Feast · 31 May
Éliphas Lévi
Address · 155, rue de Sèvres, 75015 Paris
Metro · Vaneau (10)
Today · Other use. Along the Necker-Enfants malades hospital.
The story
Alphonse-Louis Constant was born in Paris on 8 February 1810, at 5 rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-des-Prés (now rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie), the son of a shoemaker. A seminarian at Saint-Sulpice, he renounced the priesthood in 1836 after the diaconate, moved in socialist circles, became close to Flora Tristan and was imprisoned for his writings. Around 1851, under the name Éliphas Lévi, he turned to occultism: Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854-1856), Histoire de la magie and La Clef des grands mystères (1861) made him a reference for French esotericism, and then for the Golden Dawn.
In May 1864 he settled at 155 rue de Sèvres, where he spent his last years, suffering from a heart condition contracted during the siege of 1870, then from severe bronchitis in 1874. He died there on 31 May 1875, at around two in the afternoon, aged 65. His religious funeral took place at Saint-François-Xavier; he was buried in the Ivry cemetery under a simple wooden cross, but his remains were exhumed in 1881 and placed in the common grave.
Crowley, born in October 1875, a few months after his death, believed himself to be the reincarnation of Lévi, a conviction encouraged by this coincidence of dates. He owed him a great deal: at the end of 1913 The Equinox published the English translation of La Clef des grands mystères, which takes up nearly half the volume, and Crowley adopted the name Baphomet, a figure Lévi had popularised through his famous drawing in Dogme et rituel. Lévi also appears among the saints of the Gnostic Mass, under his civil name Alphonse Louis Constant.
No. 155 now lies alongside the site of the Hôpital Necker-Enfants malades, whose main address is 149 rue de Sèvres. This complex combines the hospital founded in 1778 by Suzanne Necker, where Laennec invented the stethoscope in 1816, and the first paediatric hospital in the Western world, opened in 1802; the two institutions merged in 1920. Nothing marks Lévi on site, and his grave at Ivry no longer exists. Every 31 May, the map suggests a gathering, the eleventh collect and a laying of flowers.