Papus

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Among the genii of the first hour in the Nuctemeron attributed to Apollonius of Tyana — the roster of hours and presiding spirits that Éliphas Lévi appended to his Rituel de la haute magie — stands “Papus, médecin”: Papus, genius of medicine. Gérard Anaclet Vincent Encausse (1865–1916), a Paris physician who became the principal organizer of the French occult revival of the 1880s and 1890s, took the name for his own. He was born on 13 July 1865 at La Coruña, in Spanish Galicia, to a French father — Louis Encausse, a chemist and inventor of patent remedies — and a Spanish mother; the family moved to Paris when he was about four, and the city kept him to the end. The borrowing fitted a man who held a medical degree and treated the occult sciences as a body of knowledge to be systematized rather than merely felt; from the same first-hour list his brother-in-law Emmanuel Lalande later took the name Marc Haven.

He trained in medicine while reading widely in the esoteric literature then circulating in the capital — long self-taught hours at the Bibliothèque nationale among Kabbalah, ritual magic, and alchemy, above all in the writings of Lévi — alongside the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and the older French current of Martinism descending from Martinez de Pasqually and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin.

The hospital and the invisible

The medical career was genuine, parallel, and load-bearing. In the late 1880s Encausse worked under the neurologist Jules Bernard Luys at the Hôpital de la Charité; he edited the Revue d’hypnologie from 1888, and around 1890 became head of the hospital’s laboratory of hypnology. On 7 July 1894 he defended his University of Paris doctoral thesis, “L’anatomie philosophique et ses divisions,” before Professor Mathias Duval — an anatomy of the invisible argued before the faculty of the visible — and later kept a clinic in the rue Rodin. None of this was respectable cover for the other career; it was the other career’s evidence. The Luys-era experiments — hypnotic suggestion, “transfer cures” worked with magnetized iron crowns, the action of sealed drug vials at a distance — entered his books as demonstration that the unseen forces named by the old science were measurable, repeatable, and clinically real. Occult science, he insisted, is a science, with a method, a literature, and now a laboratory; he wrote as savant and expérimentateur, not as thaumaturge or seer, and signed Du traitement externe et psychique des maladies nerveuses (Chamuel, 1897) with his civil name and doctorate, pairing it that year with La Magie et l’hypnose.

Forging the orders

He joined the French branch of the Theosophical Society around 1887 and broke with it around 1890, publishing L’Affaire de la Société théosophique (1891) to justify the rupture: the Society had turned eastward, toward Hindu and Buddhist sources, and his loyalty was to a Western, initiatic, and explicitly Christian-leaning esotericism. The institutions he then built reflect that preference, and the conviction beneath it: the Western tradition is a living chain, and a chain lives only while someone forges its links.

The first was the Ordre Martiniste, which he co-founded with Augustin Chaboseau: in 1888 the two exchanged their respective initiations, and in 1891 the Supreme Council was constituted with Papus as Grand Master — Martinism given a working order at last, with Papus its public face. Whether the chain they joined truly reached back to Saint-Martin is the order’s oldest question, and the record holds both answers. The founders’ account says it did: Papus claimed initiation in 1882 from Henri Delaage, who traced his warrant through his grandfather Jean-Antoine Chaptal, whom Delaage held to be a disciple of Saint-Martin; Chaboseau claimed a transmission from his aunt, the Marquise Amélie de Boisse-Mortemart, through Adolphe Desbarolles and Henri de Latouche to Saint-Martin himself. The critical historians find no chain: Robert Amadou — himself an initiate, and the tradition’s most exacting modern scholar — concluded in his Documents Martinistes that before Papus there was no Martinist Order and no ritual initiation deriving from Saint-Martin, only an intellectual and spiritual inheritance; Massimo Introvigne judges it “safer to conclude that there was no direct connection”; David Allen Harvey reads the genealogies as retrospective constructions. Claimed lines and unproven descent stand together in the record — and the order spread and endured regardless; its doctrine and later successions are stories of their own.

