About this manuscript
The unpublished poems of Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant, 1810–1875) in his own hand, dated November 1871 — four years before his death. Lévi is the man whose books turned a London clerk named Arthur Waite toward the Secret Tradition, and whose association of the tarot with the Kabbalah still heads every theory of the cards. "Rimes et Raison" ("Rhymes and Reason") shows the magician as a poet: verse written in the last years of his life, unpublished in his lifetime.
The Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne catalogues the manuscript as MS 1799 and serves its 251 leaves as loose images. This file compiles all 251 into a single document with a title page and colophon carrying the library's own catalogue description. There is no transcription — the hand is the author's, and a transcription read off photographs would be a guess.
Download the PDF (free) — public domain by date, no account needed. The road Lévi opened runs through this house: try the tarot he bound to the Kabbalah, or read the essays his tradition inspired.