Synopsis :
Elephas Levi (the pen name of Abbé Louis Constant, 1810-1875) was one of the leading occultists of the 19th century. For most of his life he was a Roman Catholic priest; even after he was defrocked in 1844, his views continued to have a strong Catholic influence. His books, translated into English after his death, were essential to the development of other occultists such as Albert Pike, Helena Blavatsky, A.E. Waite, and Aleister Crowley.
"Paradoxes of the Highest Science" was the first of Levi's books to be translated into English. (The original French version was published in 1856.) This edition reprints the 1883 text issued by the Theosophical Society (translated by Anonymous) and includes the 1922 commentary by "an Eminent Occultist" (perhaps Helena P. Blavatsky).
In addition to "Paradoxes of the Highest Science," this edition includes two more essays by Levi, "Synthetic Recapitulation" and "The Great Secret."
About the Author:
"Eliphas Levi, born Alphonse Louis Constant, (February 8, 1810 - May 31, 1875) was a French occult author and magician.
"Eliphas Levi," the name under which he published his books, was his attempt to translate or transliterate his given names "Alphonse Louis" into Hebrew.
Levi was the son of a shoemaker in Paris; he attended a seminary and began to study to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood. However, while at the seminary he fell in love, and left without being ordained. He wrote a number of minor religious works: Des Moeurs et des Doctrines du Rationalisme en France ("Of the Moral Customs and Doctrines of Rationalism in France", 1839) was a tract within the cultural stream of the Counter-Enlightenment. La Mere de Dieu ("The Mother of God", 1844) followed and, after leaving the seminary, two radical tracts, L'Evangile du Peuple ("The Gospel of the People," 1840), and Le Testament de la Liberte ("The Testament of Liberty"), published in the year of revolutions, 1848, led to two brief prison sentences.
In 1854, Levi visited England, where he met the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was interested in Rosicrucianism as a literary theme and was the president of a minor Rosicrucian order. With Bulwer-Lytton, Levi conceived the notion of writing a treatise on magic. This appeared in 1855 under the title Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, and was translated into English by Arthur Edward Waite as Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual. Its famous opening lines present the single essential theme of Occultism and gives some of the flavor of its atmosphere:
Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. (Introduction)
In 1861, he published a sequel..." (Quote from wikipedia.org)
Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.
