Papus

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Papus was the occult pen name of Gérard Encausse (1865–1916), a Paris physician who became the principal organizer of the French occult revival of the 1880s and 1890s. He took the name from the Nuctemeron attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, where Papus is a minor genius of medicine — a fitting borrowing for a man who held a medical degree and treated the occult sciences as a body of knowledge to be systematized rather than merely felt.

Encausse arrived in Paris from Spain as a child and trained in medicine while reading widely in the esoteric literature then circulating in the capital: the writings of Éliphas Lévi, the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky, and the older French current of Martinism descending from Martinez de Pasqually and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin. He joined the Theosophical Society early and soon broke with it, preferring a Western, initiatic, and explicitly Christian-leaning esotericism to the Society’s eastward turn. The institutions he built reflect that preference. He founded the Ordre Martiniste, reviving the Saint-Martin lineage as a working order of which he became the public face, and joined Stanislas de Guaita in establishing the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross. Through these bodies, and through a stream of journals and a publishing house, he gave the scattered occultism of his moment something it had largely lacked: organization, a curriculum, and a degree of respectability.

His many books were written to instruct. The best known is Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), which the library holds in its 1910 English revision: an attempt to read the tarot as a complete philosophical and cosmological system keyed to the Hebrew alphabet and the Kabbalah. 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. Other works ranged across the Kabbalah, practical magic, anatomy of the “invisible,” and a methodical treatise meant to survey the whole field.

The biography acquired a legend in its later years. Papus is reported to have been received at the Russian court, where he and other occultists were consulted by Nicholas II and Alexandra — episodes that belong as much to the era’s fascination with mystics around the throne as to anything attested in detail. What is certain is the ending: serving as a military physician in the First World War, he contracted the illness that killed him, and died in Paris in 1916. The orders he founded outlived him and splintered into rival successions, which is one measure of how much of the French occult world had come to run through a single energetic man.

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

→ Related: Antoine Court De Gebelin · Franz Anton Mesmer · Theosophy · Divination