Two pillars stand at the door of Solomon's Temple in the Bible, one called Jachin and one Boaz, and the Hebrew mystics later read them as a picture of balanced opposites: mercy on one side, severity on the other. In the nineteenth century, a former seminarian in Paris who called himself Eliphas Lévi gave the idea a dramatic new setting. He wrote that magic itself stands between two such pillars, and that its power comes from holding both. His book, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie , "Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic," did more than any other single work to turn the occult of the Victorian age into the occult of today. From Seminary to Magic Eliphas Lévi was born Alphonse-Louis Constant in Paris in 1810, the son of a shoemaker. A priest noticed his intelligence, and he trained for the priesthood at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice. He became a deacon but never a priest, and he left the seminary after doubts and, by his own account, a love that drew him away. He then li...