Organising the French Revival

Gerard Encausse was a Paris physician who took the name Papus from a minor spirit in the Nuctemeron attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, and became the organisational engine of the French occult revival at the turn of the century.

He was a founder or officer of a remarkable number of bodies, the Martinist Order, which he revived from the Saint-Martin and Pasqually current, the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix, and the Independent Group of Esoteric Studies, and he wrote fast and accessibly. The Tarot of the Bohemians (1889) is the book through which most French and many English readers first met the Kabbalistic tarot; it is derivative of Levi and it was enormously effective.

The claim attached to him that most needs qualifying is the Martinist succession. He presented the order as a continuous transmission from Martinez de Pasqually through Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin; the documentary basis for an unbroken chain to 1884 is weak, and the order is better understood as a nineteenth-century reconstruction of an eighteenth-century current than as its survival. He died of tuberculosis contracted while serving as a physician at the front in 1916.