Symposium, Vol. 66, No.

3, 139149, 2012
Copyright
C
Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0039-7709 print / 1931-0676 online
DOI: 10.1080/00397709.2012.708301
JON LEAVER
University of La Verne
Sorcellerie evocatoire: Magic and Memory
in Baudelaire and Eliphas L evi
The relationship between Charles Baudelaire and his contemporary, the occult writer Eliphas
L evi, has long interested scholars. This essay argues that instead of fruitlessly looking for evidence
of direct literary inuence 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 Fant ome also explores the connection between memory and the
occult concept of lumi` ere 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 have
offered the semblance of plenitude and happiness in their transcendence of daily existence, they
also, by denition, held such feelings out of reach in an eternally irretrievable past.
Keywords: Charles Baudelaire, Un Fant ome, Eliphas L evi (Alphonse Constant), lumi` ere
astrale, magic, memory, modernity, occult
INTRODUCTION: BAUDELAIRE, THE OCCULT, AND ELIPHAS L

EVI
Early in 1866, languishing in Brussels toward the end of his declining years, Charles Baude-
laire added a brief reading list to the poem LImpr evu in his manuscript for Les

Epaves,
casually referring his reader to le Rituel de la haute Magie, dEliphas L evi, 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 L evi (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 denite connec-
tion between these two contemporaries than this meager scrap, but with little success. In the
uvres compl` etes, 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 Myst` eres galants des th e atres de Paris,
139
140 Symposium
was evidence that Baudelaire was well aware of his fellow writer. Later, in his biography of
Baudelaire, Pichois identied a roll of ofcers and afliates of Le Parti r epublicain centrala
Blanquist Republican organizationpublished in the Courrier francais in 1848 that included
the 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 denite acquaintance has ever
been conrmed, prompting Jacques Cr epet 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 L evis inuence on Baudelaire during the 1840s or 1850s, what signicance should we
attach to a poem such as Baudelaires Un Fant ome, written in the mid-1850s, in which he
makes unambiguous occult references that closely correlate with many of L evis 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 lumi` ere astrale in occult parlance, which to L evi signied the universal
medium that binds Creation together. The striking similarities between the imagery presented by
Baudelaire in this poem and the ideas described in L evis book Dogme et rituel de la haute magie
clearly demand attention; L evis quasi-empirical account of the occult bears a closer resemblance
to Un Fant ome than Baudelaires other, more famous mystical inspirations, Swedenborg and
Fourier, both of whom were exclusively theoretical and cosmological. However, the possibility
of L evis inuence on Baudelaire, though intriguing, is perhaps secondary to the wider question
it raises: What afnities 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
nally distinguishes his occultism from L evis? I will argue that although Baudelaires belief in
the magical, evocative (in a sense, even resurrective) qualities of poetry brings him very close
to L evi, 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 L evis 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 inuence of the mystical
thought of Emanuel Swedenborg on French literary culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, 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 B eguin 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 innite 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, Baudelaire
himself asked in the early 1860s, si ce nest un traducteur, un d echiffreur? (2: 133).
Sorcellerie evocatoire 141
It is certainly true, then, that Baudelaires aesthetic theory, no matter how original, derived
frommystical ideas about languagehe famously referred to language and writing as op erations
magiques, sorcellerie evocatoire (1: 658). In this, Baudelaire was preceded by Honor e 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, G erard de Nerval, Joseph de Maistre, Pierre
Leroux, and J ozef Maria Ho en e Wronski (L evis own esoteric mentor).
4
The hankering for the eternal expressed both by Baudelaire and L evi 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 trafc of a newly industrial city. The pop-
ulation of this city, swelled by the massive inux 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 poemsuch as Baudelaires Perte daur eole, 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 identies 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 of
the correspondences with the deprivation of experience that aficts the inhabitants of modernity?
(Benjamins 557).
Baudelaire likely found the kind of occult ideas L evi 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 L evi 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 L evi, for all his
archaism, his desire for a sense of eternity was rmly 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 L evi therefore reected a
fundamental unease about a modern world from which truly enduring experience was absent, and
to which occultism offered an antidote.
BAUDELAIRES ATTRACTION TO OCCULTISM: THE UNIVERSAL
ANALOGIE IN L

