BEGINNINGS OF OCCULTIST KABBALAH:

ADOLPHE FRANCK AND ELIPHAS LÉVI

Wouter J. Hanegraaf

1. Introduction: Misunderstandings and the Politics

of Identity

In the opening chapter of his Major Trends of 1946, Gershom Scho-

lem called attention to the creative potential of misunderstandings

and misinterpretations in the history of kabbalah.

And in a brilliant

chapter of his Sprachtheorie der Kabbala als ästhetisches Paradigma

of 1998, Andreas Kilcher further analyzed this category of “produc-

tive misunderstanding”, showing that it recurs in Scholem’s writings

until the end of his life.

From the perspective of historiography, it is

only by means of misinterpretations and misunderstandings that new

creative developments take place. his phenomenon is full of paradox

and irony, as Scholem certainly realized, for the implication is that

the very tradition of kabbalah can continue and stay alive only insofar

as the materials handed down by tradition are misunderstood by new

generations. Perfect understanding, one has to conclude, would logi-

cally imply the death of tradition.

Although the category of “productive misunderstanding” was basic

to how he looked at history, Scholem himself was not entirely consis-

tent in applying it,

due to a latent conlict in his thinking between a

strictly historical/philological approach on the one hand, and a meta-

physical concept of “true kabbalah” on the other. In the terms of a

famous letter of 1937, the historian of kabbalah inds himself wander-

ing around in the nebulous fogs of history, but he does so because

he believes in the real and solid mountain of truth that stands in the

Scholem, Major Trends, 24–25.

Kilcher, Sprachtheorie, 23–29, with further reference to Scholem, ‘Die Stellung

der Kabbala’, 13; and manuscript notes in the Gershom Scholem archive in Jerusalem,

Arc 18.

In fact, even Kilcher is not: see Hanegraaf, review of Kilcher, 116. For the same

point about Scholem, see also Pasi, ‘British Occultism and Kabbalah’.

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108 wouter j. hanegraaff

middle but is hidden from his sight.

he conlict between mountain and nebula becomes visible, for example, in Scholem’s great Eranos lecture on Alchemy and Kabbalah of 1977, where productive misun-

derstanding is described not so much as a historical fact that requires

analysis, but as a regrettable perversion due to which the true nature

of kabbalah is obscured and misperceived. In the wake of the Christian

interpretation of kabbalah, we read, [t]he name of this mysterious discipline, presented and venerated as humanity’s oldest and highest mystery wisdom by its irst Christian

mediators such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Reuchlin, became

a popular catchword in all Renaissance circles with theosophical and

occultist interests, and their followers in the baroque era. It became

something like a lag under which . . . more or less anything could be

ofered to the public: from truly Jewish through vaguely Judaizing medi-

tations of deeply Christian mystics up to the latest products of geomancy

and cartomancy on the popular market. he name kabbalah, while evok-

ing feelings of respectful awe, covered everything. Even the strangest ele-

ments of occidental folklore, and the somehow occultistically-oriented

natural sciences of the time, such as astrology, alchemy and natural

magic, became “kabbalah”. And this heavy ballast, which oten com-

pletely obscured its actual content, remains connected to popular opin-

ions about the kabbalah up to the present day, among laypersons and

theosophical adepts, in the language of many European writers and even

scholars. In particular, as late as the 19th century, French heosophists

of the martinist school (Eliphas Lévi, Papus and many others), and in

this century charlatans like Aleister Crowley and his English admirers

have created the maximum that is humanly possible in generally confus-

ing all the occult disciplines with the “holy kabbalah”. A large part of the

writings which carry the word kabbalah on their title page have nothing

or almost nothing to do with it.

Obviously this inal sentence, and indeed the passage as a whole,

implies that there is such a thing as the true or correctly-understood

kabbalah, and that it can be distinguished from a false or pseudo-

kabbalah which misunderstands and therefore distorts the truth. In

other words: we are dealing here not with a case of “productive” but

of destructive misunderstanding. Of course this begs the question: by

what criteria could the former be distinguished from the latter?

Scholem, ‘A Birthday Letter’.

Scholem, ‘Alchemie und Kabbala’, 19–20.

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the beginnings of occultist kabbalah 109

From a strictly historical point of view, I would argue, there is no

such criteria: Scholem’s very distinction is normative and implicitly

metaphysical, and logically contradicts his own concept of historical/

philological research. However, if we look at the early development

of the study of kabbalah from the perspective of academic identity

politics, it becomes easier to understand why, in spite of this, Scho-

lem could not aford to include occultist interpretations as legitimate

objects of research in the study of “kabbalah”. he development of the

academic study of kabbalah could be described as a series of polemical

exclusions and inclusions. hus, the great nineteenth-century scholar

of Judaism Heinrich Graetz, in his monumental eleven-volume His-

tory of the Jews (1853–1876) described ‘pharisaean Talmudism’ as the

‘hard core’ of true Judaism, and opposed it in the sharpest possible

terms against the perversion of Jewish mysticism in all its forms. He

used drastic images of illness and infection to describe how the healthy

body of Judaism had been threatened throughout its history by the

parasitic ‘mushroom growths’ of the irrational:

he image of the kabbalah as a ‘fungous layer’ [Schimmelüberzug] recurs

frequently. Judaism, according to Graetz, is like a ‘noble core’ surrounded

by several crusts. he core is the ‘sinaite’ and ‘prophetic’ doctrine of

Judaism, which is surrounded by the triple layer of ‘sopheric’, ‘mishnaic’

and ‘talmudic’ exegeses and demarcations. But these (healthy) layers are

‘surrounded by an ugly crust, a mushroom-like growth, a fungous layer,

the kabbalah, which gradually nested itself in cracks and openings, insid-

iously spreading and branching of from there’.

