling.
Religion has always been combinative and syncretic. Very often meaning is found by reading new stories into an object, idea, or practice — or reviving a theme or idea that has perhaps reached us in fragmentary ways.
In that vein, we encounter a figure of extraordinary intellectual vigor and contradiction. Through his efforts, occultism found new life and expression, which reverberate to the present.
He was a French ex-seminarian, political reformer twice jailed for this beliefs in “neo-Catholic communism,” and self-taught occultist born Alphonse-Louis Constant. He became known throughout modern life as Eliphas Lévi (1810–1875).
Constant was a deep aficionado of Christian Kabbalah. He adopted the name Eliphas Lévi Zahed in a manner that he believed phonetically reproduced his given…
