The Key of the Mysteries by Éliphas Lévi: what the book teaches

The book of reconciliation

The Key of the Mysteries (La Clef des grands mystères) was published in Paris in 1861. Its author was Alphonse-Louis Constant, who wrote as Éliphas Lévi. It is the third of his major books, after Dogma and Ritual of High Magic (1854–1856) and The History of Magic (1860). The subtitle states the project: a key to the mysteries "according to Enoch, Abraham, Hermes Trismegistus and Solomon".

If Dogma and Ritual is the manual and the History is the overview, the Key is the philosophical book. Lévi tries to show that religion, science and magic, rightly understood, are saying the same thing.

Who Lévi was in 1861

Constant had been a seminarian, almost a priest, then a utopian socialist jailed for his pamphlets. In the 1850s he turned to occultism and became the leading name in French magic. By 1861 he was reconciling with Catholicism, and that shapes the book: he defends the Church and its dogma, but as symbols of truths that only the initiate fully understands. The historian Christopher McIntosh describes this phase as that of a "Catholic occultist".

The themes of the book

• Balance between faith and reason. For Lévi, faith without reason becomes superstition and reason without faith becomes sterile scepticism. The magician is the one who holds both in tension.
• The astral light. A universal force, midway between spirit and matter, that will and imagination can set in motion. It is Lévi's explanation for magic, dreams, visions and influence at a distance.
• The problem of evil. Evil is not a principle equal to good but an imbalance. The devil, for Lévi, is the astral light misdirected, not an independent being.
• Spiritualist phenomena. Lévi was writing at the height of the table-turning craze. He does not deny the phenomena, but attributes them to the astral light and to collective imagination rather than to the spirits of the dead, and warns against surrendering passively to them.

Lévi against spiritualism

This is one of the most interesting parts of the book. Allan Kardec published The Spirits' Book in 1857, four years earlier, and spiritualism was spreading fast in France, Britain and the United States. Lévi and Kardec lived in the same Paris and offered opposite explanations for the same phenomena. For Kardec, the spirits communicate; for Lévi, the astral light reflects what is already in the minds of those present. The difference between passive mediumship and active will would shape all Western magic after him.

Crowley and the English translation

Aleister Crowley was born in 1875, the year Lévi died, and believed he had been Lévi in a previous life. He translated The Key of the Mysteries into English, and the translation was published after Crowley's death. That is how many English-speaking readers first met the book.

Why it is still worth reading

The Key is not a book of rituals. Anyone looking for practical instructions should go to Dogma and Ritual, summarised in the magic of Éliphas Lévi. But this is where Lévi explains why magic makes sense at all, and that explanation, the will moving the astral light, underlies almost all modern ceremonial magic. To study that path, see the guide to ceremonial magic.