“Sorcellerie évocatoire”: Magic and Memory in Baudelaire and Eliphas Lévi

Abstract

The relationship between Charles Baudelaire and his contemporary, the occult writer Eliphas Lévi, has long interested scholars. This essay argues that instead of fruitlessly looking for evidence of direct literary influence between the two men, we should look on their writings as parallel texts exploring remarkably similar themes but to radically different ends. Both Lévi and Baudelaire wrote about the supposed mystical origins of language and were interested in the links between poetry and black magic—a means, in both cases, to conjure up past experiences or absent people. Baudelaire's poem “Un Fantôme” also explores the connection between memory and the occult concept of “lumière astrale,” the mystical, unifying force that supposedly penetrated and connected all Creation. Although Baudelaire's writing looked to such occult ideas as potential antidotes to the fragmentation and transience of existence, he saw that they were ultimately marked by a fatal and quintessentially modern irony: Although ideas akin to Levi's may have offered the semblance of plenitude and happiness in their transcendence of daily existence, they also, by definition, held such feelings out of reach in an eternally irretrievable past.

Keywords:

• Charles Baudelaire
• “Un Fantôme”
• Eliphas Lévi (Alphonse Constant)
• lumière astrale
• magic
• memory
• modernity
• occult

Notes

1. Pichois included this article in the Œuvres Complètes despite his uncertainty over its authorship, precisely to establish that Baudelaire was aware of Lévi as a figure of importance in the literary world of the 1840s. He also discusses the circumstances that led Jacques Crépet to discover Baudelaire's involvement in writing sections of Les Mystères galants (2: 1532–36). It seems likely that other contributors included Privat d’Anglemont (along with whom Baudelaire became entangled in a quarrel with Baron Pichon and Lord Arondel over an attack on them contained in the collection), Georges Mathieu, Fortuné Mesuré and, somewhat bizarrely, Lévi himself.

2. Pichois points out that Baudelaire's name was omitted from a more definitive list published later.

3. Pierre Leroux was the foremost exponent of this aesthetic theory in France and was keenly read by Baudelaire. He argued that any attempt to grasp experience required the substitution or translation of ideas from their original context into a new one, matching one experience with its metaphorically corresponding equivalent.

4. In regard to Baudelaire's reading, see Champfleury (132–33). Champfleury describes Baudelaire's capricious enthusiasm for Swedenborg, which is overtaken some little time later by a fixation with Wronski. Lévi's research, meanwhile, was a little more systematic and academic. His sources included the sixteenth-century German occultist Cornelius Agrippa, as well as works by followers of Pythagoras, Kabbalistic literature, and writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a figure mentioned by Baudelaire, incidentally, in the section “Au Lecteur” of Les Fleurs du mal, in which he refers to “Satan Trismégiste” (1: 5); see Williams (71–72). For accounts of the prevalence of occult ideas in France, see also McIntosh, Webb, Mercier, Williams, and King and Sutherland.

5. Leakey talks of the “fervour” of this introductory paragraph as that of a “recent convert.” The publication of Lévi's Dogme et rituel at the time Baudelaire wrote this essay may have contributed to such a conversion.

6. The most commonly cited textual connection between Baudelaire and Lévi is that between “Correspondances” and a poem by Lévi with the same title published in an early collection of poems and chansons Les Trois harmonies. See, for example, Pichois and Ziegler (193–94). This poem, it has been claimed, was among the inspirations for Baudelaire's poem, not merely because of its title but also because of the similar mystical ideas about nature's harmonious, universal language they espouse. Compare, for example, the conversations between inanimate elements in Lévi's line “Par une secrète harmonie,/ La terre ainsi répond aux cieux” and Baudelaire's “Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent,” or nature's vocalization in Lévi's “Rien n'est muet dans la nature” and Baudelaire's “La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers/ Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles.” Yet, despite their surface similarities, the link between these two poems is actually unhelpful; their similarities end at the titles and the general theme of mystical connections. In his “Correspondances,” Lévi aimed for a Romantic evocation of the mystical connection between man and nature. Such sentimentality would have been anathema to Baudelaire, who on the other hand, took a more intellectual approach to correspondance, meditating on the intoxication of synaesthesia and the prelapsarian sense of harmony it gestures toward, though it never escapes the limitations of sensuous experience.

7. As Beryl Schlossman has observed, Baudelaire's references to the idea of correspondance are rhetorical and poetic rather than strictly doctrinal and cannot be glossed or reduced to a simple mystical concept of correspondence (“Benjamin's” 554).

8. He first mentioned the importance of memory as a crucial critical indicator in his Salon reviews of the mid-1840s, beginning in 1845 when he hinted at a connection between memory and discriminating art criticism. But it was not until 1846 that memory became the “criterium tiré de la nature,” which, according to Baudelaire, the spectator of a painting should use intuitively to grasp its harmonious beauty (2: 418).