Baudelaire y Eliphas Levi

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Symposium, Vol. 66, No. 3, 139149, 2012Copyright C Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0039-7709 print / 1931-0676 online

DOI: 10.1080/00397709.2012.708301

JONLEAVER

University of La Verne

Sorcellerieevocatoire: Magic and Memoryin Baudelaire and Eliphas Levi

The relationship between Charles Baudelaire and his contemporary, the occult writer Eliphas

Levi, 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 L evi and Baudelaire

wrote about the supposed mystical origins of language and were interested in the links between

poetry and black magica means, in both cases, to conjure up past experiences or absent

people. Baudelaires poem Un Fantome also explores the connection between memory and the

occult concept of lumiere astrale, the mystical, unifying force that supposedly penetrated and

connected all Creation. Although Baudelaires 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 Levis may haveoffered 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 Fantome, Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Constant), lumiere

astrale, magic, memory, modernity, occult

INTRODUCTION: BAUDELAIRE, THE OCCULT, AND ELIPHAS LEVI

Early in 1866, languishing in Brussels toward the end of his declining years, Charles Baude-

laire added a brief reading list to the poem LImprevu in his manuscript for Les Epaves,

casually referring his reader to le Rituel de la haute Magie, dEliphas Levi, along with a few

other texts on occult subjects (1: 172). Baudelaire had a longstanding interest in occult rites and

magic, but this was the only time he ever alluded to the famous writer Eliphas Levi (whose

name, before he adopted this Hebraic pseudonym, was Alphonse Constant), at the time the most

prominent occultist in France. Scholars have since tried to pin down a more definite connec-

tion between these two contemporaries than this meager scrap, but with little success. In the

uvres completes, for instance, editor Claude Pichois points out that in 1844, Baudelaire had

collaborated on a collection of articles recounting literary and theatrical gossip, one of which

discussed the scandalous early religious and literary career of Constant (2: 100511).1 Pichois

argued that his involvement in this project, entitled Les Mysteres galants des theatres de Paris,


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140 Symposium

was evidence that Baudelaire was well aware of his fellow writer. Later, in his biography of

Baudelaire, Pichois identified a roll of officers and affiliates ofLe Parti r epublicain centrala

Blanquist Republican organizationpublished in the Courrier francais in 1848 that includedthe names of both Baudelaire and Constant (162).2 However, despite the fact that they evidently

shared the same political and literary milieu during this period, no definite acquaintance has ever

been confirmed, prompting Jacques Crepet to conclude that there was no evidence qui prouve

des relations personnelles entre Baudelaire et Constant (as qtd. by Eigeldinger 81).

In the absence of such proof of a personal connection between the two writers that might

imply Levis influence on Baudelaire during the 1840s or 1850s, what significance should we

attach to a poem such as Baudelaires Un Fantome, written in the mid-1850s, in which he

makes unambiguous occult references that closely correlate with many of Levis key concerns?

The poem alludes to ideas of mystical correspondance, to an analogie universelle between all

things, and, most distinctively, to a mystical light that has the capacity to conjure up the poets

absent loved onea lumiere astrale in occult parlance, which to Levi signified the universalmedium that binds Creation together. The striking similarities between the imagery presented by

Baudelaire in this poem and the ideas described in Levis bookDogme et rituel de la haute magie

clearly demand attention; Levis quasi-empirical account of the occult bears a closer resemblance

to Un Fantome than Baudelaires other, more famous mystical inspirations, Swedenborg and

Fourier, both of whom were exclusively theoretical and cosmological. However, the possibility

of Levis influence on Baudelaire, though intriguing, is perhaps secondary to the wider question

it raises: What affinities existed between occult doctrines and contemporary Romantic literary

ideas that allowed such imagery to be integrated into a love poem such as Un Fant ome? And

perhaps most importantly, in light of Baudelaires celebrated originality and independence, what

finally distinguishes his occultism from Levis? I will argue that although Baudelaires belief inthe magical, evocative (in a sense, even resurrective) qualities of poetry brings him very close

to Levi, he is uniquely modern in his ultimate ambivalence about the value of such eternal

aspirations. Baudelaires writing suggests that the sort of timeless and eternal experience posited

by Levis Dogme et rituel, though seductive, was unsustainable under the inescapable material

conditions of modern life.

