Eliphas Lévi
| Eliphas Levi | |
|---|---|
Eliphas Levi photgraphed in 1864
|
|
| Born |
Alphonse Louis Constant February 8, 1810 Paris, French Empire |
| Died | May 31, 1875 (aged 65) Paris, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Education |
Seminary of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet Seminary of Saint-Sulpice |
| Notable work | Dogma and Ritual of High Magic |
| Spouse(s) | Marie-Noémi Cadiot (m. 1846; div. 1854) |
| Era | 20th century |
| Region | Western |
| School | Esotericism |
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Main interests
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Politics, religion, occult, magic |
|
Notable ideas
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Magical pentagram, Baphomet, tarots |
Éliphas Lévi (born Alphonse Louis Constant; 8 February 1810 – 31 May 1875), was a French occult author and ceremonial magician.
"Éliphas Lévi", the name under which he published his books, was his attempt to translate or transliterate his given names "Alphonse Louis" into the Hebrew language.
Constant was the son of a shoemaker in Paris; he attended the seminary of Saint Sulpice since 1830 and began to study to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood. However, while at the seminary he fell in love and left in 1836 without being ordained. He spent the following years among his socialist and Romantic friends, including Henri-François-Alphonse Esquiros and so-called petits romantiques such as Gérard de Nerval and Théophile Gautier. During this time he turned to a radical socialism that was decisively inspired by the writings of Félicité de Lamennais, the former leader of the influential neo-Catholic movement who had recently broken with Rome and propagated a Christian socialism. When Constant published his first radical writing, La Bible de la liberté (1841, The Bible of Liberty), he was sentenced to an eight-month prison term and a high fine. Contemporaries saw in him the most notorious "disciple" of Lamennais, although the two men do not seem to have established a personal contact. In the following years, Constant would describe his ideology as communisme néo-catholique and publish a number of socialist books and pamphlets. Like many socialists, he propagated socialism as "true Christianity" and denounced the Churches as corruptors of the teachings of Christ.
Important friends at that time include, next to Esquiros, the feminist Flora Tristan, the excentric socialist mystic Simon Ganneau, and the socialist Charley Fauvety. In the course of the 1840s, Constant developed close ties to the Fourierist movement, publishing in Fourierist publications and praising Fourierism as the "true Christianity". Several of his books were published by the Fourierist Librairie phalanstérienne. He also turned to the writings of the Catholic traditionalist Joseph de Maistre, whose writings were highly popular in socialist circles. An especially radical pamphlet, La voix de la famine (1846, The Voice of Famine), earned Constant another prison sentence that was significantly shortened at the request of his pregnant wife, Marie-Noémi Cadiot.
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