Although Graetz himself would not have seen it this way, the iden-

tity of Judaism as understood by him therefore relied, for deining

itself, upon a concept of mysticism as its rhetorical “other”. Gershom

Scholem’s oeuvre, in contrast, can be seen as a successful attempt to

See the excellent analysis in Schäfer, ‘ “Adversus cabbalam” ’. For the language of

exclusion, see for instance Graetz, Konstruktion, 56–59 (quoted in Schäfer, o.c., 190),

where in one short quotation we ind mention of the ‘talmudischen Umzäunungen’,

the Jewish home as a ‘scharf umgrenztes Palästina’, which ‘isolates’ Judaism within

the situation of the diaspora by drawing ‘unverrückbare Grenzen’ with the outside

world, and where the Talmudic ‘Beschränkungen’ result in a Talmudic ‘Isolierungs-

system’. Later on in the same text there is mention of the ‘ausscheidende’ function

of Talmudism, which repels the ‘schädlichen Bestandteile’ and ‘fremde Einlüsse’

(Schäfer, o.c., 191).

Schäfer, ‘ “Adversus cabbalam” ’, 204, quoting Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol.

10, 114.

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110 wouter j. hanegraaff

integrate back into Judaism what had been excluded from it by the

Wissenschat des Judentums of scholars such as Graetz.

But the identity of Jewish mysticism as conceived of by Scholem

implied a rhetorical “other” as well. As already suggested by the quo-

tation given above, in his case this was the universalist understand-

ing of “kabbalah” as a perennial wisdom that was supposed to have

been widely present in many traditions of the ancient world. It is well

known that the origins of that concept are to be found in the Christian

interpretation of kabbalah since Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, lead-

ing to what has sometimes been called a “metaphorical kabbalah” (or

a “second kabbalah”),

the permutations of which can be traced from

the iteenth century to the present. Relecting on that phenomenon,

Scholem wryly observed that ‘as far as the essence of the kabbalah

is concerned, it [could] supposedly be anything except Judaism’, and

accordingly, to ind its origins one could look anywhere, as long as it

was as far away from Judaism as possible.

Just as Graetz had deined the identity of Judaism by emphasizing

its rationality and sharply opposing it to mystical Schwärmerei, Scho-

lem for his part deined Jewish mysticism by emphasizing its Jewish-

ness and sharply opposing it against the idea of a “universal kabbalah”

with non-Jewish origins. As I hope to demonstrate in this article, in

the nineteenth and indeed until far into the twentieth century such a

concept of kabbalah was by no means limited to esoteric or occult-

ist circles. On the contrary: we will see that, at the time, recognized

scholars of kabbalah, such as the French pioneer in this ield Adolphe

Franck, held very basic assumptions in common with occultists like

Eliphas Lévi or Papus. Across the board—from popular esotericism to

the academic establishment—we encounter during this period the idea

of a “universal kabbalah” with non-Jewish roots, and it is against this

widespread consensus that Scholem developed his work.

Kilcher, Sprachtheorie der Kabbala, 21–22, and for the concept of a “second kab-

balah” see his reference to Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins heorie, 199.

Scholem, ‘Die Erforschung der Kabbala’, 256: ‘Was dem heutigen Beobachter

solcher Aufassungen im Rückblick aufällt, ist, dass in den meisten dieser Deutun-

gen die Kabbala ihrem Wesen nach alles andere eher sein soll als gerade Judentum

und ihr Ursprung dementsprechend auch möglichst weit weg vom Judentum gesucht

wurde’.

From the discussion in Dan, ‘Gershom Scholem’, one may conclude that to a

greater extent than oten assumed, even Scholem himself was still inluenced by such

concepts in the irst decades of his career.

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the beginnings of occultist kabbalah 111

2. Adolphe Franck

Moshe Idel noted in 1988 that Adolphe Franck, with his monograph

La Kabbale ou la philosophie religieuse des Hébreux of 1843, ‘contrib-

uted more to the knowledge of Kabbalah in modern Europe than did

any other work prior to the studies of Scholem’;

and Paul Fenton

has called it ‘a milestone in the annals of Qabbalistic research’, which

‘had the efect of a bombshell [and] gave an unprecedented impe-

tus to Qabbalistic studies’.

he book was translated into German

almost immediately, by Adolf Jellinek, and went through three edi-

tions in France; it was translated into Hebrew in 1909 and into English

in 1926.

Adolphe Franck was born in Liocourt in 1809. He originally studied

for the rabbinate, but changed his direction in favor of philosophy.

Having moved to Paris, he became a protégé of the famous philoso-

pher of eclecticism Victor Cousin, and embarked on a brilliantly suc-

cessful academic career. He has been described by Charles Mopsik as

‘a model of integration’:

the irst French Jew to receive an agrégation

in philosophy, his book on kabbalah was called a ‘masterwork of criti-

cism’ by Jules Michelet and earned him his prestigious election, at the

young age of 36, to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques,

one of the ive academies of the Institut de France. His career found

its culmination in a professorship for “Droit de la nature et des gens”

at the Collège de France, from 1854 to 1881. While a typical repre-

sentative of the French academic establishment, he was also actively

involved in the cause of Judaism, becoming president of the Société des

Etudes Juives and contributing to the Archives Israélites for over half a

century. He died in 1893 at the age of 48.

In philosophy, Franck is best remembered as editor of a 1800-page

Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques, which appeared from 1844

on. In the line of Victor Cousin’s eclecticism, he believed that meta-

physics had the task of demonstrating the four basic tendencies of

human thought—naturalism, idealism, skepticism, and mysticism—to

be four aspects of one and the same reality. Franck is known to have

Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, 8.

Fenton, ‘Qabbalah and Academia’, 48. On p. 49 he writes, perhaps a bit hyper-

bolically, that it ‘had the efect of a tidal wave’.

Mopsik, ‘Quelques remarques’, 241.

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112 wouter j. hanegraaff

been a vehement opponent of atheism and positivism, and has been

criticized for never having come to terms with Kantian philosophy.

Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of Franck’s intellectual interests,

and quite relevant for us here, is his relation to the various “esoteric”

currents that existed in France at the time. hus, among many publica-

tions devoted to straightforward academic philosophy, we ind that in

1853 he lectured on Paracelsus and sixteenth-century alchemy,

and

even devoted a book-length study to Martinez de Pasqually and Louis-

Claude de Saint-Martin in 1866.

Towards the end of his life, inally,

he appears to have developed friendly contacts with the neo-Martinist

occultist circles around Gérard Encausse, better known as Papus. He

went as far as contributing a preface to Papus’ Traité méthodique de

science occulte, where it happens to be printed right ater a photograph

of Eliphas Lévi on his deathbed.

his letter is quite interesting for our concerns. For Papus it was

obviously useful to have his book prefaced by an academic of such

prestige (the “Lettre-préface de Ad. Franck, membre de l’institut” is

mentioned on the cover), and for his part Franck is at pains to point

out that his collaboration does not imply an endorsement of occult-

ism: the idea of an occult science diferent from, and more funda-

mental than, the normal one he considers ‘absolutely irrational’ and

‘anti-scientiic’.