THE OCCULT TRADITION IN ROMANTIC LITERATURE

The common ground between occult mysticism and Romanticism has received important

recent attention. Lynn Wilkinson, for example, has deftly charted the influence of the mystical

thought of Emanuel Swedenborg on French literary culture of the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies, including the impact it had on Baudelaire. More broadly, the image of the poet as a

kind of magus or seer has been acknowledged as an underlying Romantic trope (see Beguin and

Cohn). The longstanding mystical conjecture that humanity had originally possessed a perfect

logos, had subsequently lost it, but might ultimately regain it and by doing so restore the lost

primordial unity to mans relation to the universe was taken up by thinkers of the Romantic period

who regarded poetry as one of the means by which such a recovery could be achieved. Moreover,

by the midnineteenth century, it had become a commonplace of Romantic discourse to regard

the poetic process as a form of quasi-mystical translation. An idea prevailed that the infinite and

ineffable quality of the universe could only be depicted symbolically in hieroglyphs and signs

of the kind poetry was adept at translating (see Lawler 20, 43).

3

What was a poet, Baudelairehimself asked in the early 1860s, si ce nest un traducteur, un dechiffreur? (2: 133).


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Sorcellerie evocatoire 141

It is certainly true, then, that Baudelaires aesthetic theory, no matter how original, derived

from mystical ideas about languagehe famously referred to language and writing as operations

magiques, sorcellerieevocatoire (1: 658). In this, Baudelaire was preceded by Honore de Balzac,who can take much of the credit for popularizing mystical ideas in literary circles; his novel

Seraphita, published in the mid 1830s, described Emanuel Swedenborgs philosophy in some

detail. Baudelaire was acquainted with Swedenborgs own writing as well as that of others

interested in mysticism including Charles Fourier, Gerard de Nerval, Joseph de Maistre, Pierre

Leroux, and Jozef Maria Hoene Wronski (Levis own esoteric mentor).4

The hankering for the eternal expressed both by Baudelaire and Levi was, as Walter Benjamin

demonstrated in his criticism on Baudelaire, a legitimate reaction to the increasingly fast-paced

and impermanent nature of urban experience in midnineteenth-century Paris, with its crowded,

macadam-paved boulevards, along which bustled the traffic of a newly industrial city. The pop-

ulation of this city, swelled by the massive influx of workers from the provinces, also lacked an

organic sense of community, resulting in an increase in peoples feelings of alienation and deraci-nation (Benjamin 11217). For Benjamin, a prose poem such as Baudelaires Perte daureole, in

which a poet loses his halo in the jostling crowd, indicates the profoundly disenchanted nature of

modernity in which experience had been degraded to something simply lived through or endured

rather than experienced in all its plenitude (153). In writing about the essay On Some Motifs in

Baudelaire, in which Benjamin meditated on Baudelaires attitude to the city and its experience,

Beryl Schlossman identifies the central paradox or aporia at the heart of his ideas on the poet.

According to Schlossman, Benjamin found in Baudelaires representation of life in modern Paris

an existential conundrum whereby a desire for rich, Auratic experience insinuates itself into ones

experience of the impoverished banality of everyday life. Benjamins text, Schlossman claims,

frames Baudelaires problem thusly: How is it possible to reconcile the riches and feast-days ofthe correspondences with the deprivation of experience that afflicts the inhabitants of modernity?

(Benjamins 557).

Baudelaire likely found the kind of occult ideas Levi popularized appealing, therefore,

because they envisioned a means to recover the harmony seemingly absent from the modern

world. In fact, the burgeoning interest in occult mysticism that helped propel Levi to such

prominence in the 1850s and 1860s can be attributed to societys pervasive anxiety about the

conditions of modernity. And as David Harvey has demonstrated with regard to Levi, for all his

archaism, his desire for a sense of eternity was firmly rooted in his own eralike many who

turned to occultism, he was responding to the social dislocations and political upheavals France

experienced at the time (666). The writing both of Baudelaire and Levi therefore reflected a

fundamental unease about a modern world from which truly enduring experience was absent, andto which occultism offered an antidote.

