@ARTICLE{Prinke_Rafał_T._Wroński’s_2013, author={Prinke, Rafał T.}, volume={tom 30}, journal={Pamiętnik Biblioteki Kórnickiej}, pages={132-154}, howpublished={online}, year={2013}, abstract={The Kórnik Library owns the richest collection of papers related to the mathematician and philosopher Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński (1776-1853), the founder of Polish Messianism. Among them there is a copy of a letter written to him in 1853 by Alphonse-Louis Constant (1810-1875), better known under his later literary pseudonym “Éliphas Lévi”. He became an admirer of Wroński (the letter is signed “your devoted disciple”) and one of the few people present at his funeral. He also helped Leonard Niedźwiecki with cataloguing Wroński’s manuscripts. The paper discusses his life and relations with the Polish aristocratic emigration in France. Of special note is his friendship with Flora Tristan, the feminist activist, through whom he met Balzac and probably Adam Mickiewicz, quoted with great admiration in his later books on magic and occultism. It is even possible that those interests of Lévi were partly inspired by Mickiewicz’s readings of Swedenborg, Jakob Böhme and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin. The key discovery is that the phrase “Poland is the Christ of nations”, known to every Polish pupil, was not formulated by Mickiewicz (as is widely believed) but by Constant in a political pamphlet Le Deuil de la Pologne (1846). After his metamorphosis into a modern magus, Éliphas Lévi became a close friend of Madame de Balzac (to whom he dedicated an occult novel), brothers Aleksander and Konstanty Branicki, as well as Jerzy Mniszech, who became the sole heir of his magical manuscripts and a curious instrument called “prognometer”. It is not known what happened to the manuscripts, but the “prognometer” is now in the collections of the National Library as a deposit of the Branicki Library in Wilanów.}, type={Artykuły / Articles}, title={Wroński’s disciple - Éliphas Lévi in the Polish Messianist circle}, URL={http://journals.pan.pl/Content/113844/PDF/document%20(84).pdf}, }