However,

if under the name of occult science you mean to speak about the irst

eforts and irst discoveries of science, those discoveries that are based on

analogy rather than on reason and analysis, and which have been pro-

voked by man’s intuition about the universal order of nature and by the

similitude of the laws of the universe with the laws of his own thought,

then I completely agree with you.

Franck wants to see in Papus a defender not so much of the occult,

as of ‘le mysticisme’. He explains that although he is not himself a

mystic, he has always been inspired by it; and more than that, at the

high age that he has now reached (Franck is 82 years old), he dares to

admit that mysticism not only inspires deep respect in him, but even

Fouillée, ‘M. Adolphe Franck’, 291–292.

Franck, ‘Paracelse et l’alchimie’.

Franck, La philosophie mystique en France.

Franck, ‘Préface’, v–vi.

Ibid., vi.

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the beginnings of occultist kabbalah 113

feelings of ‘devotion mixed with tenderness’.

What Franck believes

he has in common with Papus is, furthermore, a vehement opposition

against the ‘bad doctrines’ of positivism, atheism, and pessimism. To

ind a real alternative to those perversions, one needs to seek the very

divine ground and essence of being, and that is what Franck believes

the Martinists are doing:

It is in these [divine] depths that you and your collaborators of L’Initiation

love to descend, while calling upon all kinds of mysticism, both from the

East and from the West, from India and from Europe! hese depths have

their shadows and their dangers [. . .]. But I much prefer these audacious

speculations over the blindness of positivism, the nothingness of atheist

science and the more or less hypocritical despair of pessimism. In my

eyes they are like an energetic appeal to the seriousness of life, to the

re-awakening of the sense of the divine.

Two years earlier, in 1889, Franck had written a foreword to the

second edition of his book on kabbalah, which indicates that it was

the very phenomenon of popular occultism that had inspired him to

republish the book. he irst edition of 1843 had quickly sold out, and

during the following decades Franck felt it was out of touch with the

spirit of the times. In addition, his critics wanted him to give priority

to ‘certain questions of bibliography and chronology’, which hardly

interested him, since he saw the philosophical and religious system of

kabbalah as by far the most important. Now, however, the situation

has changed:

Disgusted by the positivist, evolutionist or brutally atheist doctrines that

nowadays dominate our country, and which seek to play the boss in

both science and society, many people turn towards the East, the cra-

dle of religions, the original fatherland of mystical ideas, and among

the doctrines that they try to bring back to honor, the kabbalah is not

forgotten.

What follows is a long list of examples. First, there is the heo-

sophical Society, its ‘highly interesting’ journal Lotus, and its French

branch “Ysis” that has recently published a translation of the Sepher

Yetzirah. Franck quotes with apparent approval the statement of the

translator—not mentioned by name, but it is actually Papus—that

Ibid., viii.

Ibid., ix.

Franck, ‘Avant-propos de la deuxième édition’, ii.

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114 wouter j. hanegraaff

‘the Kabbalah is the unique religion from which all the others have

emanated’.

In another theosophical journal, L’Aurore, published by

Lady Caithness, kabbalah is described as ‘Semitic theosophy’ and its

method of esoteric hermeneutic is presented as a possible means of

overcoming the diferences between Buddhism and Christianity.

both cases Franck states that he gives no opinion about the merits of

the argumentation, but his general attitude is quite positive. Franck

then turns towards Papus’ new journal L’Initiation, which has existed

for only four months, and oten associates heosophy with ‘la sainte

Kabbale’. He highlights an article by René Caillé which discusses the

Zohar in the context of a Christian kabbalah along the lines of Saint-

Martin, ‘the unconscious renovator of the doctrine of Origen’.

And

inally there are the various Swedenborgian journals. Here Franck is

slightly more critical, pointing out (correctly) that kabbalah and Swe-

denborg have nothing in common except that they both give esoteric

interpretations of Holy Scripture.

he inal page of Franck’s new foreword is devoted to a strong

restatement of the ancient origins of both the Zohar and the Sepher

Yetzirah, with reference to some recent publications. He believes that

these origins go back even much farther than argued there:

Is it not true that the numbers and letters that are basic to the entire

system of the Sepher Yetzirah play a very large role in Pythagoreanism

and the earliest systems of India as well? We have this fashion nowadays

of wanting to make everything young, as if it were not true that the

systemic spirit and, most of all, the mystical spirit are as ancient as the

world and destined to endure as long as the human spirit.

Such a statement of kabbalah as perennial truth might as well have

been written by the occultist Eliphas Lévi. If we now turn to Franck’s

book on kabbalah of 1843, we ind there essentially the same concept.

According to Franck, the entire history of humanity demonstrates that

all truths about the nature of man and the universe have their origin

Ibid., ii.

Ibid., iii. Franck’s formulations are a bit ambiguous: ‘à l’aide d’une interpréta-

tion ésotérique des textes sacrés, les deux religions sont mises d’accord entre elles et

présentées comme le fonds commun de toutes les autres. Cette interprétation ésotéri-

que est certainement un des principaux éléments de la Kabbale’.

Ibid., iv.

On this question of the relation between Swedenborg and kabbalah, cf. Hane-

graaf, ‘Emanuel Swedenborg, the Jews, and Jewish Traditions’.

Ibid., vi.

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the beginnings of occultist kabbalah 115

not in human reason, but in a universal ‘power’ (puissance), known

as “religion” or “revelation”. his power is essentially One, but mani-

fests itself diferently according to the changing conditions of time and

space. It does so in three diferent ways: as orthodoxy, as rational the-

ology or philosophy, and as mysticism. In the Jewish context, mysti-

cism has taken two forms: Hellenized Judaism as represented by Philo

of Alexandria, and kabbalah. he kabbalah he describes as

[. . .] a truly original system, a truly great one, which does not resemble

other systems, whether religious or philosophical, except by the fact that

it comes from the same source, has been provoked by the same causes,

and responds to the same needs; in short, by the general laws of the

human spirit. hese are the kabbalists.

