Sorcellerie française

Sorcellerie française, three layers

Catholic-folk · Grimoires · Occultisme

Sorcellerie française is not a single unified system but three interwoven layers: first, the living Catholic folk magic (saint veneration, use of holy water, candle rites to saints), practiced without interruption in many rural regions of France and Quebec. Second, the early modern grimoire culture, Le Petit Albert (1668), Le Grand Albert, Cyprianus, which lay in farmhouses from the 17th to the 19th century and was worked through. Third, the occultism of the 19th century (Éliphas Lévi, Papus, Eteilla), from which most modern Western occultism currents descend.

Keep the three layers clearly apart

• Living Catholic-folk magic: invoking saints, holy water, petitions to Mary, egg cleansings. Grandmother to granddaughter, within the Catholic frame.
• Grimoire culture: Petit Albert, Grand Albert, Sixth-and-Seventh-Book-of-Moses. Protective formulas, healing charms, talismans. In the farmhouse, often in secret.
• Occultisme française: Lévi (1856), Papus (1880s), Eteilla (1780s tarot). An intellectual program, salons, orders; from this current come Crowley, the GD, modern Hermeticism.

What Sorcellerie française is not

• Not a mere Wicca variant with French deity names; this path has no central Goddess/God polarity.
• Not a homogeneous tradition; the three layers often do not know one another. A saint-invoking grandmother in Provence knows no Liber AL.
• Not a closed tradition; all three layers are open, but context-specific (Catholic-folk needs the Catholic frame to make sense).

Whoever practices Sorcellerie française should know which layer they are working in; saint magic and Lévi's pentagram look similar, but they are different worlds.

Le Petit Albert & Le Grand Albert

French folk grimoires · 17th to 19th c.

Le Petit Albert (first edition around 1668, popular edition Cologne 1722) and Le Grand Albert are the most important French-language folk grimoires of early modern Europe. Attributed to Albertus Magnus (13th century) but in fact compiled anonymously. They lay in farmhouses and petit-bourgeois households as practical magic handbooks: protective formulas, healing charms, love magic, thief detection, weather magic. Public domain.

Le Petit Albert (1668ff.)

• Focus: practical household magic, protection against witches, foiling thieves, healing animals.
• Classic pieces: the Hand of Glory (a talisman made from a hanged man's hand), conjuration circles with Latin formulas, magical sympathy mirrors.
• Scraps of Latin combined with Old French; the efficacy lies in correct pronunciation.
• Handed down in some rural families into the 20th century, as a family book, not shown publicly.

Le Grand Albert (~1750)

• Focus: higher magic, angel invocation, planetary talismans, stone and plant correspondences.
• Also medical recipes, many of them based on Galenic humoral theory.
• Stands between grimoire culture and the beginnings of Renaissance Hermeticism (the Agrippa substrate is visible).

Cyprianus (the Saint Cyprian book)

• The third important folk grimoire, in several French-Scandinavian-German versions.
• Named after Saint Cyprian of Antioch, said to have been a magician before his conversion.
• In France often known under the title "Livre du Diable"; the title is marketing, not content.

Éliphas Lévi, magician of the 19th century

1810 to 1875 · Dogme et Rituel · 1856

Éliphas Lévi (born Alphonse Louis Constant) shaped the modern concept of the magician with Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1856). Formerly a Catholic deacon, then a prison inmate on account of socialist writings, then an occultist. Lévi's synthesis of Kabbalah, tarot, Christian Hermeticism and Romantic eclecticism is the soil on which Crowley, the Golden Dawn and the whole modern Western occultism tradition grew.

Lévi's core ideas

• The astral light (lumière astrale), universal medium of all magical action; forerunner of modern energy concepts.
• The pentagram as key symbol; he established the now classic 22-trump tarot-Sephiroth correspondence (with its weaknesses).
• The magician as a reflective human being; magic as discipline, not as raw power.
• The image of the sabbath goat (Baphomet) as a symbol of balance, drawn by Lévi, later taken up and misunderstood.

