Papus and the Tarot of the Bohemians (1889)

Gerard Encausse was twenty-four when Le Tarot des Bohemiens appeared in 1889. He would not finish his medical degree for another five years, submitting a dissertation on philosophical anatomy in 1894. The book was not the work of an established authority. It was the work of a young man who had spent his free hours at the Bibliotheque nationale reading Kabbalah, alchemy, and every page Eliphas Levi ever wrote.

He signed it Papus, a name he lifted from Levi's translation of the Nuctemeron of Apollonius of Tyana, printed as an appendix to Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie in 1855. In that text Papus is the genius of medicine, listed among the spirits of the first hour. A medical student choosing the name of the healing spirit is not being subtle, and he was not trying to be.

Born in A Coruna in July 1865 to a Spanish mother and a French father, brought to Paris at four, he spent the rest of his life running two careers at once. He practised medicine, he founded the Martinist Order in 1891, and he wrote without stopping. When the war came he joined the army medical corps. He caught tuberculosis in a military hospital and died in October 1916, fifty-one years old.

The subtitle promised the most ancient book in the world. Papus believed the tarot came out of Egypt, carried west by the people nineteenth-century France called Bohemians, meaning the Roma. He inherited that story rather than inventing it. Antoine Court de Gebelin had put it in print in 1781, in the eighth volume of Le Monde primitif, and it had been repeated as settled fact for a hundred years.

It is not true. The trail of physical evidence begins in northern Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century, with a card game. Trumps were added to an ordinary deck to make a trick-taking game, and the earliest documents that mention them talk about playing, not about initiation. No Egyptian source supports the older story: no papyrus, no inscription, nothing.

This deserves saying flatly, because half the tarot books on sale today still repeat Papus with the confidence of someone quoting a primary source. Read his history chapters as an artefact of 1889. The rest of the book is a different matter entirely.

Papus was not really writing history. He was describing a machine.

His argument is that the tarot is generated rather than assembled. Take the four letters of the divine name, yod, he, vau and the second he, and you have an active principle, a passive one, the relation between them, and the passage of that relation into a fresh cycle. Papus maps the four suits onto those four letters: the sceptre to yod, the cup to the first he, the sword to vau, the pentacle to the second he. The same four-beat pattern then runs inside each suit, and again inside the majors.

The payoff is that nothing has to be memorised card by card. A card's meaning falls out of its position in the structure: which suit, which rank, which beat of the cycle. That is why the book still gets read. Whether or not you accept the metaphysics, it is the earliest sustained attempt in print to treat seventy-eight cards as one system with internal rules, instead of seventy-eight separate pictures carrying seventy-eight separate stories.

Eliphas Levi had already done the piece of work that made Papus possible. He was the first to line the twenty-two Hebrew letters up against the twenty-two trumps, and he did it the obvious way: aleph on trump I, the Bateleur, then straight up the alphabet. The Fool, which carries no number, he slid in between Judgement and the World and gave the letter shin.

Papus followed him. So did the entire French line after him.

The Golden Dawn broke it. They put the Fool first, numbered it zero, and gave it aleph. Every letter after that shifts down one card, and since the letters carry astrological attributions, the planets and signs shift with them. Two internally consistent systems, incompatible at almost every card.

An English-speaking reader almost always inherits the Golden Dawn version without ever being told there was a choice, because the Rider-Waite came out of that order and the Rider-Waite is what English bookshops sold for a century. Papus is the shortest route to discovering that the other branch exists, and that it came first.

The Martinist Order outlived him and still exists in several competing lines. The Egyptology did not survive, and should not have.

What survived best is a habit: reading the Tarot de Marseille structurally. Numbers, suits, positions and directions first, pictorial detail second. That reflex runs from Levi through Papus to the twentieth-century French practitioners, and a Marseille reader still uses it today. When Alejandro Jodorowsky insists that a card is read by where it looks, what it holds and what number it carries, he is working inside a tradition Papus helped codify, whatever he would have made of the rest of the book.

The book is out of copyright and easy to find. An English translation by A. P. Morton appeared in 1892, and most reprints descend from it, which means the English you will read is Victorian and heavy going in places.

A practical order. Skip the opening argument about Egypt on a first pass. Go straight to the sections on the structure of the minor arcana and read those slowly, because that is where the method lives. Come back to the majors afterwards with Levi's letter order in front of you rather than the Golden Dawn's, otherwise the correspondences will look broken when they are simply from the other branch.

Read it alongside a Marseille deck, not a Rider-Waite. Papus is describing minor arcana that carry no scene, only arrangements of the suit symbol, and a large part of his argument has nothing to attach to on a deck that illustrates every card.