Still More Weird Tales from France

Alphonse Louis Constant
Aka Eliphas Lévi Zahed, Eliphas Lévi
Author, Mystic, Magician
Born February 8, 1810, Paris, France
Died May 31, 1875, Paris, France

For Weird Tales
"Black Magic" (article, Sept. 1923)

Alphonse Louis Constant had been gone nearly half a century by the time Weird Tales printed his article "Black Magic" in the magazine's first year in publication (in Sept. 1923). Born on February 8, 1810, in Paris, Constant studied for the priesthood but left the seminary before being ordained. The reason? Cherchez la femme as the French say. Constant became a writer and associated himself with various names, including the socialist and feminist Flora Tristan (1803-1844), fellow mystic M. Ganneau (ca. 1805-1851), "messianic mathematician" Jozef Maria Hoëhne-Wronski (1778-1853), British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), and French sculptress Marie-Noémi Cadiot (1832-1888), whom he married in 1846. (1) Constant was a mystic and a magician, evidently one of the most important names in that realm of endeavor. According to Wikipedia, he incorporated the Tarot into contemporary practice and was a great influence on other mystics and magicians of his time and after, including Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). (2) Constant was also the originator of a famous "Sabbatic Goat" image and of the idea that a pentagram pointing upwards represents good, while one pointing downwards (approximating the countenance of a goat) represents evil. He wrote under the pseudonyms Eliphas Lévi Zahed and Eliphas Lévi and died on May 31, 1875, in Paris.

You can read more about Constant on these websites:

• "Eliphas Levi" on Wikipedia
• "Alphonse Louis Constant" on The Invisible Basilica of Sabazius
• "Alphonse Louis Constant . . . " on a French website, probably the most complete of these sources and including photographs of Constant

Notes

(1) Flora Tristan, née Flore Celestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso, was the grandmother of French painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Simon Ganneau, referred to as M. Ganneau, was the inventor of the religion Evadaïsme, "a compound of all the dogmas, doctrines and philosophies that have divided mankind," of which he was "the Mapah," a title combining maman and papa and a reference to our "first parents," Eve and Adam, their names combined in the name of his religion. The quotes on him are from The Living Age, Volume 29, on the occasion of Ganneau's death. Like Flora Tristan, he was a progenitor of fame, for he was the father of the archaeologist and orientalist Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau (1846-1923).

(2) Crowley, born less than five months after Constant's death, considered himself a reincarnation of the great magician.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

Né Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

Author, Playwright, Editor/Publisher

Born November 7, 1838, Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, France

Died August 19, 1889, House of Brothers of St. Jean de Dieu, Rue Oudinot, Paris, France

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was not in fact published in Weird Tales but in an offspring of "The Unique Magazine," Robert W. Lowndes' Magazine of Horror from the 1960s. Born on November 7, 1838, in the city of Saint-Brieuc, Villiers seems to have been a man ill-suited to life's demands. Unlucky in love, impoverished for most of his life, and not often successful as a writer, he nonetheless gave us two terms still in use today. One of them has become indispensable in science fiction and in fact.

Under the influence of Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, Villiers wrote tales of fantasy, mystery, horror, torture, and cruelty. (3) In his novel L'Ève future (a title translated by Wikipedia as Tomorrow's Eve, 1886), Villiers employed the term android (which had been in use since at least the 18th century) in its more modern sense, meaning a robot in human form. George Lucas and hundreds of other science fiction writers owe Villiers a debt for that.

Villiers is most well known for his collection of short stories from 1883, Contes Cruels. The conte cruel has become a subgenre or a type of fiction, a short story or tale (conte) in which characters are subjected to cruelty, torment, and torture, perhaps not because they deserve it but simply because--I suppose--life itself is full of cruel vicissitudes. I can imagine that Villiers sometimes felt himself to be such a character. Then again, essayist Arthur Symons remarked upon Villiers' "lack of sympathy," derived from his "disdain of ordinary human beings." (4)

I looked in several books on literature and fantastic fiction for a definition of the conte cruel and came up empty. Barbara, a contributor to Google Groups, admirably answers the question "What is the definition of conte cruel?" at this link. She attributes the origin of the term to Villiers' collection of the same name. She also mentions Villiers' story "The Torture by Hope," which by no coincidence appeared in Magazine of Horror #10 (Aug. 1965). Barbara also mentions Ambrose Bierce and W.C. Morrow as authors of contes cruels.

