Did Eliphas Levi actually believe in magic?

[acrowley93]

Sometimes I really get the impression that this is a very creative thinker using mythological language as a way to ground psychologically, and he really didn’t “believe” in magic as much as he thought it was a way to restore meaning to the mundane

 

[stalkinghyena]

He was trying to reconcile Reason and Faith, like a lot of thinkers going back to the Middle Ages. How he transformed from passionate priest-candidate to violent socialist revolutionary to the High Magus of France is an interesting track with a number of blackout periods. But he was, at points, a hard "believer" in a number of things that got him in hot water.

At the very least, for him, magic meant mastering symbolism for the sake of utility, be it personal or social. He always hints at something more, and leaves paradoxes in his wake, which IMO were on purpose (mostly).
Curiously, at his final residence before his death, he had grouped on his wall pictures of Voltaire and Rousseau - I think with Jesus also.

I've always found it an interesting meditation to draw a chain of ideas out linking his "Travail, Realization, Adaptation" to the later formulation, "The Method of Science and the Aim of Religion."

 

[freakstarsh]

Magic is not to simply "believe" as something shallow, but to work, which is convenient for Eliphas' books

 

[MorganBlack]

Eliphas Levi is the starting point of a modern occult timeline I usually mark in red as "ignore." I can't stand him personally , but others may get something out of his idiotic twaddle.

He's the moment where the "Sovereign Logos" of a not-literal Renaissance - Early Modern symbolic/metaphorical vocabulary was exchanged for the astral hallucination of the 19th-century Occult Revival. Levi shifted our operative metaphors from the theurgic ascent to the One of Neoplatonism (albeit expressed in Catholic religious symbolism ) to the manipulation of the "Astral Mirror." His synthesis was historically inaccurate and linguistically flawed, and forced disparate systems into a 19th-century romantic mold -becoming the hidden Ur-Granddaddy of the every chi-ball throwing dough-boy on the internet. Just , fuck no.

 

[WonderFire]

I never got that impression from him TBH. He went all out into evocation and necromancy if I remember correctly, not something "psychological model" folks ever bother with because it is too complicated.

 

[MorganBlack]

Levi was a "High Magician" in the effete philosophical vein. Whether he was a practicing magician in the traditional Solomonic sense is a point of debate among occult historians.

If I recall, the only evidence we have of Levi practicing the magic of the time - the grimoires, etc. - was when he once attempted to summon the spirit of Apollonius of Tyana. He dismissed the Grimorium Verum as a "degenerate" and "dangerous" work filled with "evil magic," which forever brands him as a coward and an idiot in my book. He cautioned against practicing magic (here meaning sorcery, and not mind metaphysics, which I also like, btw), calling it dangerous and hallucinatory for those without sufficient "mental discipline." The rankest of blather.

Better to read the Martinists, who preceded him by a century, I say, who did practice traditional magic and were also "high magicians," having read Boehme.

 

[Adelina]

Levi was a "High Magician" in the effete philosophical vein. Whether he was a practicing magician in the traditional Solomonic sense is a point of debate among occult historians.

If I recall, the only evidence we have of Levi practicing the magic of the time - the grimoires, etc. - was when he once attempted to summon the spirit of Apollonius of Tyana. He dismissed the Grimorium Verum as a "degenerate" and "dangerous" work filled with "evil magic," which forever brands him as a coward and an idiot in my book. He cautioned against practicing magic (here meaning sorcery, and not mind metaphysics, which I also like, btw), calling it dangerous and hallucinatory for those without sufficient "mental discipline." The rankest of blather.

Better to read the Martinists, who preceded him by a century, I say, who did practice traditional magic and were also "high magicians," having read Boehme.

Indeed, also Eliphas Levi seems to be making up a lot of things, like Goetic Circle and Baphomet (which managed to become heavily ingrained in pop-Occultism without anyone giving a second thought on its origination). He also boasted somewhere in his books that he did a whole ONE Magic Operation (the one with Apollonius... and its success was also quite dubious)... One Operation in his entire life, that basically makes him classic example of armchair magician.

However, Martitinists were slightly later than Eliphas Levi, unless you meant someone else. Papus, while also being part of pop-Occultism several decades ago, still was quite close to Solomonic Tradition and had a number of interesting experiments and works.

 

[MorganBlack]

Right right, Adelina! I totally forgot about Papus. I was thinking Pasqually and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin.

Papus was much later, if I recall clearly, and maybe, if we cut him some of the same slack we cut Mathers, was having to write for the same "modern audience" of the time as "scientific thinking " became all the rage and a sort of cargo cult among occultists.