"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." It is the most famous opening in the Bible, and few sentences have been read so many times. What did Moses mean? Did he describe a few days of divine work, or the order of a whole cosmos? In 1489, a young nobleman living near Florence decided that the first chapter of Genesis could be read in seven ways at once, and he wrote a book to show how. It was called the Heptaplus , "the sevenfold account," and its author was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. After the Storm Pico was twenty-six, and he had lately been through a difficult time. His 900 Theses had been condemned by a papal commission in 1487, and he had been arrested in France in 1488. With the help of Lorenzo de' Medici, he came to live near Florence, in the hills of Fiesole. The Heptaplus is a product of that quiet period. It is dedicated to Lorenzo. It was a carefully safe work. Unlike the Theses, which had startled authorities by their daring...

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 ...