The building year, 1888, gave more than the order. With Stanislas de Guaita and Joséphin Péladan (Oswald Wirth beside them) Papus helped establish the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, a selective “occult university” awarding symbolic kabbalistic doctorates in the graded manner of Rosicrucianism, and sat on its Supreme Council. With the publisher Lucien Chamuel he opened the Librairie du Merveilleux at 29 rue de Trévise, the revival’s storefront and the address everything else operated from. In October 1888 he founded L’Initiation, the monthly review he directed until the war silenced it in 1914 — the revival’s flagship organ for twenty-six years, revived by his son in 1953 and running still. A weekly, Le Voile d’Isis, followed in 1890. In November 1889 came the school: the Groupe indépendant d’études ésotériques, offering a dozen classes a month in Kabbalah, alchemy, the tarot, and the history of hermetic philosophy — ninety-six groups, branches, and correspondents by his own 1892 count — reorganized in March 1897 as the Faculté des sciences hermétiques, its faculty including Sédir, Victor-Émile Michelet, Chaboseau, and Barlet: a free university of the occult and the Martinist Order’s outer court.

Not everything held together. Péladan seceded — the “war of the two roses” ran from May 1890 to March 1893 — and the duels, salons, and press anathemas of that quarrel belong to the wider scene of occult Paris, where all this machinery stood. Papus built on through it: consecrated a bishop of Jules Doinel’s Gnostic Church under the name Tau Vincent in 1893; presiding over the June 1908 Paris spiritualist congress and its convent of esoteric Freemasonry — some thirty organizations, fourteen masonic powers — where Theodor Reuss handed him a patent; Grand Hierophant of the Rites of Memphis-Misraïm on John Yarker’s death in 1913. No other capital of the revival ran so much of its machinery through one pair of hands — not even London in the founding decade of the Golden Dawn lineage. Through these bodies, and through the journals and the publishing house, he gave the scattered occultism of his moment what it had largely lacked: organization, a curriculum, and a degree of respectability.

A curriculum for occult science

His many books were written to instruct, and to instruct in order. The career in print began before the building year — L’occultisme contemporain (1887) surveyed the field when its author was twenty-two — and then the architecture went up by stages. Traité élémentaire de science occulte (1888) is the gateway primer. Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889) is the universal key: an attempt to read the tarot as a complete philosophical and cosmological system keyed to the Hebrew alphabet and the Kabbalah — the “absolute key to occult science,” mapping Tetragrammaton, number, astrology, and cosmogony onto the seventy-eight cards, with the Major Arcana drawn by Oswald Wirth. The interpretation owes much to Court de Gébelin and Lévi before him, and modern historians treat its claim of ancient Egyptian origin as eighteenth-century invention rather than established fact; but as a synthesis it shaped how the tarot was understood for a century. A. P. Morton made the first English translation (Redway, 1892); the 1910 second edition (Rider) reused Morton’s text, revised and prefaced by A. E. Waite: the reviser, not the translator. La Kabbale (1892; considerably augmented in 1903) is the module on the Christian Kabbalah, the “secret tradition of the West” of its subtitle, carrying in its second edition a complete translation of the Sepher Yetzirah. Traité méthodique de science occulte (1891), with a letter-preface by the Sorbonne philosopher Adolphe Franck, is the near-encyclopedic capstone meant to survey the whole field; Traité élémentaire de magie pratique (1893) the practical module; Le Tarot divinatoire (1909) the late divinatory one, a working apparatus of divination in the line of Etteilla. The doctrinal substance was largely inherited — from Lévi above all, and from Hoëné Wronski, Fabre d’Olivet, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Louis Lucas, and the abbé Lacuria — and the architecture was his own: a scattered nineteenth-century literature converted into a graded, teachable whole. It was likewise through the publishing apparatus he built that Lévi’s posthumous writings reached print — Clefs majeures et clavicules de Salomon from Chamuel in 1895, Le Grand Arcane from Chamuel in 1898, Le livre des sages from Chacornac in 1912, new Lévi texts inside the 1903 Cabbale — though no document names Papus as the personal editor or heir of the manuscripts.