What we have here is a religionist or even “perennialist” perspective:

kabbalah may be a speciically Jewish phenomenon, but its ultimate

source and essence is universal. As for its manifestation in Jewish

culture, Franck immediately reduces it to only two books: kabbalah,

for him, means the Zohar and the Sepher Yetzirah. For example, it

is remarkable how negative Franck is about Isaac Luria, who was

not a serious kabbalist but merely ‘a sick spirit’ whose writings are

‘unbearable’.

In his overview of previous studies of kabbalah, Franck mentioned

Johann Georg Wachter’s famous thesis about kabbalah as panthe-

ism, and hence atheism: the comparison may have been supericial,

he writes, but it did contribute signiicantly to a better understanding

of kabbalah.

Indeed, Franck’s interpretation of the Sepher Yetzirah

and Zohar shows a dominant preoccupation with reducing kab-

balah to a metaphysical ‘system’, and he repeatedly draws parallels

with Spinoza and with the philosophers of German idealism.

ends up summarizing kabbalistic metaphysics in four points, which

Franck, La Kabbale, 35.

Ibid., 4 (Luria has a mind ‘sans originalité’ who constantly gives free rein to ‘ses

propres rêveries, véritables songes d’un esprit malade, aegri somnia vana’), and 7 (‘les

commentaires d’Isaac Loria, dont un homme en jouissance de sa raison ne soutient

pas la lecture’).

Ibid., 23. See also his dismissal on p. 25 of Freystadt, Kabbalismus und Pantheis-

mus, who argued against the pantheism thesis.

For example ibid., 170: the kabbalists ‘auraient pu dire aussi comme un philos-

ophe moderne issu de leur race: Omnia, quamvis diversis gradibus, animata tamen

sunt’ (reference to Spinoza’s Ethica). See also the references to Hegel, ibid., 24–25.

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116 wouter j. hanegraaff

emphasizes a pantheist and emanationist system incompatible with

theistic creationism:

he belief in a creator God distinct from Nature [. . .] they replace by

the idea of a universal substance which is actually ininite, always active,

always thinking, which is the immanent cause of the universe, but is

not enclosed within the universe; a substance for which [. . .] creating is

nothing but thinking, existing and developing itself. Instead of a purely

material world, distinct from God, emerging from nothing and destined

to return to nothing, [the kabbalah] posits innumerable forms under

which the divine substance develops and manifests itself according to

the unchanging laws of thought.

he value and originality of kabbalah for Franck lies entirely in this

philosophy, and certainly not in its exegetical techniques: the proce-

dures for permutating letters and numbers that would become central

to Eliphas Lévi’s perspective are dismissed by Franck as a series of

bizarre manipulations without deeper signiicance. hey are merely

the ‘gross envelope’ in which the kabbalists clothed their ‘original and

profound ideas’.

Finally, there is the question of the origins of the kabbalah. Franck

spent much energy on proving that the Zohar was not written by

Moses de Léon, ‘an obscure rabbi from the 13th century’ and ‘a mis-

erable charlatan’:

on the contrary, at least the essential metaphysical

core of the Zohar must be traced back to the irst centuries, if not fur-

ther back. It should be noted that although such an opinion has been

deinitely discarded by scholarship since Scholem’s Major Trends of

1946, it was still very respectable and even dominant at the time—to

such an extent that Scholem himself still defended the Zohar’s great

Ibid., 193–194. Franck was harshly criticized for these interpretations later, nota-

bly by le chevalier Drach, a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism who published a

small but much-noted booklet against Franck in 1864 (Drach, La Cabale des Hébreux

vengée; see discussion in Fenton, ‘Qabbalah and Academia’, 52–53).

Franck, La Kabbale, 15, here with reference to Athanasius Kircher: ‘les idées

originales et profondes, les croyances hardies qu’elle renferme [. . .] sont entièrement

perdu[e]s pour sa faible vue, frappée seulement de ces formes symboliques dont

l’usage et l’abus semblent être dans la nature même du mysticisme. La kabbale est

pour lui tout entière dans cette grossière enveloppe, dans ses mille combinaisons des

lettres et des nombres, dans ses chifres arbitraires, enin dans tous les procédés plus

ou moins bizarres au moyen desquels, forçant les textes sacrés à leur prêter leur appui,

elle trouvait un accès dans des esprits rebelles à toute autre autorité qu’à celle de la

Bible. Les faits et les textes que j’ai rassemblés dans ce travail se chargeront de détruire

ce point de vue étrange et me dispensent de m’y arrêter plus longtemps’.

Ibid., 73.

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the beginnings of occultist kabbalah 117

antiquity against Heinrich Graetz (who correctly saw it as medieval)

at an occasion as important as his inauguration speech at the Hebrew

University in 1925.

Nor was it at all unusual, as we already saw, to argue that the kab-

balah had non-Jewish origins. For example, Jacob Brucker (1696–

1770), the virtual founder of the history of philosophy, who dominated

that discipline throughout the eighteenth century and whose inluence

reaches far into the nineteenth century, traced the kabbalah back to

ancient Egypt.

Adolphe Franck, in the inal part of his book, devoted

separate chapters to a comparison of the kabbalah with Plato, Neopla-

tonism (referred to as the “Alexandrian School”), Philo of Alexandria,

Christianity, and inally the Chaldaeans and Persians. he comparison

fell out negative far all of them except the last, for he ended up argu-

ing for a ‘perfect resemblance’ between all the essential elements of

the kabbalah and the metaphysical principles of Zoroastrianism. His

reference was, predictably, Anquetil-Duperron’s famous 1771 edition

of the Zend Avesta. Franck emphasized, however, that the Persian/

Zoroastrian origins of kabbalah did not make the kabbalists into mere

servile imitators: on the contrary, they signiicantly improved Zoroas-

trianism by putting its principles into the new context of monotheism:

‘he framework, the exterior design of the Zend Avesta remains, but

the foundation has changed its nature completely, and the kabbalah

ofers us [. . .] a curious spectacle: that of a mythology progressing to

the stage of metaphysics, under the very inluence of the religious

sentiment’.

Franck sees these religious sentiments as secondary to the true

essence of kabbalah. Its true destiny is to shed the trappings of Jewish

theology and show its ‘true face’ as a natural product of the human

spirit, for only thus will it be able to ‘enter the history of philosophy

and of humanity’.

In the end, or so we have to conclude, the enduring

See discussion in Dan, ‘Gershom Scholem’, 38–41. It must have been very pain-

ful for Scholem to inally have to admit that he had been mistaken and Graetz, of all

people, had been right: Dan remarks that ‘[d]uring the many years that I spent in

Scholem’s courses and in his company, nobody ever dared to mention this article [i.e.,

the publication of his inauguration speech]. It was the stain on Scholem’s scholarly

work’ (o.c., 40).

See Hanegraaf, ‘Western Esotericism in Enlightenment Historiography’.

Franck, La Kabbale, 290.

Ibid., 291. hese statements are made in relation to the assimilation between kab-

balah and Alexandrian philosophy, leading to Neoplatonism; but it is clear that Franck

also means a general process of progress in which the true universal metaphysical

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118 wouter j. hanegraaff

value of the kabbalah for Franck is not its speciic Jewish manifes-

tation, but it universal essence, which happens to coincide with the

idealist metaphysics to which he himself adheres.

3. Eliphas Lévi

As far as I have been able to ascertain, the founder of “occultist kab-

balah” Eliphas Lévi does not refer even one single time to Franck’s

famous book on kabbalah, which had appeared about ten years before

he started publishing his own works on occultism. Given Lévi’s fas-

cination with ‘la sainte Cabale’, it is hard to imagine that he did not

know of it; but if he did, any direct inluence will be very diicult to

demonstrate. If we approach Franck and Lévi as parallel but indepen-

dent authors, a comparison is all the more interesting, since the signif-

icant resonances between their ideas suggest a common background

that was not limited to esoteric milieus.

Eliphas Lévi Zahed is the pseudonym adopted (in his later occultist

writings) by Alphonse-Louis Constant, who was born in a very poor

family in Paris in 1810, and is therefore an almost exact contemporary

of Adolphe Franck. He attended seminary to study for the priesthood,

but never made it to the ordination due to a series of events and con-

licts that have been described in detail by his biographers

but do not

need to detain us here. Suice it to say that during the irst part of his

life, Constant maintained a highly complex relation with the Church,

while at the same time getting involved in various movements work-

ing for social and political reform: his socialist and utopian writings,

including high-minded ideals about the emancipation of woman, led

to conlicts with the authorities and several prison sentences. It was

in the wake of the revolution of 1848 that he made his decisive move

towards the study of esotericism. he three central works document-

ing his occultist worldview were published in 1854–1856, 1860 and

1861 respectively, and made his name as an authority of ‘magic and

kabbalah’.

essence develops out of the narrow and limiting constraints of nationalistic or reli-

gious commitments.

Most complete in this regard is Chacornac, Eliphas Lévi. Another good mono-

graphic treatment is McIntosh, Eliphas Lévi. Of rather doubtful quality are Uzzel,

Eliphas Lévi, and Williams, Eliphas Lévi.

Apparently he came to be seen as an authority even outside occultist circles, as

suggested by the fact that he was asked to contribute articles on kabbalah and Knorr

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the beginnings of occultist kabbalah 119

Gershom Scholem, in his Major Trends, characterized Lévi’s view of

kabbalah as ‘brilliant misunderstandings and misrepresentations’,

and

that description is more to the point than one might think. hat Lévi

misunderstood and misrepresented most of what he read is beyond

any doubt, and this fact is admitted even by his admirers; but the bril-

liance of his literary style, and arguably of his synthesis as a whole has

not always received the appreciation it deserves. A notable example is

François Secret, who in 1988 did a hatchet job exposing Lévi’s faulty

references and shocking ignorance of elementary Hebrew: ‘il faut insis-

ter sur l’ignorance de Lévi’.

Most of Secret’s criticisms were certainly

correct; but there is hardly much reason to be impressed by his high-

handed demolition of such an easy target—and even less so consider-

ing the fact that his own article is illed with incomplete or faulty page

references,

and written in a prose that is so bad as not even to allow

comparison with the French of his victim. It seems rather pointless to

judge Eliphas Lévi by the standards of academic philology and critical

historiography. It makes more sense to see him as what he was: an

intelligent and creative amateur of considerable although unsystem-

atic erudition, driven by sincere idealism and an enthusiastic joy of

discovery, who had to work with scattered and chaotic fragments of

learning but somehow managed to create something new and quite

original out of it.

A complete overview of Lévi’s synthesis is not necessary here. Rather,

I will concentrate on what we need in order to understand his concept

of “kabbalah”. his means that I will have to ignore almost completely

the concept that is perhaps most central and innovative in his magical

worldview as a whole: the lumière astrale or astral light, closely con-

nected to the powers of the imagination. And as a result, I will also

have to pass over his many polemics—which become more intense

from volume to volume—against mystical ecstasy in all its forms,

which he sees as a dangerous perversion resulting from a failure to

von Rosenroth to a reference work as famous as the Larousse (see Kilcher, ‘Verhüllung

und Enthüllung’, 354–355).

Scholem, Major Trends, 2.

Secret, ‘Eliphas Lévi et la Kabbale’, 83.

For example, on page 83 “rusé” should be “subtil”; on page 85, n. 3, the page

reference should be 364–378, not 346–378; most of the quotations are not referenced;

the article is full of sentences that are incomplete, grammatically impossible, or com-

pletely obscure; and inally Secret blames Lévi for quoting a non-existing book, which

however does exist and was quoted correctly by Lévi (Mosheim, Observationes sacrae

et historico-criticae, 1721; see Secret, ‘Eliphas Lévi et la Kabbale’, 86).

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120 wouter j. hanegraaff

dominate the astral light by the disciplined will. Likewise, I will not go

into Lévi’s highly ambivalent speculations about Satan and the nature

of evil: one of his main preoccupations, to which he has devoted some

of the most inspired pages in his oeuvre.

