Papus and the Tarot of the Bohemians

The Tarot of the Bohemians is the 1889 book in which Gérard Encausse, writing as Papus, tried to fit the whole deck into one grand theory of Kabbalah, astrology and number. He was a physician by training and an organizer by temperament, and his book became the manual an entire generation of French occultists used to read the cards as a philosophical system rather than a parlor game.

Papus did not discover new cards or invent a deck of his own. He inherited the Marseille pattern and the claims of Éliphas Lévi before him, and then built a structured, almost textbook-like synthesis on top of them, numbered propositions and all. Éliphas Lévi's School: The Tarot as a Universal Key had proposed the tarot as a universal key; Papus tried to write the instruction manual for actually turning it.

From medicine to the Martinist order

Encausse trained as a physician in Paris and kept practicing medicine even as he built an occult career under the pen name Papus, borrowed from a spirit name in an occult romance. He co-founded the Martinist Order, a Christian-mystical lodge drawing on the eighteenth-century teachings of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, and used it as a base from which to organize occult study across France. Where Lévi wrote in dense, aphoristic prose, Papus wrote like a professor, with tables, numbered chapters and a stated method. That clarity is why his book spread so widely.

Building the tarot of the bohemians

The title itself makes a historical claim: that the tarot came to Europe through the Romani, themselves (in the folklore Papus accepted) descended from Egyptian wanderers, carrying a fragment of ancient priestly wisdom disguised as a card game. Modern historians reject this origin story; there is no evidence the tarot has Egyptian or Romani roots, and the deck's documented history begins in fifteenth-century Italian courts. But the tarot of the bohemians was never meant as a history book. It was a working synthesis, using that origin myth as a frame to present a system of Hebrew letters, numbers and astrological correspondences that readers could apply directly to the cards in front of them.

Papus organized the twenty-two trumps as a step-by-step curriculum, pairing each with a Hebrew letter much as Lévi had, while adding his own numerological commentary on how the trumps group into sets of seven. He treated the The Priestess as the custodian of hidden knowledge standing at the threshold of the whole system, the second step after the Magician's raw will, a reading that shaped how later French-language tarot schools described her role.

Kabbalah made teachable

What set Papus apart from Lévi was pedagogy. He assumed his reader knew nothing and built the argument from the ground, chapter by chapter: first the general theory of correspondences, then the Hebrew alphabet, then the trumps one at a time, then the minor arcana and their place in the scheme. He drew diagrams connecting the Tree of Life to the deck and insisted that a student work through them in sequence rather than skip to a favorite card.

This teaching structure made the book usable in study groups, which is exactly how the Martinist Order and its allied circles used it. A reader working through a layout like the Astrological wheel today, matching planetary houses to drawn cards, is using a method of correspondence that French occultism popularized largely through Papus's systematic approach rather than Lévi's looser suggestions.

Numbers, letters and a living method

Papus leaned harder on numerology than Lévi had. He treated the number of a trump, not only its picture, as a carrier of meaning, and he cross-referenced that number against Hebrew gematria and against groupings of three, seven and ten drawn from Kabbalistic tradition. Tradition holds that he saw the whole deck as expressing one underlying mathematical order, visible once a reader learned to count the cards correctly rather than simply read their pictures.

This numerical layer became one of his most lasting contributions. Later schools, including several in the English-speaking world, picked up his habit of asking what a card's number meant before asking what its picture meant, a sequence that reverses how most beginners still learn to read today.

Why the book still matters

The Tarot of the Bohemians is read now less for its history, which scholarship has largely set aside, and more for its method. Papus showed that an occult deck could be taught the way a language is taught: systematically, with a clear order of topics and a teacher's patience. That structure outlived the Egyptian myth that gave the book its title, and it still shapes how serious students approach the trumps as a coherent course of study rather than a loose bag of symbols.

Readers wanting the primary source can consult the English Wikipedia overview of Papus, which outlines his medical career alongside his occult writing.

FAQ

Who was Papus? Papus was the pen name of Gérard Encausse, a French physician and occultist who founded the Martinist Order and wrote the Tarot of the Bohemians in 1889.

Is the Romani origin story in the book historically accurate? No. Historians have found no evidence linking the tarot's origins to Egypt or the Romani people; the documented history of the cards begins in fifteenth-century Italy.

How does Papus differ from Éliphas Lévi? Lévi wrote in dense, suggestive prose. Papus organized the same basic ideas into a structured curriculum with numbered chapters, diagrams and a stated teaching method.

Does the Martinist Order still exist? Yes, in various continuing branches, though their teaching and membership have changed considerably since Papus's own lifetime.