The Channel into the French Revival

That is exactly why it matters. The nineteenth century occult revival in France did not proceed by manuscript research. It proceeded through a small number of accessible compendia, and a writer who wanted angelic names and seals reached for a book that had them arranged, rather than for the Renaissance sources those tables had been extracted from. Eliphas Levi and the authors who followed him drew on this material, and from Paris it passed into the English speaking orders later in the century, so that a modern practitioner using a planetary sigil is often several removes from anything they could name.

Two cautions belong with the entry. Very little is documented about the man himself, and the atlas holds him essentially as the author of one book, which is a thin biographical base that should not be padded out. And a compilation of this kind flattens its material: procedures from different centuries and different intellectual settings are presented side by side as though they formed one coherent system, and the appearance of coherence is the compiler doing. Reading back from such a book to what any earlier tradition actually held is a step that has to be taken deliberately, not assumed.