What, then, does Lévi understand by kabbalah? In the introduction

to his Dogme et Rituel de la haute magie, we ind the following pas-

sage, which contains all its essential elements and also gives us a taste

of Lévi’s Romantic prose:

One is seized by admiration, when penetrating into the sanctuary of the

kabbalah, and at the sight of a dogma so logical, so simple and at the

same time so absolute. he necessary union of ideas and signs; the con-

secration of the most fundamental realities by elementary characters; the

trinity of words, letters and numbers; a philosophy that is simple as the

alphabet, profound and ininite as the Word; theorems more complete

and luminous than those of Pythagoras; a theology that one summarizes

by counting on one’s ingers; an ininite that one can hold in the palm of

an infant’s hand; ten numbers and twenty-two letters, a triangle, a square

and a circle: those are all the elements of the kabbalah. hey are the

elementary principles of the written Word, the relection of that Word

that has created the world.

All truly dogmatic religions have their origin in the kabbalah and

return to it; all that is scientiic and grandiose in the religious dreams

of all the illuminés, Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Saint-Martin etc., is

derived from the Kabbalah; all the masonic associations owe their secrets

and their symbols to it. Only the kabbalah consecrates the alliance of

the universal reason with the divine Word; by the counter-point of two

apparently opposed forces, it establishes the eternal balance of being; it

alone reconciles reason with faith, power with liberty, science with mys-

tery: it has the keys of the present, the past and the future!

For Lévi, the very value and interest of the kabbalah resides precisely

in its universality, by dint of which it can function as the key that

unlocks the secrets of all religions and philosophies: if the kabbalah

were a speciically Jewish phenomenon, it might have been an object

of historical curiosity, but could not possibly have commanded the

enormous authority it has for our author. And this authority, in turn,

is grounded in a metaphysical concept: the kabbalah is the direct

relection of “the Word”: the Logos that has created the world accord-

A particularly good example is the ‘Introduction’ to his Rituel (Dogme et rituel,

159–171; all page references will be to Lévi, Secrets de la magie, edited by Francis Lac-

assin, which contains Lévi’s three main magical texts in one volume).

Lévi, Dogme et rituel, 47.

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the beginnings of occultist kabbalah 121

ing to the opening of the Gospel of John. his Logos, according to

Lévi, manifests itself on the highest level of creation as a symbolism of

numbers; and their meanings and dynamics can serve as a universal

hermeneutical key at all ontologically lower levels of reality, according

to the logic of correspondences or universal analogy.

hus Lévi’s Dogme et rituel de la haute magie has two parts devoted to

theory and practice, which mirror and complement each other accord-

ing to what Lévi calls the law of equilibrium; each of the two parts has

twenty-two chapters, one for each of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

As explained at length in several places of the book, these letters in turn

correspond with the twenty-two cards of the Tarot known as the Major

Arcana. In various parts of his works, Lévi develops elaborate tables of

correspondences for each of them; but if one compares these various

tables and tries to reduce them to one system, one inds that they do

not add up. Although Lévi speaks of these correspondences in terms of

a universal system of classiication for all possible kind of knowledge,

the general principle that such a system exists seems more important to

him than presenting the reader with one speciic and inal system.

Why is this? It would be incorrect, in my opinion, to interpret the

inconsistencies of his table of correspondences as merely a failure or

weakness on Lévi’s part; on the contrary, I would argue, they tell us

something essential about Lévi’s thought. Presenting the reader with

one inal and complete table of correspondences would imply, in his

eyes, a kind of reductionism incompatible with the ininite complexity

of the invisible divine reality. he Logos is incarnated in our world;

but by no means does this mean that it is exhausted by, or can be

reduced to, its visible manifestation. Early on in his Dogme et rituel,

Lévi writes that

there is only one dogma in magic: the visible is the manifestation of the

invisible, or in other words, in the things that can be judged and seen,

the perfect Logos exists in exact proportion with the things that cannot

be judged by our senses or seen by our eyes.

Hence the universal correspondences revealed by the kabbalah should

be seen as signs of the Absolute as revealed in creation, but not as

a means to “solve the riddle”: any attempt to do so would imply a

fatal confusion between essence and manifestation, which inverts the

Ibid., 58.

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122 wouter j. hanegraaff

hierarchical order of reality and interprets the higher, invisible world

in terms of its visible relection in the lower world.

his brings me to a crucial and controversial aspect of Lévi’s think-

ing: the relation between his magical and kabbalistic beliefs and his

profession of Roman Catholicism. If one reads his Dogme et rituel,

Histoire de la magie, and Clef des grands mystères in that order, one

notes an increasing emphasis on the truth of Catholicism as essen-

tial to any correct understanding of magic and kabbalah. Readers who

expect Lévi to criticize the Church for having suppressed magic and

paganism will be surprised to see that he in fact endorses it through-

out. For example, he describes the gnostics as deluded heretics, and

goes to great lengths to defend the necessity of the atrocious so-called

Vehmgerichte against heretics under Charlemagne; in his History of

Magic, we even ind several formal declarations of submission to the

authority of the Church,

and his Clés des grands mystères abounds in

references to the absolute truth of hierarchical authority.

Arthur Edward Waite has argued at length that Dogme et rituel

preached an occultist doctrine opposed to and incompatible with

Roman Catholic orthodoxy, and that his later works relect a “fail-

ure of nerve” which actually betrays that worldview.

I believe this is

a mistake, which ignores the deeply dialectic manner in which Lévi

conceives of the “equilibrium” between good and evil, truth and error,

God and devil, orthodoxy and heresy, and so on. His many discus-

sions of Satan are the best example, but too complex to discuss in the

present context. What makes Lévi’s work intellectually interesting is,

precisely, the fact that he does not present magic and kabbalah dualis-

tically, as a counterculture against Christianity, but dialectically, as the

hidden truth of Roman Catholicism which both reveals and conceals

itself in the very coincidentia oppositorum of light and darkness. Lévi’s

basic law of equilibrium (the law of two) implies, as he oten repeats,

that there can be no truth without error, no light without darkness,

In this regard, the underlying logic of Lévi’s concept of correspondences is quite

similar to Swedenborg’s; see in that regard Hanegraaf, Swedenborg, Oetinger, Kant,

3–11.

Lévi, Histoire, 358 (‘nous soumettons notre œuvre tout entière au jugement

suprême de l’Eglise’); 421 (‘Nous ne dogmatisons pas, nous soumettons aux auto-

rités légitimes nos observations et nos études’); 481 (‘Nous ne prétendons ici nier ni

airmer la tradition de la chute des anges, nous en rapportant comme toujours en

matière de foi aux décisions suprêmes et infaillibles de la sainte Eglise catholique,

apostolique et romaine’).

