Stanislas de Guaita

He was born in the castle of Alteville in the commune of Tarquimpol, Moselle, and went to school at the lyceum in Nancy, where he studied chemistry, metaphysics and Cabala.

[1] As a young man, he moved to Paris, and his luxurious apartment became a meeting place for poets, artists, and writers who were interested in esotericism and mysticism.

De Guaita was influenced by the writings of l'Abbé Alphonse-Louis Constant, alias Eliphas Lévi, a prominent French occultist who was initiated in London to rosicrucianism by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1854.

Encausse, who went by the pseudonym “Papus”, was a Spanish-born French physician and occultist who had written books on magic, Cabalah and the Tarot.

In the late 1880s, the Abbé Boullan, a defrocked Catholic Priest and the head of a schismatic branch called the “Church of the Carmel” led a “magical war” against de Guaita.

French-Belgian novelist Joris K. Huysmans, a supporter of Boullan, portrayed De Guaita as a Satanic sorcerer in the novel La Bas.

Stanislas de Guaita 1861–1897), philosopher and poet.
De Guaita's drawings of the upright and inverted pentagrams, representing Spirit over matter (holiness) and matter over Spirit (evil), respectively, from his book La Clef de la Magie Noire , in 1897.