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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 name in Hebrew.
Lévi entered seminary as a young man, discovered quickly that the priesthood was not for him — his mystical, sexual, and social impulses proved too independent — and he morphed into an early Christian socialist. In 1841, Lévi published La Bible de la liberté (“The Bible of Liberty”), which the government seized upon its publication in August.
Convicted on charges of insurrection, Lévi languished eight months in prison. [1] The one consolation of brutal Parisian prison conditions was Lévi’s discovery of the visions of Swedish scientist-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Even during his later magical phase, the seeker-radical suffered another six-month prison sentence in 1855 for opposition to Napoleon III.
Lévi was a perpetually struggling outsider. He chaffed against the doctrinal limits and vows of celibacy required for the priesthood. He proved willing to sacrifice his freedom for his political…
