Residence · 1861
Éliphas Lévi's apartment
Address · 19, avenue du Maine, 75015 Paris
Metro · Montparnasse – Bienvenüe (4, 6, 12, 13)
Today · Private, seen from the street. Residential building, seen from the street.
The story
Avenue du Maine, a former country road annexed to Paris in 1860, leads south from the Montparnasse district. Alphonse-Louis Constant (1810-1875), a former seminarian who, under the name Éliphas Lévi, became the leading thinker of French occultism, lived here in the early 1860s. He then made his living from private lessons and from his books, including Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. He also gave consultations to disciples from all over Europe.
Churton reports that an English visitor, Kenneth Mackenzie, came to see him at home on 3 December 1861. Lévi is said to have shown him a prophecy attributed to Paracelsus, read as foretelling the rise of Napoleon, the end of the papacy's political power, Italian unity and the future triumph of the occult sciences. The account, published in 1873, helped spread Lévi's image among English Rosicrucians and later in the Golden Dawn. The episode shows how far Lévi's reputation already reached beyond France's borders.
Lévi died in Paris in 1875; his remains, first buried in Ivry, were later moved to a common grave. The address on avenue du Maine remains one of the few Parisian homes of Lévi precisely documented by Churton. Crowley, who claimed to be his reincarnation, contributed to his posthumous fame. Mackenzie and other foreign visitors thus made this modest dwelling a place of pilgrimage for the first English Rosicrucians. The nearby Gare Montparnasse profoundly transformed the neighborhood in the 20th century.
To be checked · The numbering of avenue du Maine may have changed since 1861; location to be confirmed. Lévi died in 1875 and was buried in Ivry, outside Paris.