5/31/2012

May 31: Eliphas Levi

Eliphas Levi, writing under his birth name of Alphonse-Louis Constant, published "The Bible of Liberty" in France in 1848. In it he appraised the Book of Revelation through a triumphal lens of utopian socialism, seeing its predictions of a Second Coming and New Jerusalem as having a political dimension, as well as spiritual. The book was considered radical, and resulted in a brief prison sentence.

Later, under the Hebraicized moniker "Eliphas Levi", Constant went on to focus more on Kabbalah, the occult, and Satanism. He died this day in 1875.