EVIS DOGME 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 une evocation, une op eration magique, warning that it was therefore
folly to discuss les formules evocatoires du sorcier (meaning the artist) because painting had
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 sense
impressions (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 of correspondance, 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
L evis 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 concern
absent from other occult writers Baudelaire is known to have read. According to L evi, memory
revealed its philosophical signicance 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
d etermin ees (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 p erit dans la nature, et tout ce qui a v ecu continue ` a vivre toujours sous des
formes nouvelles; mais les formes m emes ant erieures ne sont pas d etruites, puisque
nous les retrouvons dans notre souvenir. [ . . . ] Les traces m emes que nous croyons
effac ees dans notre souvenir ne sont pas r eellement, puisquune circonstance fortuite
les evoque et nous les rappelle. (2: 62)
Here L evi describes a universal phenomenon Marcel Proust would later characterize as the
m emoire involontaire, in which recollections of the past are evoked without conscious effort.
But later in the same section, L evi 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 m emoire 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. L evi explained that memory contained ideas that were le
caract` ere naturel, la signature of the forms from which they originated, which made it possible
for a mage to evoque activement lid ee 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 L evis Dogme et rituel was the idea of a universal analogie,
in which even seemingly opposed ideas were unied par correspondance et par connexion
analogique (2: 47). L evi 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 L evis conviction of the existence of une doctrine partout
la m eme et partout soigneusement cach ee, an understanding of which would grant access to
the divine truths of Creation (1: 63). His occultism held that all religious doctrines reected
Sorcellerie evocatoire 143
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, L evi argued,
because of fear of the unknown and in spite of its kinship with this magical doctrine, had driven
it 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. L evi
regarded the Kabbalah as a source immense et cach ee 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 parl e qui a cr e e le mondein
other words, the original utterance by which God brought the universe into being (1: 95). Seen
fromthis perspective, everything in Creation was understood as part of a hieroglyphic or symbolic
language that revealed the underlying perfection of its original conception.
L evi located the origin of this idea in Gods original creative act, which was itself a linguistic
utterance. According to L evi, 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 sign e tous leurs ouvrages, et que tous les
produits dune force quelconque de la nature portent, pour ainsi dire, lestampille
de cette force imprim ee en caract` eres ind el ebiles, en sorte que liniti e aux ecritures
occultes puisse lire ` a livre ouvert les sympathies et les antipathies des choses, les
propri et es des substances et tous les autres secrets de la cr eation. (Lhistoire de la
magie 370)
Throughout L evis writings, we nd 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 L evi clearly
matched the beauty of poetry with the beauty of divine revelation. Remarking on Pythagorass
philosophical ideas in Lhistoire de la magieideas L evi 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 pens ees et les belles
expressions gur ees, ses symboles m emes sont pleins de po esie (100). For L evi, then, there
existed a seamless progression from the hieroglyphic language of nature, through the symbolic
occult text, to the beauty of poetic expression, all of which corresponded with the original Verbe
parl e.
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 L evi
to the sacred texts of Kabbalistic study. Discussing the writing of Th eophile Gautier in 1859,
for example, he afrmed that to use poetic language adeptly was to possess a magnique
dictionnaire whose pages were remu es par un soufe 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 to
write poetry well was to practice a kind of magic:
144 Symposium
Manier savamment une langue, cest pratiquer une esp` ece de sorcellerie evocatoire.
Cest alors que la couleur parle, comme une voix profonde et vibrante; [ . . . ] que le
parfum provoque la pens ee et le souvenir correspondants; que la passion murmure
ou rugit son langage eternellement 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, Orient 87).
L

EVIS ASTRAL LIGHT AND BAUDELAIRES LUMINOUS SPECTRE

Many of Baudelaires central concerns come together in Un Fant ome, a poemthat depicts a
poetsorcerer who holds much in common with L evis 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 the
richness of memory and correspondanceonly makes sense within the context of Baudelaires
wider ideas concerning the nature of modernity.
Un Fant ome, 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 ow,
the poet has some consolation. But times relentless ow (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 signicantly, 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 lumi` ere astrale. L evi 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. L evi therefore envisaged a situation in which the mage, by engaging this light, could revive
or communicate with the dead, as he explained in a section of the Dogme et rituel on necromancy,
describing the way some personnes magn etis eesthose affected by an occult forcecould
Sorcellerie evocatoire 145
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 magn etis ees qui les
evoquent [ . . . ]. On les revoit telles quelles peuvent etre encore dans le souvenir de
ceux qui les ont connues, telles que leurs reets sans doute les ont laiss ees empreintes
dans la lumi` ere astrale. Quand les spectres evoqu es r epondent aux questions quon
leur adresse, cest toujours par les signes ou par impression int erieure et imaginaire,
jamais avec une voix qui frappe r eellement 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 rst sonnet, entitled Les T en` ebres, Baudelaire describes an isolated, tomblike setting. The
caveaux dinsondable tristesse of the rst line also establish the emotional tenor of the poem,
metaphorically evoking the deathly imprisonment in which the artist nds his spirit conned.
Darkness denes this world; the shadows of the title are reiterated in the rst and second stanzas
depicting a gloom that speaks of mortication and humiliation, a punishment inicted 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, h elas! sur les t en` ebres; (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. L evis conception of a lumi` ere astrale that
gave the mages memory its evocative power bears striking similarities to the imagery of this
section, as Les T en` ebres 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 s etale
Un spectre fait de gr ace et de splendeur.
`
A sa r eveuse 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 ow. In these moments, the image of Elle appears to the
poetsorcerer noire et pourtant lumineuse and seems to deliver himfromhis prison of isolation,
resurrecting the woman for whom he mourns.
146 Symposium
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 with
melancholynostalgia, 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 rst quatrain is overtaken by the more mysterious
structures of magic as the sonnet proceeds, resulting in a revered, though eeting, occult form of
memory:
Charme profond, magique, dont nous grise
Dans le pr esent le pass e restaur e!
Ainsi lamant sur un corps ador e
Du souvenir cueille la eur 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 lled 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 rst
quatrain is transformed into lalc ove of the boudoir; languid and ponderous hair suggests
wildness and savagery by the perfume it exudes (De ses cheveux elastiques et lourds/ . . . Une
senteur 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-dened 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 artice and synthesis to
be inadequate in the face of the isolation of reality. Temporal ow reasserts itself and images
of darkness once more replace the transient image of the luminous phantom. The increasing
prevalence of the past tense (pour nous amboya, mon coeur se noya) denotes a poignant
denouement: The poets happiness is past and gone. This reafrms 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 p ale 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 it
is a faith that rings a little hollow:
Sorcellerie evocatoire 147
Noir assassin de la Vie et de lArt,
Tu ne tueras jamais dans ma m emoire
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 L evis magic represents. In the
end, Baudelaires writing preserves an ironic distance from the more straightforward ideas of
orthodox occultism. What Un Fant ome 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 l