BAUDELAIRES ATTRACTION TO OCCULTISM: THE UNIVERSAL

ANALOGIE IN LEVISDOGME ET RITUEL

Baudelaire was most explicit about his enthusiasm for mystical ideas in his review of the

Exposition Universelle of 1855, the preamble to which describes the harmonie of a universe

structured by an immense analogie universelle (2: 575)in other words, a divinely ordained

cosmos connected by a set of inner correspondences (Leakey 174).5 Later in the same essay, he

also described painting as uneevocation, une operation magique, warning that it was thereforefolly to discuss les formulesevocatoires du sorcier (meaning the artist) because painting had


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142 Symposium

mysterious inner laws of its own (2: 580). But Baudelaire most famously engaged these kinds

of mystical ideas in his iconic, and much debated, poem Correspondances, which portrays

the quasi-spiritual experience of synaesthesia.6

The poem describes the interconnection of senseimpressions (or correspondance) characteristic of this condition, and the way their mingling

transports the poet to a harmonious world hidden within mundane reality. It seems, then, that

Baudelaire used mystical ideas and imagery because they promised to bring a rich vein of sensory

and spiritual experience into ones daily life, regardless of how seemingly insubstantial this daily

life may have become.7

Similar to this notion ofcorrespondance, Baudelaire conceived of memory as a way to recu-

perate sensuous experience that otherwise seemed lost. Baudelaires writing often explored his

enduring fascination with memory; indeed, as J. A. Hiddleston has comprehensively established,

it became a central component of his aesthetic.8 Levis Dogme et rituel, written in the early

1850s and published in installments between 1854 and 1856,is therefore of particular interest to

scholars of Baudelaire, because it presents a vivid model of an ideal form of memorya concernabsent from other occult writers Baudelaire is known to have read. According to Levi, memory

revealed its philosophical significance to everyone by showing that everything, including the

past and present, is linked by inner correspondences. For example, he regarded nature as a unity

in which toutes les formes sont proportionnelles et analogiques to the divine id ee qui les a

determinees (2: 6263). Memory was therefore magically able to evoke the past because its

internal patterns closely corresponded with the recurring cycles found in nature:

Rien ne perit dans la nature, et tout ce qui a vecu continuea vivre toujours sous des

formes nouvelles; mais les formes memes anterieures ne sont pas detruites, puisque

nous les retrouvons dans notre souvenir. [ . . . ] Les traces memes que nous croyonseffacees dans notre souvenir ne sont pas reellement, puisquune circonstance fortuite

lesevoque et nous les rappelle. (2: 62)

Here Levi describes a universal phenomenon Marcel Proust would later characterize as the

memoire involontaire, in which recollections of the past are evoked without conscious effort.

But later in the same section, Levi also claimed that the magehis practitioner of the occult

artscould achieve a more deliberate control over memory. Here he was not quite thinking along

the lines of Prousts alternative concept, the memoire volontaire, whose synthetic memories

lack the essential qualities of the past, but rather he conceived of a much more powerful, organic,

and complete reawakening of the past. Levi explained that memory contained ideas that were le

caractere naturel, lasignature of the forms from which they originated, which made it possiblefor a mage to evoque activement lidee and thus conjure up the form vividly (2: 63). This

suggests that to the mage, the richness of past experience is always as fully accessible as if it

were woven into current reality.

Indeed, the central principle of LevisDogme et rituelwas the idea of a universal analogie,

in which even seemingly opposed ideas were unified par correspondance et par connexion

analogique (2: 47). Levi thus envisaged the universe as a limitless series of correspondences

linking the divine and the corporeal. His text explained how this underlying celestial structure

could be perceived by the mage and translated as a set of esoteric symbols or hieroglyphs. The

Dogme et rituel also expounded Levis conviction of the existence of une doctrine partout

la meme et partout soigneusement cachee, an understanding of which would grant access tothe divine truths of Creation (1: 63). His occultism held that all religious doctrines reflected


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this secret truth, but that ancient esoteric traditions grasped it most profoundly in the form of a

correlation between the divine utterance and the printed word. The Christian Church, Levi argued,

because of fear of the unknown and in spite of its kinship with this magical doctrine, had drivenit into increasing obscurity by defaming its practitioners and breaking the chain of initiation

that allowed such esoteric knowledge to be passed down orally from generation to generation.

However, modern initiates could still gain access to this hidden truth by studying the teachings

of the Kabbalah, the ancient tradition of exegetical interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures. Levi

regarded the Kabbalah as a source immense et cachee de la philosophie universelle that could

uncover the inner meaning encoded in sacred texts (1: 92). The written words of these texts were

believed to bear an analogical correspondence with the Verbe parle qui a cree le mondein

other words, the original utterance by which God brought the universe into being (1: 95). Seen

from this perspective, everything in Creation was understood as part of a hieroglyphic or symbolic

language that revealed the underlying perfection of its original conception.

