The Papus Tarot of 1909

Papus was the pen name of Gérard Encausse (1865–1916), a Paris physician who became the busiest organiser of the French occult revival. He took the name from a minor spirit in the Nuctemeron, a text circulated by Éliphas Lévi, whose writings shaped almost everything Papus later did with the tarot.

His first major book, Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), argued that the tarot was not a game that had acquired mystical airs but a compact philosophical machine: a set of keys arranged so that anyone who understood the arrangement could reconstruct an entire metaphysics from the cards alone. Twenty years later, in Le Tarot divinatoire (1909), he published the deck itself — the plates now used here, drawn to his instructions by Gabriel Goulinat.

Papus was also a working doctor who ran free clinics, an editor of several journals, and a founder or officer of a small crowd of societies. That practical, systematising habit of mind is all over the deck: it is designed to be taught.

The full tarot has seventy-eight cards, and Papus wrote about all of them. But the twenty-two Major Arcana stand apart in his system, because twenty-two is the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. For Papus, following Lévi, the correspondence was not decorative but structural: each arcanum is a letter, and the letters are the elements from which the world is spelled.

This is why the numbering here can look unfamiliar. Le Mat — the Fool — carries no number at all in Papus's ordering and sits near the end of the sequence rather than at its head, and the Hebrew letters run from Aleph on the Magician to Tau on the World. The minor cards, in his scheme, describe circumstances. The twenty-two describe principles.

Papus was the best-known figure of Martinism, an initiatic current descending from Martinez de Pasqually and his pupil Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, the eighteenth-century writer who signed himself "the Unknown Philosopher". Papus and Augustin Chaboseau reorganised the tradition as the Ordre Martiniste in 1891.

Its central story is simple and severe. Humanity was made in a state of glory and fell from it; what remains is a being of real dignity living in reduced circumstances, capable of return. Saint-Martin called the work of that return réintégration — reintegration. It is undertaken inwardly, through prayer, attention and moral repair rather than through ceremony, and the Martinist is described not as a magician but as a Homme de désir, a man of desire: someone whose longing for the source is itself the method.

Read in that light, the arcana stop being predictions. The Tower is not an accident waiting in your calendar; it is the collapse of a structure built on the wrong ground, and the question a Martinist asks of it is which of your structures that describes. The deck is a mirror held up to the work of return.

Papus's Kabbalah is the Christian and Hermetic Kabbalah of nineteenth-century France rather than the rabbinic tradition of the Zohar, and it rests on two ideas.

The first is the four-letter name, Yod-He-Vau-He. Papus treats it as a pattern rather than a word: an active principle (Yod), a passive or receptive one (He), the relation that binds them (Vau), and the fruit of that relation which becomes the Yod of the next cycle (the second He). He then divides the twenty-two into groups of seven and reads each group as one turn of this pattern, so that the same movement repeats at three levels — which is where the Three Worlds come from.

The second is the Tree of Life, the ten Sephiroth joined by twenty-two paths. Because the paths are lettered, and the arcana are lettered, each card can be placed on a path between two Sephiroth. A card then means something quite precise: not a mood but a passage — the particular way one quality of being flows into another.

The practical consequence for a reading is that a card is never only about you. It is a law; you are one of the places it is currently operating.

The spread built for this deck follows Papus's own division. The first card speaks in the divine world — the principle at work, the law itself. The second speaks in the human world — how that law is being lived out in thought, relationship and will. The third speaks in the natural world — where it is landing in the body, the money, the house, the calendar.

The three are one statement read at three depths. When they agree, the matter is settled and only patience is required. When the divine and the natural disagree, the middle card usually shows why: the human world is where the law is either translated faithfully or mistranslated.

The plates reproduced here are from the 1909 edition of Le Tarot divinatoire, and they are in the public domain. They are hosted at Wikimedia Commons and are used here unaltered but for scaling.