I believe that I may speak with a certain accent of authority upon any question which connects with the French magus Eliphas Levi.

I am an old student of his works, and of the aspects of occult science and magical history which arise out of them; in the year 1886 I published a digest of his writings which has been the only attempt to present them to English readers until the present year when I have undertaken a translation _in extenso_ of the _Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie_, which is actually in the hands of the printer.

Now, it has not been alleged in so many words that the radix of Modern Diabolism and the Masonic cultus of Lucifer is to be found in Eliphas Levi, but that is the substance of the charge.

Most, or all, of the witnesses agree in representing him as an atrocious Satanist, an invoker of Lucifer, a celebrater of black masses, and an adept in the practical blasphemies of Eucharistic sacrilege; all of them father either upon the Palladium or upon Pike a variety of documents containing gross thefts from Levi; some of them, directly and upon their own responsibility, cite passages from his works, always with conspicuous bad faith.

Finally, they agree in connecting him with the foundation of the New and Reformed Palladium through his alleged disciple Phileas Walder; and one of them goes so far as to say that Palladism was a further development or restoration of a Satanic society directed by Eliphas Levi and operating his theurgic system, which he in turn, if I rightly understand the mixed hypothesis of M.de la Rive, may have derived from the Palladic rite of 1730.