Levi located the origin of this idea in Gods original creative act, which was itself a linguisticutterance. According to Levi, Gods generative Word was that of a celestial author whose writings,

so to speak, disclosed the most profound truths in a universal and perfect language:

Dieu et la nature ont en quelque sorte signe tous leurs ouvrages, et que tous les

produits dune force quelconque de la nature portent, pour ainsi dire, lestampille

de cette force imprimee en caracteres indelebiles, en sorte que linitie auxecritures

occultes puisse lire a livre ouvert les sympathies et les antipathies des choses, les

proprietes des substances et tous les autres secrets de la cr eation. (Lhistoire de la

magie370)

Throughout Levis writings, we find a similar connection drawn between Gods creative

word (the logos, or as he termed it le Verbe), the symbolic language of occult texts, and poetry.

The introduction to the second volume of the Dogme et rituel, for example, contains a rambling,

esoteric meditation on the links between le Verbe and natural forces, and here Levi clearly

matched the beauty of poetry with the beauty of divine revelation. Remarking on Pythagorass

philosophical ideas in Lhistoire de la magieideas Levi believed to be an ancient expression

of the occulthe noted an accord between their truth and their poetic qualities: Pythagoras, he

said, ne pouvait ignorer la relation exacte qui existe entre les sublimes pensees et les belles

expressions figurees, ses symboles memes sont pleins de poesie (100). For Levi, then, there

existed a seamless progression from the hieroglyphic language of nature, through the symbolicoccult text, to the beauty of poetic expression, all of which corresponded with the original Verbe

parle.

The interest in this mystical conception of language, which Baudelaire shared with L evi,

was signaled most clearly in the poets critical writings from the mid-1850s onward; on several

occasions, he described poetry as possessing a divine quality similar to that attributed by Levi

to the sacred texts of Kabbalistic study. Discussing the writing of Th eophile Gautier in 1859,

for example, he affirmed that to use poetic language adeptly was to possess a magnifique

dictionnaire whose pages were remues par un souffle divin (2: 117). Baudelaire clearly

conceived that certain forms of language had a greater correspondence with divine truth, and

poetry ascended to a high level in this hierarchy. Moreover, Baudelaire went on to suggest that towrite poetry well was to practice a kind of magic:


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Manier savamment une langue, cest pratiquer une espece de sorcellerieevocatoire.

Cest alors que la couleur parle, comme une voix profonde et vibrante; [ . . . ] que le

parfum provoque la pensee et le souvenir correspondants; que la passion murmureou rugit son langageeternellement semblable. (2: 118)

In Baudelaires view, Gautier, like all great poets, possessed the ability to see beyond the

appearance of the world around him and grasp the deeper correspondences within it, translating

its hieroglyphs into a comprehensible form while still retaining its resonant sense of eternity.

It is also worth pointing out that the language of occult mysticism that Baudelaire deployed

in his own poetry resonated in a framework rooted in the liturgy of the Catholic Church. The

mysteries of Catholic ritual, the theology that underpinned it, and the language through which it

was expressed were a source of continuing inspiration. Like mystical theology, they offered to

mitigate the traumatic quality of the modern city by reestablishing the richness of traditions and

sacraments it routinely lacked (Schlossman, Orient87).

LEVIS ASTRAL LIGHT AND BAUDELAIRES LUMINOUS SPECTRE

Many of Baudelaires central concerns come together in Un Fantome, a poem that depicts a

poetsorcerer who holds much in common with Levis mage. In it, he deals with the contradictory

nature of memoryconsoling on one hand and disappointing on the otherthe evocative power

of correspondance, the alchemical nature of art (and implicitly poetry, too), and the ultimate

failure of eternity to sustain itself. The poem is not obviously a very modern one, set as it is in

a timeless realm and possessing an occult aesthetic that is deliberately archaic, but its central

philosophical thrustthe evident degradation of everyday experience when compared with therichness of memory and correspondanceonly makes sense within the context of Baudelaires

wider ideas concerning the nature of modernity.

Un Fantome, probably written sometime between 1858 and 1860, describes a series of

manifestations of the presence or image of a lost lover, through memory as well as through

mystical and occult means. Memory appears in a succession of guises throughout the four

sonnets that comprise the poem, which in their individual ways reacquaint the poet with a lost

past. But as the poem progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that time is the enemy of the

poets happiness. Left alone with his reveries, in which he passes out of the normal temporal flow,

the poet has some consolation. But times relentless flow (to which he must always return) means

that the ideal is always something appreciated retrospectively, and only in recollection can our

conception of the world attain a plenitude of which the present is devoid.Most significantly, the poem touches on an idea that is a distinctive feature of L evis account

of occultism, namely his insistence on the possibility of vivid communication with dead or absent

people via the intercession of what he termed lumiere astrale. Levi presents a theory of astral

light that not only includes an account of necromancy, but also claims to explain the nature of

memory and its seemingly magical capacity to reawaken past experience. He saw astral light as a

universal ether joining all dimensions of time and space, both earthly and celestial. This medium

also enables memory, which exploits the links created between the past and present by astral

light. Levi therefore envisaged a situation in which themage, by engaging this light, could revive

or communicate with the dead, as he explained in a section of the Dogme et rituelon necromancy,

describing the way some personnes magnetiseesthose affected by an occult forcecould