Waite, ‘Preface to the Second Edition’; idem, ‘Preface to the English Translation’.

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the beginnings of occultist kabbalah 123

and no concept of God without a concept of Satan. he hidden unity

of the divine is revealed to us under the sign of the ternary, Lévi’s

number of “manifestation”, and obviously linked to the Trinity, which

paradoxically reconciles these opposites without sacriicing either one

of them to the other. It is only from the divine perspective of absolute

Unity that all these dualities are mysteriously resolved. he temptation

for us as creatural beings is to misunderstand the law of equilibrium

and thereby lapse into a Manichaean dualism of good and evil as inde-

pendent absolutes.

Because the dualistic doctrine destroys the very law of equilibrium,

it necessarily destroys the very unity of the divine, of reality, and of

truth as well. It is against this fundamental heresy of heresies, Lévi

argues, that the Church has defended its trinitarian doctrine, grounded

in unity and the universal law of equilibrium. From this perspective it

becomes much easier to understand the internal logic of Lévi’s history

of magic. Like Adolphe Franck, but for diferent reasons, Lévi, too,

traces magic and the true kabbalah (which to him are one and the

same) to Zoroaster; but he distinguishes the latter from a second Zoro-

aster, the inventor of the material ire-cult and of the ‘impious dogma

of divine dualism’, who is ultimately responsible for the later decline of

true magic.

As Michael Stausberg has shown in his fundamental study

on the “memory of Zoroastrianism” in Western culture, this topos of

the two Zoroasters is an old one, but Lévi’s use of it is new.

If the false Zoroaster is the father of materialism and dualism, the

true Zoroaster is his exact opposite. he former taught the cult of

material ire, but the latter revealed what Lévi calls a ‘transcenden-

tal pyrotechnique’,

focused on the great agent of magic: the astral

light. Very interestingly, Lévi supports this view by extensive quota-

tions in French from the Renaissance hermetist Francesco Patrizi,

whose Magia philosophica of 1593

contains a Latin translation of the

Chaldaean Oracles, sometimes referred to as the “bible of theurgy”,

which had been (falsely) attributed to Zoroaster ever since Gemistos

Plethon in the iteenth century. Since the true doctrine of Zoroaster

is presented as the “Chaldaean” Oracles, Lévi predictably concludes

that when Abraham let Ur of the Chaldaeans, he must have taken

Lévi, Histoire, 383.

Stausberg, Faszination Zarathushtra, 334.

Lévi, Histoire, 383–384.

Ibid., 384–385. he quotation is from Patrizi, Magia philosophica, 43v–45r.

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124 wouter j. hanegraaff

those teachings with him and this is how they entered Jewish culture.

he doctrine also spread to Egypt, where it was translated into the

hieroglyphic language of images and symbols, leading to an elaborate

science of correspondences between gods, letters, ideas, numbers and

signs; and just as Abraham had saved the doctrine before it began to

degenerate in Chaldaea, Moses did the same for Egypt. his is how the

kabbalah became the hidden doctrine of the Hebrew Bible.

And then everything changed. ‘[A] breath of charity descended from

the sky’,

Lévi writes, with the birth of Christ. From that moment on,

the magic of the “ancient world” became obsolete: ‘a sad beauty spread

over its dead remains [. . .] a cold beauty without life’.

And as for Juda-

ism: just like Rachel died at the birth of her youngest son Benjamin,

the birth of Jesus as the youngest son of Israel meant the death of his

mother:

henceforth Christianity became the legitimate carrier of the

true kabbalah, and its survivals outside the Church lack such legitimacy.

his is why the rest of Lévi’s history of magic turns out to be essentially

a history of heresies: the teachings of the false Zoroaster lived on in

such currents as gnosticism and the Order of the Knights Templar, in

witchcrat and black sorcery, and in various kinds of ecstatic cults up

to and including the contemporary current of spiritualism.

Although Roman Catholicism has been the legitimate carrier of

kabbalah and true magic since its very origins, this great truth still

remains hidden even to its adherents: ‘Considered as the perfect, real-

ized and living expression of kabbalah, that is to say, of the ancient

tradition, Christianity is still unknown, and that is why the kabbalistic

and prophetic book of the Apocalypse remains unexplained. Without

the kabbalistic keys, it is perfectly inexplicable, because incomprehen-

sible’.

hese keys are now revealed to the world by Eliphas Lévi. He

claims to ind them in the Zohar and Sepher Yetzirah,

but given the

universality of the kabbalah, he feels no less free to ind them in a

Ibid., 456.

Ibid., 457.

Ibid., 461. See also e.g. Lévi, Clef, 866: ‘Ainsi, toutes les absurdités apparentes

des dogmes cachent les hautes et antiques révélations de la sagesse de tous le siècles,

et c’est pour cela que le christianisme, enrichi de tant de dépouilles opimes, a prévalu

sur le judaïsme desséché et appauvri, qui ne comprenait plus même les allégories de

son arche et de son chandelier d’or’.

Ibid. 458. Cf. Lévi, Clef, 865: ‘Le dogme catholique est sorti tout entier de la kab-

bale, mais sous combien de voiles et avec quelles étranges modiications!’

On Lévi’s reception, by means of the Kabbala Denudata, of the Zohar in gen-

eral and the Sifra di-Dzeniuta in particular, see Kilcher, ‘Verhüllung und Enthüllung’,

353–362. Kilcher also shows how Lévi lay the foundations for the subsequent career of

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PREVOD DONJE LIJEVE SLIKE

Na vrhu stranice piše "[gniessi] I have been born, gentibus- to the nations

"za/za rase" vjerovatno misli na ljudske rase

Na spoljnom točku piše "qui potest capere, capiat. Intellectus judicat veritatem"

He who can grasp, let him grasp. The intellect judges the truth.

ko može da uzme, neka uzme. Razumjevanje sudi o istini

tko može uzeti, neka uzme. Razum prosuđuje istinu

Prevod: "ko je u stanju da uhvati, neka uhvati. Intelekt sudi o istini."

