Éliphas Lévi – pentagram and hexagram
The 19th-century French Kabbalist made the pentagram and hexagram core symbols of modern esotericism.
Éliphas Lévi, born Alphonse Louis Constant (1810–1875), is regarded as one of the most influential occultists of the modern age. Hardly an esoteric current after him does without his images and terms, even if his name is rarely mentioned. His main work, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Dogma and Ritual of High Magic, 1854–1856), contains allegorical drawings that put the star polygons of the tetractys at the centre.
The pentagram
For Lévi the pentagram, which the Gnostics called the “blazing star”, is the sign of omnipotence and spiritual self-mastery, the star of the magi and the sign of the Word made flesh. Depending on the direction of its points it represents good or evil: with one point upwards the lamb, with two points upwards the goat. It is morning star and evening star at once, light and night. According to Lévi, all the mysteries of magic, all the symbols of Gnosis and all the Kabbalistic keys are summed up in the pentagram. Paracelsus, he says, already called it the greatest and most powerful sign.
Pentagram and hexagram are among the four start figures of the tetractys.
Baphomet
Lévi’s best-known drawing is Baphomet, a winged hybrid with a goat’s head, which he understood as a pantheistic image of the absolute. Between its horns it carries a torch, the light of revelation, and on its forehead an upright pentagram, the sign of human intelligence. Its hands point up and down towards two crescent moons, one light and one dark, as an image of the relation between good and evil, mercy and justice.
Elsewhere Lévi interpreted the figure differently and more negatively. One can see in it the angel fallen into matter, Lucifer, the “light-bearer” with the torch on his head. On this reading the alchemical process begins here: fall, purification, ascent. That is why the pentagram also carries the idea of redemption, as the star of Bethlehem.
The four creatures and the seal of Solomon
Another drawing by Lévi shows the cherub from the vision of Ezekiel with four heads and six wings. For Lévi the four heads are the fourness of the Merkabah, the six wings the sixness of the creation story. He calls the figure the key to all pentacles and the pentacle of Pythagoras. How Lévi arrived at the link with Pythagoras is open. That it exists is not in doubt.
The great seal of Solomon, the double triangle, Lévi depicts as two old men, the god of light and the god of reflections, the merciful and the avenging. The hexagram as a union of opposites is the same figure that in the rhythm of six stands for the interplay of even and odd numbers.
More on the cherub and the Merkabah under The throne of God and the number 24.