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become conduits for communicating with the dead, and he noted the internalized, mnemonic

quality of such communications:

Il est certain que les images des morts apparaissent aux personnes magnetisees qui les

evoquent [ . . . ]. On les revoit telles quelles peuventetre encore dans le souvenir de

ceux qui les ont connues, telles que leurs reflets sans doute les ont laissees empreintes

dans la lumiere astrale. Quand les spectres evoques repondent aux questions quon

leur adresse, cest toujours par les signes ou par impression interieure et imaginaire,

jamais avec une voix qui frappe reellement les oreilles [ . . . ]. (2: 182)

The consciousness of the dead, then, could be imprinted on the astral light, making an absent

person tangible to someone who could connect with this force.

The potency of such an idea to Baudelaire lay in its ability to reunite the poet with his lost

lover; it promised, in other words, that the past is never entirely lost. Un Fant ome, then, begins

as a hope for the redemption offered by memory from the isolation of the poets urban life. In

the first sonnet, entitled Les Tenebres, Baudelaire describes an isolated, tomblike setting. The

caveaux dinsondable tristesse of the first line also establish the emotional tenor of the poem,

metaphorically evoking the deathly imprisonment in which the artist finds his spirit confined.

Darkness defines this world; the shadows of the title are reiterated in the first and second stanzas

depicting a gloom that speaks of mortification and humiliation, a punishment inflicted on the poet

by the combined forces of a mocking God and a capricious Fate:

Je suis comme un peintre quun Dieu moqueur

Condamne a peindre, helas! sur les tenebres; (1: 38)

The darkness even renders his artistic activity futile, it seems.

Into this fruitless state Baudelaire introduces a luminous, phantom-like memory of his absent

love as a promise of salvation from his isolation. Levis conception of a lumiere astrale that

gave the mages memory its evocative power bears striking similarities to the imagery of this

section, as Les Tenebres offers an otherworldly luminosity as a redeeming power in the poets

predicament, transporting him to a timeless realm in which death is overcome and the dead live

on:

Par instants brille, et sallonge, et setaleUn spectre fait de grace et de splendeur.

A sa reveuse allure orientale,

Quand il atteint sa totale grandeur,

Je reconnais ma belle visiteuse:

Cest Elle! noire et pourtant lumineuse. (1: 38)

The moments in which the apparition appears have an uncanny elasticity that elongates time,

removing the poet from its normal flow. In these moments, the image of Elle appears to the

poetsorcerer noire et pourtant lumineuse and seems to deliver him from his prison of isolation,

resurrecting the woman for whom he mourns.


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In the next sonnet, Le Parfum, Baudelaire depicts memory in its most sensuous form

that evoked by correspondance. Here, addressing the reader, the poetsorcerer tells of the

powerful erotic and mnemonic charge carried by scent. Yet these reveries are tinged withmelancholynostalgia, the reader comes to realize, does not bring the object of desire back.

Nevertheless, the resonant quality of this experience is everywhere apparent. The irregularly

recurring cadences of the vowel sounds suggest the veiled obscurity inherent in the olfactory

experience, and herein lies its potency; it suggests something that, like the whole sonnet, para-

doxically blends the oblique intangibility of the description of smell with the hint of ecclesi-

astical order. This religious allusion of the first quatrain is overtaken by the more mysterious

structures of magic as the sonnet proceeds, resulting in a revered, though fleeting, occult form of

memory:

Charme profond, magique, dont nous grise

Dans le present le passe restaure!Ainsi lamant sur un corps adore

Du souvenir cueille la fleur exquise. (1: 39)

Recollections here are distinctly involuntary, and their power is consequently more potent.