Russia: the record and the legend

The biography acquired its legend in Russia, where the revival touched a throne and the era’s fascination with mystics around it. The documented core is firm. He made multiple trips around the turn of the century: by his own account, two stays in St. Petersburg — a month in 1899 as guest of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, two months at the end of 1900 — while English-language sources commonly list visits in 1901, 1905, and 1906. The 1901 journey he made in the train of the man he revered as his spiritual master, the Lyon healer Maître Philippe de Lyon (Nizier Anthelme Philippe, 1849–1905). Philippe was the one invited; the way to the imperial family ran through the Montenegrin grand duchesses Militza and Anastasia and the Martinist Olga Moussine-Pouchkine, and it was Philippe whom Nicholas II received at Compiègne in September 1901. On that occasion Papus met the Tsarina — not the Tsar. Around the core, the memorial literature raised a statelier architecture: the séance at Tsarskoye Selo in October 1905 at which the shade of Alexander III counseled firmness and prophesied revolution; the assurance that revolution would not prevail while Papus lived, with its coda that Nicholas kept the throne until 141 days after Papus’s death; the letter warning the imperial couple against Rasputin. All of this is carried by partisan and memoir-grade sources, told with their own “it is said” — and Papus himself, in a contemporary press interview, denied ever organizing séances in Russia, complaining that gossip had dressed him as a red-robed mage shut up in a palace wing. The episode also had a harder political edge: in October 1901 he collaborated with the journalist Jean Carrère on the “Niet” articles in L’Écho de Paris, attacking Sergei Witte and Pyotr Rachkovsky with antisemitic conspiracy material — journalism that later fed the unproven and generally rejected allegation linking him to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The last uniform

What is certain is the ending. He volunteered in 1914 and served as médecin-major — captain’s rank — and chief physician of a front-line field ambulance through that autumn and winter, then at Tours, then in Paris. The pulmonary tuberculosis he contracted in service killed him in Paris on 25 October 1916, at fifty-one; he is buried at Père-Lachaise. The orders he built outlived him and splintered into rival successions — a history that belongs with the order itself, and one measure of how much of the French occult world had come to run through a single energetic man. His son, the physician Philippe Encausse, became his biographer and keeper of the legacy, fixed the affectionate title “the Balzac of occultism” — a mapper of a whole world in a connected series of books — and in 1953 revived both L’Initiation and the order. The chain held, not by pedigree but because someone kept forging links for it.

Sources and further reading

The corpus is public domain, and the library where he taught himself now serves his readers. Gallica holds L’occultisme contemporain (Georges Carré, 1887), Traité élémentaire de science occulte (Carré, 1888) with its augmented fifth edition of 1898, the capstone Traité méthodique de science occulte (Carré, 1891), the second, considerably augmented edition of La Cabbale (1903; first edition Carré, 1892), the augmented French second edition of Le Tarot des Bohémiens (first edition Carré, 1889), and Du traitement externe et psychique des maladies nerveuses (Chamuel, 1897). The posthumous Lévi he published is there too: Le Grand Arcane, ou l’occultisme dévoilé (Chamuel, 1898) and Le livre des sages (Bibliothèque Chacornac, 1912). The successor review at linitiation.eu keeps the complete old series of L’Initiation (1888–1914) freely downloadable.

The scholarship is compact. Marie-Sophie André and Christophe Beaufils, Papus: biographie — la Belle Époque de l’occultisme (Paris: Berg International, 1995), is the standard French biography. David Allen Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment: Occultism and Politics in Modern France (Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), is the principal English-language study of the revival’s politics and order-building. John Warne Monroe, Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France (Cornell University Press, 2008), sets the Charité hypnology and the medical double life in the history of experimental religion. Robert Amadou’s Documents Martinistes remains the controlling critical examination of the Saint-Martin filiation claims.

→ In the library: Papus — The Tarot of the Bohemians (1910 English rev.)

→ Related: Antoine Court De Gebelin · Franz Anton Mesmer · Theosophy · Divination · Eliphas Levi Alphonse Louis Constant · Martinism · Ordre Martiniste · Occult Paris · French Occultism · Tarot Cartomancy · Marc Haven · Helena Blavatsky · Rosicrucianism