If Éliphas Lévi is regarded as the father of modern occultism, Papus was its great organiser. In late nineteenth-century Paris, among literary cafés, specialist bookshops and lodges, the young physician Gérard Encausse managed to turn a scattered crowd of the curious, the learned and the mystical into a network of journals, study groups and orders. Understanding him means understanding how Western esotericism became, between 1885 and the First World War, a visible cultural phenomenon.
Origins and the choice of a name
Gérard Anaclet Vincent Encausse was born in 1865 in A Coruña, Spain, to a French father and a Spanish mother, and grew up in Paris. He studied medicine and, in the same years, immersed himself in Hermetic authors, in Kabbalah and above all in the works of Lévi.
The pseudonym "Papus" came from the Nuctemeron attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, which Lévi had published as an appendix to his Dogma and Ritual of High Magic: there Papus appears as the genius of medicine. The choice says a great deal about the man: a doctor who wanted to hold together the science of his time and the traditional doctrines, convinced that the two did not exclude each other.
The builder of institutions
After a brief membership of the Theosophical Society, which he left because he found its approach too oriented towards the East, Papus decided to give French occultism structures of its own. The main steps were:
- L'Initiation (1888), a monthly review that for decades published articles on Kabbalah, Hermeticism, magnetism, spiritualism and symbolism;
- the Groupe indépendant d'études ésotériques, a kind of popular university of the occult with lectures and courses;
- membership of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross founded by Stanislas de Guaita in 1888;
- the Martinist Order, organised around 1891 together with Augustin Chaboseau, which claimed the legacy of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin.
Papus's Martinism was not a faithful reconstruction of an eighteenth-century order: it was a new synthesis, with simple degrees, symbolic masks and cloaks, centred on the "way of the heart" and on transmission from initiator to initiate. That very simplicity helped it spread in France and abroad.
The main works
Papus was a prolific writer, more a populariser than an original thinker. Among his most widely read books:
| Work | Year | Content |
|---|---|---|
| Le Tarot des Bohémiens | 1889 | The tarot read through the Hebrew letters and the Tetragrammaton |
| Traité méthodique de science occulte | 1891 | Encyclopaedic compendium of occultist doctrines |
| La Cabbale | 1892 | Anthology and commentary of Kabbalistic texts |
| Traité élémentaire de magie pratique | 1893 | Systematic account of ceremonial magic |
In the Tarot of the Bohemians Papus develops an idea already present in Lévi: the twenty-two major arcana would correspond to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the whole deck would be a philosophical "machine" built on the four-letter divine name. Today the history of the tarot game, born in the Italian courts of the fifteenth century, shows that this is a later symbolic reading rather than a historical origin; but the book remains essential for understanding how the tarot entered modern esotericism.
Medicine, Russia and the "master" of Lyon
Papus took his doctorate in medicine in 1894 and never abandoned the profession. His interest in the occult was intertwined with a strong religious inclination, especially after he met Nizier Anthelme Philippe, the healer of Lyon known as "Maître Philippe", whom Papus always regarded as his spiritual guide.
In the early twentieth century Papus was received several times in Russia, in circles close to the imperial court, where a taste for mysticism and healers was widespread. Many legends have grown up around these journeys; what is certain is that Martinism found followers among the Russian aristocracy and that Papus enjoyed a considerable reputation there.
The last years and the historical verdict
When the First World War broke out, Papus, by then around fifty, served as an army doctor. Conditions at the front undermined his health and he died in Paris in October 1916.
His legacy is ambivalent. On the one hand he was a tireless cultural organiser: without him many texts would not have been reprinted and many people would never have approached the study of tradition. On the other, his encyclopaedic method tended to put sources of very different value on the same level. René Guénon, who as a young man moved in Papus's circles, later became one of his harshest critics, accusing the occultism of those years of confusing authentic traditions with modern inventions.
For anyone studying the history of ideas today, Papus remains an indispensable key to the esoteric Belle Époque: a man who sincerely believed in the unity of science and spirit and who, with strengths and limits, built the institutions through which much of twentieth-century esotericism would pass.
In short
- Gérard Encausse (1865-1916), known as Papus, was a physician and the chief organiser of late nineteenth-century French occultism.
- He founded the review L'Initiation and organised the Martinist Order together with Augustin Chaboseau.
- The Tarot of the Bohemians tied the tarot to Kabbalah for good, as a symbolic reading rather than a historical origin.
- He was a great populariser, criticised for his eclecticism by authors such as René Guénon.