Moreover, the relation between the images Baudelaire draws on brings us back, with temporary

optimism, to the idea of the universal analogy. The sonnet is filled with reciprocal relationships

between the wider idea expressed by the quatrains and the particular evocation of the remembered

womans body in the tercets that follow. Paradoxical elements are united, the church of the first

quatrain is transformed into lalcove of the boudoir; languid and ponderous hair suggests

wildness and savagery by the perfume it exudes (De ses cheveux elastiques et lourds/ . . . Unesenteur montait, sauvage et fauve; 1: 39); the jeunesse pure of her garments has at the same

time un parfum de fourrure. In Baudelaires system, these correspondences connect us with

a more original, primitive experience where the boundaries between innocence and sensuality,

purity and sexuality, or religious feeling and erotic desire are as ill-defined as the boundaries

between the senses in a synaesthete.

The third sonnet, Le Cadre, is ostensibly a hymn to the perfecting quality of art, a unifying

force transcending nature. Yet as the poem proceeds, the experience of memory to which this

dreamlike fantasy corresponds becomes increasingly synthetic and unsatisfying as its potent,

occult form declines into a barren, willed, everyday form. The last sonnet, Le Portrait, reveals

the ultimate impotence of everyday remembrance; Baudelaire shows artifice and synthesis to

be inadequate in the face of the isolation of reality. Temporal flow reasserts itself and imagesof darkness once more replace the transient image of the luminous phantom. The increasing

prevalence of the past tense (pour nous flamboya, mon coeur se noya) denotes a poignant

denouement: The poets happiness is past and gone. This reaffirms the death of the poets love, at

the same time describing the obliteration of involuntary memory, presenting us with a despairing

question: De ces transports, plus vifs que des rayons,/ Que reste-t-il? (1: 40).

By the end of the poem, all that remains to the poetsorcerer of his past happiness is a bitter

nostalgia. In his anger and frustration at the loss of the powers of involuntary memory that had

preceded, all he can conjure is a vague impression of the one he has lost, a dessin fort pale that

stands in stark contrast with her earlier clarity. Nevertheless, the poetsorcerer still expresses his

faith that such memories, though bitter, are better than nothing; one wonders, though, whether itis a faith that rings a little hollow:


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Noir assassin de la Vie et de lArt,

Tu ne tueras jamais dans ma memoire

Celle qui fut mon plaisir et ma gloire! (1: 40)

We are left with the feeling that solipsism and isolation, characteristic of this urban poets

situation, have triumphed over his hope.

BAUDELAIRES AMBIVALENCE TO NOTIONS OF ETERNITY

Interpreting such occult imagery in Baudelaires poetry is no simple task because his writing

is clearly deeply ambivalent about the kind of eternal experience Levis magic represents. In the

end, Baudelaires writing preserves an ironic distance from the more straightforward ideas of

orthodox occultism. What Un Fantome demonstrates, in fact, is the way Baudelaires writing

calls into question and sometimes even parodies a theory that was, in his view, illusory; modernity,he felt, could not sustain the eternal qualities occultism promised to bestow. This inclination to

parody the aspiration to eternal experience is not uncommon in Baudelaires writing. In the prose

poem La Chambre Double, for instance, he described a room where le temps a disparu and

where instead lEternite reigns, only to reveal the timeless, harmonious experience of this room

as a cruel irony (1: 281). When an editors messenger knocks at the door demanding the next

installment of copy, the spell is broken, times inescapable demands reassert themselves and

existence turns out to be anything but timeless. Likewise, Un Fantome, while at first seeming

to laud the role of the poet asmagewho conjures the past into the present and thereby offers the

magical hope of escape from the mundane contingencies of everyday reality, finally expresses

Baudelaires vacillations between hope and despairhope that his memory might bring hislover back to him, and despair at the bitter realization that the pleasure that these recollections

produced could never last. The enthusiasm for verbal sorcery that Baudelaires poems so often

evince evaporates, then, as we recognize that the original fantasy merely staves off a reality

marked by hollowness and impermanence.

The paradox of Baudelaires attitude to the triviality of everyday lifesorely in need of

a redemptive sense of eternity but unable to sustain ithas been skillfully analyzed by Paul

Smith, who suggests that Baudelaires critical writings conclude that the aspiration to a state of

timeless bliss could only be regarded as a delusion (Baudelaires 7778). This attitude is most

notably expressed in Baudelaires famous definition of art, set out in his essayLe Peintre de la vie

moderne, in which he suggests that it comprised both modernitys transitoire, fugitive, and

contingent elements as well as the transcendent qualities of leternel et limmuable (2: 695).But as Smith observes, it is difficult to see exactly what Baudelaire meant by this duality, and this

gives the essays aesthetic criterion only the semblance of plausibility or coherenceinstead,

the reality of modern life was that it precluded eternal experience, even as it made it increasingly

desirable. Baudelaires work therefore suggests that the condition of capitalist modernity, by

making clock time the measure of the working day and isolating individuals from the sense of

continuity and belonging that lies at the heart of this desire for eternity, had effectively banished

timelessness from everyday experience.

In fact, such a conclusion gives further meaning to love poems such as Un Fantome. As

Smith suggests, Baudelaire used imagery of erotic loss metaphorically, using the unattainability

of love in the city to point to the deeper disappearance of meaningful communication and sharedexperience from modern life in general. Put simply, Smith says, Baudelaires reaction to


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148 Symposium

modernity is a reaction to crisis (Impressionism 40). The retreat into fantasy that this crisis

occasioned, and the sense of loss and isolation that it generated, constituted what Benjamin

called the stigmata which life in a metropolis inflicts on love (140).

BAUDELAIRES PARADOX OF MEMORY: LEVIS OCCULTISM

AND THE CRISIS OF MODERNITY

What, then, are we to make of this connection between Baudelaires writing and the ideas

of Eliphas Levi? Though clearly drawing on the same group of occult ideas and imagery, the

differences in the way Levi and Baudelaire used magic in their writing are perhaps just as

remarkable: While Levis concepts of a timeless magical dogma held an implacable conviction,

Baudelaires were filled with doubts that were quintessentially modern. His occult poems are

marked by a profound ambivalence typical of his attitude to the world around him in general. On

one hand, Baudelaire saw that memory and language together possessed a capacity to conjure

up the past, which allowed him to embrace occultism as a means to bring back a sense of

enchantment that had been utterly extinguished by capitalism and commodity culture. On the

other hand, Baudelaire came to realize that mundane existence prevented such a sense from taking

root in everyday life. Time, for example, always intruded its peremptory influence. Consequently,

his work asserted that modern life had somehow missed something crucial; it had turned into a

cul-de-sac of limited, transitory experience, outside of which lay the cohesive harmony of nature.

How was one to be content in the present, Baudelaires writings seem to ask, when memory

put one in touch with a more sensuously gratifying experience of the world but held it out of

reach? In this light, the contradictions Baudelaires works present are entirely consistent with

his insight into the fragmentation of modernity. Baudelaire imbues his works with a feeling ofdisenchanted nostalgia, of something unattainable or untenable, as they describe a place in which

the poet can only ever be the mages unsuccessful doppelganger.

Notes

1Pichois included this article in the uvres Completes despite his uncertainty over its authorship, precisely toestablish that Baudelaire was aware of Levi as a figure of importance in the literary world of the 1840s. He also discussesthe circumstances that led Jacques Crepet to discover Baudelaires involvement in writing sections ofLes Mysteres galants(2: 153236). It seems likely that other contributors included Privat dAnglemont (along with whom Baudelaire becameentangled in a quarrel with Baron Pichon and Lord Arondel over an attack on them contained in the collection), GeorgesMathieu, Fortune Mesure and, somewhat bizarrely, Levi himself.

2Pichois points out that Baudelaires name was omitted from a more definitive list published later.3Pierre Leroux was the foremost exponent of this aesthetic theory in France and was keenly read by Baudelaire. Heargued that any attempt to grasp experience required the substitution or translation of ideas from their original contextinto a new one, matching one experience with its metaphorically corresponding equivalent.

4In regard to Baudelaires reading, see Champfleury (13233). Champfleury describes Baudelaires capriciousenthusiasm for Swedenborg, which is overtaken some little time later by a fixation with Wronski. Levis research,meanwhile, was a little more systematic and academic. His sources included the sixteenth-century German occultistCornelius Agrippa, as well as works by followers of Pythagoras, Kabbalistic literature, and writings attributed to HermesTrismegistus, a figure mentioned by Baudelaire, incidentally, in the section Au Lecteur ofLes Fleurs du mal, in whichhe refers to Satan Trismegiste (1: 5); see Williams (7172). For accounts of the prevalence of occult ideas in France,see also McIntosh, Webb, Mercier, Williams, and King and Sutherland.

5Leakey talks of the fervour of this introductory paragraph as that of a recent convert. The publication of L evisDogme et rituelat the time Baudelaire wrote this essay may have contributed to such a conversion.

