Papus and the ABC of Occultism
In Paris in the 1890s, a young doctor with a thick moustache and a restless pen was writing at a pace that left his readers breathless. He produced handbooks on Kabbalah, Tarot, magic, hypnosis and alchemy, edited a review, gave lectures, led secret orders and still saw his patients.
He signed his books with a strange name, Papus. His real name was Gérard Encausse, and no figure did more to turn the scattered occult interests of France into something like an organized movement.
A Doctor in Paris
Encausse was born in 1865 in La Coruña, in Spain, to a French father and a Spanish mother, and the family moved to Paris when he was a child. As a boy, he spent hours in the Bibliothèque Nationale, reading the works of Éliphas Lévi and other writers on magic. He studied medicine, and he took his degree in Paris in 1894.
The pen name came from an old text called the Nuctemeron, attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, in which "Papus" is the name of a spirit of the first hour of the day and means "physician." It was a neat choice for a man who was both a doctor and a student of hidden things.
Orders and Journals
In 1888, he helped to found the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, with the writer Stanislas de Guaita. A few years later, in 1891, he and Augustin Chaboseau revived the Martinist Order. This group looked back to Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, the "Unknown Philosopher" of the eighteenth century, who taught an inner path of Christian mysticism, and to his teacher Martinez de Pasqually. Papus gave the order a modern structure, with lodges and initiations, and it spread across Europe and beyond.
He also founded a journal, L'Initiation, which published articles by many writers and gave the French occult world a common voice. Among his many books were the Traité méthodique de science occulte (1891), a huge survey of the field, and a shorter work, the ABC illustré d'occultisme, from 1906.
The Tarot of the Bohemians
Papus's best-known book is Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), subtitled "the absolute key to occult science." In it, he took up an earlier tradition. In 1781, the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin had claimed that the Tarot was a survival of an ancient Egyptian book.
Later, Éliphas Lévi connected the twenty-two major trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Papus built on these ideas and tried to present the Tarot as a complete system of symbols that could be read on many levels.
The word "Bohemians" in the title refers to the Romani people, who were believed at the time to have come from Egypt and to have preserved the cards.
Historians have since shown that this story is not true. The Tarot first appears in northern Italy in the fifteenth century as a card game, and it was only in the late eighteenth century that anyone attached occult meanings to it.
The Egyptian origin has no support. This does not mean that the occult reading of the Tarot is worthless; it only means that it is a modern invention and not an ancient inheritance.
The Method of Analogy
At the center of Papus's thought was the principle of analogy: the idea that the same patterns repeat at every level of existence, so that what is true of the human body may say something about the planets, and vice versa.
He wrote a good deal about the numbers three and seven, finding triads and sevens in nature, in the human being and in religion. This idea is as old as Hermes and as new as the nineteenth-century desire for a universal key.
Readers should be careful here. The method of analogy produces beautiful patterns, and it can find a pattern in nearly anything. Without some check from observation, it tells us more about the one who draws the analogy than about the world. Papus himself trained as a physician and wished his work to be scientific, but modern scientists would not accept his methods.
The Tsar's Doctor of Souls
In 1901, Papus traveled to Russia, where he was received at the court of Tsar Nicholas II and the empress Alexandra. He returned in 1905. According to reports of the time, he took part in a séance in which the spirit of the late Tsar Alexander III was said to have been called up.
These accounts come from sources of uneven reliability, and it is hard to separate fact from rumor. What is certain is that Papus won a following in St. Petersburg, and that the court was open to mystics in these years.
When the First World War broke out, Papus joined the French army as a military doctor. He caught tuberculosis at the front, and he died in Paris in October 1916 at the age of fifty-one.
Closing
Papus has often been called a popularizer, and the word is fair. He did not discover new truths, and some of what he taught has not held up. Yet he gave order and a voice to a movement that might otherwise have scattered.
Behind the long list of books is a simple and appealing idea: that the great symbols of the past, from the Tarot to the Tree of Life, are keys to be turned with patience, and that the person who turns them is changed in the process.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- Papus and the Absolute Key to Occult Science: The Kabbalistic Synthesis
- Papus and the Tarot of the Bohemians
- The Tarot Compendium: The 78 Keys of Wisdom
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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