Levi may have couched his socialist leanings in the vocabulary of esotericism in order to avoid the consequences of overt political confrontation; he wrote during a volatile point in French history. This subterfuge may have occurred only on a subconscious level. There is a poignant observation made by Levi in "Dogma et Rituel de la Haute Magie": "What was the end of the aspirants to knowledge? They sought the secret of the Great Work, the Philosophical Stone, the perpetual motion, the quadrature of the circle, the Universal Medicine – formulae which often saved them from persecution and hatred by causing them to be taxed with madness, [...]"