6The most commonly cited textual connection between Baudelaire and Levi is that between Correspondances

and a poem by Levi with the same title published in an early collection of poems and chansons Les Trois harmonies. See,for example, Pichois and Ziegler (19394). This poem, it has been claimed, was among the inspirations for Baudelaires


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poem, not merely because of its title but also because of the similar mystical ideas about natures harmonious, universallanguage they espouse. Compare, for example, the conversations between inanimate elements in Levis line Par unesecrete harmonie,/ La terre ainsi repond aux cieux and Baudelaires Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se r epondent,

or natures vocalization in Levis Rien nest muet dans la nature and Baudelaires La Nature est un temple ou devivants piliers/ Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles. Yet, despite their surface similarities, the link between thesetwo poems is actually unhelpful; their similarities end at the titles and the general theme of mystical connections. Inhis Correspondances, Levi aimed for a Romantic evocation of the mystical connection between man and nature. Suchsentimentality would have been anathema to Baudelaire, who on the other hand, took a more intellectual approach tocorrespondance, meditating on the intoxication of synaesthesia and the prelapsarian sense of harmony it gestures toward,though it never escapes the limitations of sensuous experience.

7As Beryl Schlossman has observed, Baudelaires references to the idea of correspondance are rhetorical andpoetic rather than strictly doctrinal and cannot be glossed or reduced to a simple mystical concept of correspondence(Benjamins 554).

8He 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 until1846 that memory became the criterium tire de la nature, which, according to Baudelaire, the spectator of a paintingshould use intuitively to grasp its harmonious beauty (2: 418).

Works Cited

Balzac, Honore de.S eraphita, Louis Lambert and The Exiles. Trans. Clara Bell. Sawtry: Dedalus, 1995. Print.

Baudelaire, Charles.uvres completes. Ed. Claude Pichois. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 197576. Print.

Baudelaire, Charles, and Jacques Crepet.Mysteres galants des theatres de Paris. Paris: Gallimard, 1938. Print.

Beguin, Albert, and Robert G. Cohn. Poetry and Occultism. Yale French Studies4 (1949): 1225. Print.

Benjamin, Walter.Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1983. Print.

Champfleury.Souvenirs et portraits de jeunesse. Paris: Dentu, 1872. Print.

Constant, Alphonse Louis.Les Trois harmonies. Paris: Fellens et Dufour, 1845. Print.

Eigeldinger, Marc. Baudelaire et lalchimie verbale. Etudes Baudelairiennes. Ed. W. T. Bandy and Claude Pichois.

Neuchatel: Baconniere, 1971. 8198. Print.

Harvey, David Allen. Beyond Enlightenment: Occultism, Politics, and Culture in France from the Old Regime to the

Fin de Siecle.The Historian65.3 (2003): 66594. Print.

Hiddleston, J. A. Baudelaire and the Art of Memory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Print.

King, Francis, and Isabel Sutherland. The Rebirth of Magic. Aylesbury: Corgi, 1982. Print.

Lawler, J.Poetry and moral dialectic: Baudelaires secret architecture. London: Associated UP, 1997. Print.

Leakey, F. W.Baudelaire and Nature. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1969. Print.

Levi, Eliphas.Dogme et rituel de la haute magie.2nd ed. 2 vols. Paris: Bailliere, 1861. Print.

.Histoire de la magie: avec une exposition claire et pr ecise de ses proced es, de ses rites et de ses mysteres. Paris:

Bailliere, 1860. Print.

McIntosh, Christopher.Eliphas Levi and the French Occult Revival. London: Rider, 1972. Print.

Mercier, Alain.Eliphas Levi et la pensee magique au XIXe siecle. Paris: Seghers, 1974. Print.

Pichois, Claude, and Jean Ziegler. Baudelaire. Paris: Julliard, 1987. Print.

Schlossman, Beryl. Benjamins Uber Einige Motive bei Baudelaire: The Secret Architecture of Correspondances.MLN

107.3 (1992): 54879. Print..The Orient of Style: Modernist Allegories of Conversion. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. Print.

Smith, Paul. Baudelaires Le Peintre de la vie moderne and La Peinture de la vie ancienne. Impressions of French

Modernity: Art and Literature in France 18501900. Ed. R. Hobbs. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998. 7696. Print.

.Impressionism: Beneath the Surface. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995. Print.

Webb, James.The Occult Underground. LaSalle: Library Press, 1974. Print.

Wilkinson, Lynn Rosellen. The Dream of an Absolute Language: Emanuel Swedenborg and French Literary Culture.

Albany: State U of New York P, 1996. Print.

Williams, Thomas A.Eliphas Levi: Master of Occultism. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1975. Print.

Jon Leaver is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Honors Program at the University of La Verne

in Southern California. His research focuses on nineteenth-century French art and criticism as well as contemporary art.


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