The Great Secret by Eliphas Levi

The Great Secret by Eliphas Levi

So concludes what Levi considered to be his testament, his most important and final treatise, and a summation of his esoteric philosophy. This volume is the conclusion of the work he started as Book One, The Heiratic Mystery or the Traditional Documents of High Initiation, published as The Book of Splendours (Weiser, 1984). The Great Secret contains his final two works. In Book Two, The Royal Mystery or Art of Subduing the Powers, Levi discusses such topics as Evil, the Outer Darkness, the Great Secret, Magical Sacrifice, Evocations, the Arcana of Solomon's Ring, and the Terrible Secret. In Book Three, The Sacerdotal Mystery or the Art of being Served by Spirits, he expounds on the subjects of Aberrant Forces, the Chaining of the Devil, Sacred and Accursed Rites, Divination, Dark Intelligence, and the Great Arcanum. 

Eliphas Levi, a pen name for Alphonse Louis Constant, was a master of the conventional Rosicrucian interpretation of the Kabbalah. He was born in France in 1810 and received his education for the church at SaintSulpice through the parish priest's office. Later, he was removed from seminary for teaching beliefs that were incompatible with those of the Roman Catholic Church. Levi began researching the occult sciences in 1824 and spent the following three decades writing on magic and the Kabbalah. Transcendental Magic, Secrets of the Qabalah, and The Book of Splendours are among his other works.