* * *

He hated every kind of mediocrity: therefore he chose to analyse [sic] exceptional souls, to construct exceptional stories, to invent splendid names, and to evoke singular landscapes. It was part of his curiosity in souls to prefer the complex to the simple, the perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to either. (5)

And in him there was ambiguity, too. Though born into an ancient and very distinguished aristocratic family, Villiers was nearly always poor, and though a staunch Catholic, he was also a mystic. (6) Though well loved and admired, he was lonely all of his life. A great talker and great personality, he "sometimes talked them [his stories] instead of writing them, in his too royally spendthrift way." (7) He founded a short-lived revue and one winter burned bundles of issues to keep warm. Like Poe before him, Villiers died young, in his case of cancer. He married but once, on his deathbed, to an illiterate midwife who was devoted to him in every way. Like Constant, he left a son, Victor. The last of his line, Victor--an ironic name to be sure--died in 1901 at age twenty.

Shades of Lovecraft and so many others.

The digest-sized Magazine of Horror was not Weird Tales of course, but I'm not sure there was any closer imitator between the end of the original Weird Tales in 1954 and the short-lived revival of 1973-1974. The Magazine of Horror is, though, a subject for another time.

Further Reading

"CPR Remembers: Villiers de l'Isle-Adam" by Garrick Davis on the website Contemporary Poetry Review, March 1, 2005, here.

"Villiers de l'Isle-Adam" in The Symbolist Movement in Literature by Arthur Symons (Dutton, 1958), pp. 21-32.

Notes

(3) Villiers is supposed to have been an admirer of Constant's Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1856). Villiers' other associations: He was friends with Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898); he asked Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) for his daughter's hand in marriage (and was rebuffed); and his hero was Richard Wagner (1813-1883), with whom he was visiting when war broke out between their two nations in 1870. By the way, when M. Ganneau died in 1851, Gautier took his only child, Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, who had just turned five years old, under his wing.

(4) From "Villiers de l'Isle-Adam" in The Symbolist Movement in Literature by Arthur Symons (Dutton, 1958), p. 30.

(5) From Symons, p. 28.

(6) Another, Villiers, Philippe de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1464-1534), led the Knights of Rhodes in resisting the siege of Rhodes by 100,000 Turks in 1522. Forced to capitulate, he and his knights eventually ended up on the island of Malta, where he received a fiefdom from Emperor Charles V and established the Knights of Malta. In return for this grant, the knights were obliged to give to the emperor, every year on All Saints Day, a falcon, thus, among other things, the McGuffin for a detective story of the twentieth century.

Alphonse Louis Constant (1810-1875) aka Eliphas Lévi, a portrait from 1874.

Eliphas Lévi's Bephomet, an image of the Sabbatic Goat. I don't know enough about magic to say anything more. Note the name at the bottom, cut off in this image.

Villiers de L'Isle-Adam did not contribute to Weird Tales, but he was responsible for the conte cruel, a kind of story named for his collection of short stories from 1883. Here is the cover for one edition of Contes Cruels. The image is disturbing, mostly because it looks like it could have been drawn from life.

The image on this cover of a different edition is pretty tame by comparison. The man is being tortured, but he doesn't seem to be suffering much. Take away the bindings and it looks like he could be in a steam bath. (Update, Feb. 8, 2021): It occurs to me now that the image of a man working a circular machine, as in Metropolis (1927) or Modern Times (1936), may be meant to evoke the image of the breaking wheel or Catherine's wheel of medieval times.

The image on this cover of a Spanish-language edition of Conte Cruels (Cuentos crueles) is even more inviting. Are those tiger lilies?

Villiers was the author of at least fifteen books. Isis is an incomplete novel (more accurately, romance) from 1862.

In L'Ève future (1886), Villiers wrote of an android named Hadaly--invented by a fictional Thomas Alva Edison! It's from this book that we have our contemporary usage of the word android.

"The Torture of Hope," one of Villiers' contes cruels, was reprinted as the cover story in Magazine of Horror in August 1965. The cover artist was Carl Kidwell, who also contributed to Weird Tales. 

Revised and updated on February 8, 2021.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley