Napoleon's Sorcerers: The Sophisians (review)

The complexity of the Enlightenment legacy is a recent source of serious study, at least here in the U.S. David Allen Harvey (2005), John Warne Monroe (2008), and Lynn Sharp (2006), among others, have considered various heterodoxies that had their origins in the eighteenth century and developed a life of their own in the nineteenth. Occultism, Mesmerism, and Spiritism made an early appearance and had a remarkable influence in France, and not just among Parisian literati like Victor Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, and J.-K. Huysmans. The Roman Catholic Church took a dim view of these activities, of course, but scientific societies and academies eagerly sought to debunk paranormal phenomena, albeit with uneven success. The Romantics were thus not alone in their fascination with the spirit world and its rich implications for rational, empirical knowledge.

Darius Spieth's Napoleon's Sorcerers shares this scholarly interest. The book focuses on a secret society, the Ordre Sacré des Sophisiens, which owed its ritualistic imagery and arcane symbolism to the texts of Egyptologists and the cult of Isis. Although ancient Egypt had elicited considerable commentary well before Napoléon's Egyptian campaign (1798–1801), it inspired much more enthusiasm among the scholars and soldiers who participated in Bonaparte's ill-fated expedition. Their Egyptomania, Spieth argues, casts "a revealing light on how colonialism, cultural politics, and exoteric mysticism came to define the episteme of Napoleonic power" (17) in a regime otherwise indebted to the lumières' celebration of human reason, natural law, and cultural progress. "The Sophisians represent a . . . moment in the cultural history of colonialism where Western reason, rationality, and empiricism live in a dangerously close symbiosis with the superstition, mysticism, and occultism typically identified with the Oriental 'Other'" (26).

Spieth devotes the largest share of his attention to explicating the lavish images and cryptic text of one manuscript book, a copy of the Sophisians' Livre d'or (1819–21), now in the fonds maçonnique in the Salle des Manuscrits of the Bibliothèque Nationale, rue de Richelieu. Illuminated by Nicolas Ponce-Camus, a student of Jacques-Louis David, under the direction of the Order's founder, J.G.A. Cuvelier de Trie, the work served as "a repository of knowledge about ancient Egypt, an outline of rituals to be performed [by the Sophisians], a book of laws and moral principles to be followed, and finally a blueprint for exams and exercises to which aspiring initiates submitted" (70). Spieth carefully explores, chapter by chapter, the development of Egyptology from Plutarch to Diderot, the many eighteenth-century precursors of the Sophisians, the fortunes of the Institut d'Egypte during Napoléon's campaign, the Livre d'or itself, the role played by the boulevard theaters of Paris in the secret order and its adepts, and, as a conclusion, the controversies over Egyptosophy, including the scientific discussion of vitalism and evolution. The work provides, as well, a valuable appendix, which lists all Sophisians mentioned by name in the Livre d'or and explains their activities from the founding of the Order in 1800 to its demise soon after Cuvelier de Trie's death in 1824.

Spieth's book makes clear the long history of esoteric commentary on ancient Egypt since the Hellenistic era. Well before Napoléon's decision to mount his campaign, the Count Guiseppe Cagliostro, better known as Joseph Balsamo, established the mother lodge of the Masonic Egyptian rite, the Sagesse Triomphante in 1784. Much of the Freemasonry's iconography, like the pyramids and hieroglyphics, are owed largely to Cagliostro's brief, but bright influence, as described in Alexandre Lenoir's fanciful accounts (1809, 1814). Moreover, one of Cagliostro's adepts was none other than Vinant Denon, who would eventually become the director general of the Louvre Museum under Napoléon and the source of the museum's many Egyptian artifacts brought back from Bonaparte's adventure. Other Sophisians who joined the expedition would also produce arguably the most influential...