The Doctor Who Advised the Tsar

Gerard Encausse kept two careers running at full speed. Under his own name he was a physician of the Paris hospitals who eventually directed a clinic and died in 1916 of illness contracted while running a military hospital unit in the war. Under the name Papus he was the great organiser of the French occult revival, and organisation carried him to an unlikely destination: the Russian court. He visited Russia three times between 1901 and 1906, received by Nicholas II and the empress, and the reports of those visits, including a seance at which the shade of Alexander III was said to have been consulted about the coming revolution, made him briefly a figure in the politics of the empire's occult fringe; he is said to have warned the tsar against Rasputin's influence.

At home his instrument was the order: he co-founded the Martinist Order in the late 1880s, claiming a filiation of teaching back to Saint-Martin, and sat at the centre of a web of groups, journals and congresses through which the revival administered itself. His books were its textbooks, above all the Tarot of the Bohemians, which locked the tarot to the Hebrew alphabet and kabbalistic structure for a generation of readers. Energetic, unoriginal and indispensable is the common judgment, and he might not have minded it, since his particular talent was for making other men's doctrines teachable, and the schools he built taught them for a century.