Unutar točka piše "Pulsate et aperietur vobis" što je iz Mateja 7:7

Prevod: "Kucaj i otvorit vam se svima"

Dalje unutra piše HOMO

Prevod: Čovjek

U sredini kruga su slova: P. (Pater=Otac), F. (Filius=Sin) i S. (Spiritus=Sveti Duh) ovo je Sveto Trojstvo.

Na hrptu ključa piše "Exi ut introeas" što znači "Izađi da možeš ući."

Odlomak na dnu stranice je iz Luke 11:52

"Vae vobis, legisperitis, quia tulistis clavem scientiae: ipsi non introistis, et eos qui introibant, prohibuistis."

Prevod: "Teško vama advokati! Jer ste oduzeli ključ znanja. Vi sami niste ušli, a spriječili ste one koji su ulazili."

Na dnu ključa (koji se zove bit) piše "DEUS HOMO ROTA" BOG JE BIO TOČAK ČOVJEKA ili BOG JE BIO KOTAČ ČOVJEKA ili GOD MAN WHEEL "BOŽJI ČOVJEK WHEEL"

KABALA SLIKE PLANET ZEMLJA.jpg

TRANSLATION OF LEFT ABOVE IMAGE

At the top of the page it says "[gniessi] gentibus "to/for the races"

The outer wheel says "qui potest capere, capiat. Intellectus judicat veritatem"

Translation: "he who is able to seize, let him seize. Intellect judges truth."

Inside the wheel it says "Pulsate et aperietur vobis" which is from Matthew 7:7

Translation: "Knock and it shall be opened to you all"

Further inside, it says HOMO

Translation: Man

At the centre of the circle are the letters: P. (Pater=Father), F. (Filius=Son), and S. (Spiritus=Holy Spirit) this is the Holy Trinity.

On the spine of the key it says "Exi ut introeas" meaning "Go out so that you may enter."

The passage at the bottom of the page is from Luke 11:52

"Vae vobis, legisperitis, quia tulistis clavem scientiae: ipsi non introistis, et eos qui introibant, prohibuistis."

Translation: "Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You, yourselves, did not enter , and you hindered those who were entering.”

At the bottom of the key (called a bit) it says "DEUS HOMO ROTA" meaning "GOD MAN WHEEL"

the beginnings of occultist kabbalah 125

variety of other sources as well, including the Clavicula Salomonis and

the Tarot. Few discoveries seem to have impressed him as much as a

igure printed in a 1646 edition of Guillaume Postel’s Absconditorum

a constitutione mundi Clavis.

On the let, one sees the original, and on the right the way it appears

in Lévi, who describes it with disarming honesty as ‘he absolute key of

the occult sciences (given by Guillaume Postel and completed by Eliphas

Lévi)’. he four letters in the upper circle can be read both as TORA and

as TARO[T]: what better proof could there be, then, that the ancient

and mysterious “Genesis of Henoch” referred to by Postel was none

the Kabbala Denudata in esoteric Freemasonry, H.P. Blavatsky’s heosophical Society,

and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

See the supplement ‘Articles sur la kabbale’ in Clef, esp. 862–863.

Images: Courtesy Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica

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126 wouter j. hanegraaff

other than the hermetic Book of hoth, better known as the Tarot? Lévi

overlooked the fact that the picture was in fact a later addition by the

editor, Abraham von Franckenberg;

but one suspects that even had he

known this, it would not have caused him to change his mind.

4. Conclusion

Having taken a closer look at Adolphe Franck and Eliphas Lévi, one

must conclude that the essential vision of kabbalah found in the writ-

ings of these two nineteenth-century pioneers are remarkably similar

in many respects. Essential to their approach is that they both believe

in a “universal kabbalah” with non-Jewish origins, and remarkably,

they both trace those origins to the religion of Zoroaster. he similar-

ity is perhaps even more interesting given the fact that they do so for

diferent reasons: for Franck, Zoroastrianism means the Zend Avesta,

whereas for Lévi it means the Chaldaean Oracles. In line with this,

probably the most important diference between the two authors is

that Franck sees kabbalah entirely as mysticism and never discusses

magic; Lévi, on the other hand, sees kabbalah and magic as inseparable,

while describing mysticism in wholly negative terms. his diference is

linked to the fact that Franck sees kabbalah essentially as philosophy,

whereas Lévi sees it as a science of correspondences grounded in the

symbolism of numbers.

hese diferences are signiicant, and one should certainly not over-

emphasize the resonances between our two authors. Nevertheless, it

remains that Franck the academic and Lévi the occultist present two

variations on the same basic thesis of a “universal kabbalah” with non-

Jewish origins: the very thesis, that is, against which Gershom Scho-

lem posited the identity of kabbalah as speciically Jewish mysticism or

esotericism. In the wake of Scholem’s oeuvre, Franck’s approach can

nowadays be seen only as a dead end. Lévi’s work, in contrast, laid the

foundation for a new religious current that is still alive and well today.

he countless misunderstandings of kabbalah that bedevil his writings

from a perspective of critical scholarship have turned out to be highly

constructive ones from the perspective of the history of religion. In

this sense, Scholem was both right and wrong.

As also noted in Laurant, L’ésotérisme chrétien, 106 and 116 note 208.

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the beginnings of occultist kabbalah 127

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Chacornac Frères 1926.

Dan, Joseph, ‘Gershom Scholem: Mystiker oder Geschichtsschreiber des Mystischen?’,

in: Peter Schäfer & Gary Smith (eds.), Gershom Scholem: Zwischen den Disziplinen,

Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1995, 32–69.

Derenbourg, Hartwig, ‘Adolphe Franck (1809–1893)’, in: Opuscules d’un Arabisant,

1868–1905, Paris: Charles Carrington 1905, 245–256.

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tion de panthéisme par le simple exposé de sa doctrine d’après les livres cabalistiques

qui font autorité, Rome 1864.

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France’, Shofar 18/2 (2000), 45–69.

Fouillée, Alfred, ‘M. Adolphe Franck et le mouvement philosophique depuis cinquante

ans’, in: Le mouvement idéaliste et la réaction contre la science positive, Paris: Alcan

1896, 281–302.

Franck, Adolphe, La Kabbale ou la philosophie religieuse des Hébreux, orig. Paris:

Hachette 1843; 2nd ed. 1889; 3rd ed. 1892.

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