Eternit e 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 Fant ome, while at rst seeming
to laud the role of the poet as mage who conjures the past into the present and thereby offers the
magical hope of escape from the mundane contingencies of everyday reality, nally expresses
Baudelaires vacillations between hope and despairhope that his memory might bring his
lover 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 denition of art, set out in his essay Le 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 l eternel et limmuable (2: 695).
But as Smith observes, it is difcult 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 Fant ome. 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 shared
experience from modern life in general. Put simply, Smith says, Baudelaires reaction to
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 inicts on love (140).
BAUDELAIRES PARADOX OF MEMORY: L

EVIS OCCULTISM
AND THE CRISIS OF MODERNITY
What, then, are we to make of this connection between Baudelaires writing and the ideas
of Eliphas L evi? Though clearly drawing on the same group of occult ideas and imagery, the
differences in the way L evi and Baudelaire used magic in their writing are perhaps just as
remarkable: While L evis concepts of a timeless magical dogma held an implacable conviction,
Baudelaires were lled 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 fromtaking
root in everyday life. Time, for example, always intruded its peremptory inuence. 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 of
disenchanted nostalgia, of something unattainable or untenable, as they describe a place in which
the poet can only ever be the mages unsuccessful doppelganger.
Notes
1
Pichois included this article in the uvres Compl` etes despite his uncertainty over its authorship, precisely to
establish that Baudelaire was aware of L evi as a gure of importance in the literary world of the 1840s. He also discusses
the circumstances that led Jacques Cr epet to discover Baudelaires involvement in writing sections of Les Myst` eres galants
(2: 153236). It seems likely that other contributors included Privat dAnglemont (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, Fortun e Mesur e and, somewhat bizarrely, L evi himself.
2
Pichois points out that Baudelaires name was omitted from a more denitive 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 Baudelaires reading, see Champeury (13233). Champeury describes Baudelaires capricious
enthusiasm for Swedenborg, which is overtaken some little time later by a xation with Wronski. L evis 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 gure mentioned by Baudelaire, incidentally, in the section Au Lecteur of Les Fleurs du mal, in which
he refers to Satan Trism egiste (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.
5
Leakey talks of the fervour of this introductory paragraph as that of a recent convert. The publication of L evis
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 L evi is that between Correspondances
and a poem by L evi 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
Sorcellerie evocatoire 149
poem, not merely because of its title but also because of the similar mystical ideas about natures harmonious, universal
language they espouse. Compare, for example, the conversations between inanimate elements in L evis line Par une
secr` ete harmonie,/ La terre ainsi r epond aux cieux and Baudelaires Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se r epondent,
or natures vocalization in L evis Rien nest muet dans la nature and Baudelaires La Nature est un temple o` u 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, L evi 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, Baudelaires 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
(Benjamins 554).
8
He rst 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 tir e de la nature, which, according to Baudelaire, the spectator of a painting
should use intuitively to grasp its harmonious beauty (2: 418).
Works Cited
Balzac, Honor e 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 Cr epet. Myst` eres galants des th eatres de Paris. Paris: Gallimard, 1938. Print.
B eguin, Albert, and Robert G. Cohn. Poetry and Occultism. Yale French Studies 4 (1949): 1225. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1983. Print.
Champeury. 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.
Neuch atel: Baconni` ere, 1971. 8198. Print.
Harvey, David Allen. Beyond Enlightenment: Occultism, Politics, and Culture in France from the Old Regime to the
Fin de Si` ecle. The Historian 65.3 (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.
L evi, Eliphas. Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Paris: Bailli` ere, 1861. Print.
. Histoire de la magie: avec une exposition claire et pr ecise de ses proc ed es, de ses rites et de ses myst` eres. Paris:
Bailli` ere, 1860. Print.
McIntosh, Christopher. Eliphas L evi and the French Occult Revival. London: Rider, 1972. Print.
Mercier, Alain. Eliphas L evi et la pens ee magique au XIXe si` ecle. 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 L evi: 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.
Copyright of Symposium is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed
to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However,
users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.