Éliphas Lévi

Éliphas Lévi (1810–1875) was the pen name of Alphonse Louis Constant, a French occult author who did more than anyone to revive the study of magic in the nineteenth century. The son of a Paris shoemaker, he trained for the priesthood but left before final vows, wrote radical socialist pamphlets that earned him prison terms, and in the 1850s turned to the Kabbalah, the tarot and the hermetic tradition. His Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, The History of Magic and The Key of the Mysteries presented magic as a coherent science of the will and the astral light, and they shaped the Golden Dawn, Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley.