Blavatsky on Three Unpublished Essays by Éliphas Lévi

Éliphas Lévi, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 10 pages

Serialised in The Theosophist across March, April and May 1884 and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings VI. The three essays belong to the unpublished manuscripts of Éliphas Lévi and were copied and sent to the magazine by Baron Spedalieri of Marseilles; Blavatsky translated them from the French and expressed the hope of eventually giving every scrap the man ever wrote. Her estimate of him is affectionate but qualified — a remarkable Professor of High Transcendental Sciences and Occult Philosophy whose only mistake was to pander rather conspicuously to the dogmas of the established church, the church that unfrocked him.

What makes the file useful is the annotation rather than the text. Her footnotes are printed after the words of Lévi they answer, so the disagreements are visible: on the Eggregores, identified as the giants of Enoch; and on his phrase "created spirits", where she objects that "created" is a perfect misnomer in an occultist's mouth and always a blind in Lévi's work — he being quite aware of the fallacy implied by creation in the theistic sense and showing as much repeatedly elsewhere. It is, she adds, the last tribute she hopes her century will pay to an unscientific dogma of the past.

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