Insights to the High Idealism and Quaint Wit of Eliphas Lévi

Arthur Edward Waite and Boris de Zirkoff · Black versus White Magic Series · 22 pages

Unusual in this series for being a critical assessment rather than an endorsement, and by a writer with no theosophical axe to grind: Arthur Edward Waite on Eliphas Lévi, the French magus whose writings did more than any others to shape nineteenth-century European occultism. Waite begins with the concession — that no fascination in occult literature exceeds that of Lévi — and then proceeds to take him apart.

Intensely suggestive, Waite writes, but without much depth; splendid in generalisation, without accuracy in detail; and it would be difficult to cite a worse guide over mere matters of fact. He adds a sharper observation still: that had Lévi been left to himself he would not have got far in occult science, because his Gallic vivacity would have been blunted too quickly by the horrors of studious research. Boris de Zirkoff's material accompanies Waite's. For anyone reading Lévi seriously — and much of what passes for Western occultism descends from him — this is a corrective worth having early rather than late.

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