The Secret Napoleonic Code

The title of Darius A. Spieth’s Napoleon’s Sorcerers might serve for an intellectual thriller, and this book certainly reads like one. Spieth offers a scholarly account of the Sacred Order of the Sophisians, a Parisian secret society founded by veterans of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, whose rites sought to imitate those described in the late-antique Hermetic Corpus and practiced in the Greco-Roman cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Spieth in essence provides a thick description of the Sophisians’ ritual manual, the so-called “Livre d’Or” now housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale, a manuscript profusely illustrated with miniatures inspired by hieroglyphics, obelisks, and pyramids. Spieth, an art historian, contextualizes the iconography of the Order’s rituals within a fascinating array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political, intellectual, social, and artistic histories. This careful historicizing also happens to be great good fun, for the story of the Sophisians is a drama, with a supporting cast featuring not only Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, but also figures who often animate the popular imagination, such as Madame Blavatsky, Indiana Jones, members of the Roman Inquisition, and even, yes, the Knights Templar. Spieth’s is a welcome addition to a burgeoning group of studies that investigate the role magical and spiritualist societies play in modern culture. He demonstrates that there are real histories, and important ones, behind the pseudo-histories such societies manufacture.

In studying the mystical rituals and obscure texts of the Sophisians, Spieth detects the Enlightenment’s symbiotic engagement with the darker side of human endeavor. Umberto Eco could well have included the order in Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), his parody, avant la lettre, of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003). Eco’s novel explores how easy it is for scholars—especially, in Eco’s opinion, the French—to breach the all-too-permeable boundaries between reason and lunacy, science and the occult, history and myth. The Sophisians occupy the no man’s land between these various binaries, for the order’s members sought varying sorts of lumières, from the clarity of positivist reason to the self-knowledge of mystic revelation. The order began, indeed, with men of science: the Bonapartistes who founded it in Egypt during Napoleon’s campaign there (1798–1801) and later transplanted it to Paris were not only soldiers but also savants who established the Institut d’Égypte. As Spieth remarks, “The order counted within its ranks a cross-section of the intellectual elite of Bonapartist France: generals, Egyptologists, engineers, artists, architects, linguists, composers, and natural scientists” (21). Their task was, more than the military subjugation of Egypt, its “cultural conquest”—they sought both to render Egypt intelligible to the West and to import Western rationalism into it. Thus, as Spieth sketches in his introduction and explores more fully in his second chapter, “The Laboratory of Reason: Egypt from the Philosophes to Napoleon’s ‘Oriental Dream,’” the Egyptian campaign was very much an Enlightenment project. Most significantly, the French, following a plan of action imagined by Leibniz and by Voltaire, hoped to recreate Egypt as a rationalist utopia. Once liberated from the mental tyranny wrought by the despots of the Ottoman Empire, the country would serve as a carefully tended garden wherein the populace, like Rousseau’s natural man, would flourish. Even when the Egyptian expedition failed and the order was transferred to Paris, the Sophisians continued to attract the rationally minded; the roster of Sophisian members for whom Spieth provides thumbnail biographies in his appendix includes a striking number of physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists, as well as three prominent natural scientists.

Yet even an enlightened view of Egypt was obscured by mystical clouds, as Spieth explains, especially in his first chapter, “Some Sophisian Precursors.” The eighteenth century had no direct access to ancient Egyptian history; indeed, it was the Napoleonic expedition’s discovery of the Rosetta Stone and Champollion’s deciphering of that stela in the early 1820s that would ultimately provide such access. Prior to this decoding...