What is accessible

• Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1856), the main work, public domain, freely available in several translations.
• Histoire de la Magie (1860), the history of magic from Lévi's point of view; partly speculative, always readable.
• La Clef des Grands Mystères (1861), more compact, more practice-oriented.
• Tarot correspondences: Lévi founded the assignment of tarot trumps to Hebrew letters, which the GD and Crowley adopted (disputed for some cards).

What to bear in mind

• Lévi's pentagram diagram from Dogme et Rituel is his original work, but for that very reason it was also abused as antisemitic symbolism in the 20th century. The context in Lévi was different.
• Some of his historical claims (about the Templars, Atlantis, Egyptian mysteries) are speculation, not history.
• Lévi himself was not a practitioner in the modern sense; he describes the system, but rarely performed it.

Read Lévi slowly. His French style is convoluted; his system is clear. This is the source of modern Hermeticism.

Papus & French occultism, 1880s to 1910s

Gérard Encausse · Salons · Orders

Papus (Gérard Encausse, 1865 to 1916), physician and occultist, carried Lévi's legacy into the salons of the Belle Époque. He founded the Ordre Martiniste, wrote pedagogical books of magic and established the Tarot de Marseille as the main divination system of the French sphere. In this period arose the intellectual structures out of which, via Crowley, the whole of modern English magic emerged.

Important works (public domain)

• Traité méthodique de magie pratique (1893), a pedagogical handbook for beginners.
• Traité élémentaire de science occulte (1888), an overview of the whole field.
• Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), the tarot as the esoteric library of the Roma.
• La Cabbale tradition secrète de l'Occident (1892), a French synthesis of kabbalistic teachings.

Other voices of the era

• Stanislas de Guaita (1861 to 1897), Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix, symbolist.
• Joséphin Péladan, Salon de la Rose+Croix, an artists' movement with an occult program.
• Sédir (Yvon Le Loup), Christian mystic, translator of Jakob Böhme into French.
• Maurice Magre, a later generation, Albigensian research, Theosophy.

What to bear in mind

• The French occultism wave of the Belle Époque has a clear racist undercurrent; "the Jewish" or "the Gypsy" source of magic is often named with colonial-racist romanticism.
• Papus himself has antisemitic traits in some of his writings, without making them central.
• If you work with Papus: read critically, adopt the method and not all the judgments.

Tarot de Marseille, the French tarot

Pre-occult imagery · 17th c. to today

The Tarot de Marseille is the oldest continuously practiced type of tarot, born in 17th-century France from northern Italian predecessors (Visconti-Sforza), canonized in Marseille in the 18th century. Unlike the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot (1909, British-occult), the Tarot de Marseille has no illustrated pip cards; the number cards show only the suit symbol in a stylized arrangement. That makes it harder to read, but closer to the pre-occult tradition.

Four important versions

• Tarot de Marseille de Conver (1760), the canonical variant, cut by Nicolas Conver.
• Camoin-Jodorowsky tarot (1997), a modern restoration of the Conver printing plates, with Alejandro Jodorowsky.
• Tarot de Marseille de Jean Dodal (1701), older, rougher, more primal.
• Tarot Conver-Ben-Dov (2010), a historically accurate reconstruction.

What sets it apart from the Rider-Waite

• Pip cards: Marseille shows only swords/wands/cups/coins in a stylized arrangement, no narrative pictures.
• Reading method: you read the directions of movement, number and arrangement of the suits, not picture scenes.
• Trump order: trump XX = "Le Jugement", XXI = "Le Monde", the same as in the Rider-Waite.
• Trump VIII Justice, XI Strength (the reverse of Crowley/RWS, where VIII is Strength and XI Justice).

Who works with it

• The Jodorowsky tradition (the post-1980s Marseille school): a psycho-magical reading, very much alive in France.
• The Marie-Anne Lenormand legacy (1772 to 1843); the famous French fortune-teller used Marseille cards.
• Catholic-folk practitioners; Marseille is closer to the people, Rider-Waite closer to the desk.

If you are learning tarot: try Marseille at least once. The pip cards force you to read without the crutch of pictures, and that trains you.