A physician, editor and organiser
Encausse was born at La Coruña in 1865 and grew up in Paris. He qualified in medicine in 1894, while already publishing under the name Papus. In 1888 he founded L’Initiation, a journal that brought occult theory, hypnotism and related subjects into a shared publishing forum. Medical and esoteric subjects continued to appear across his bibliography.
With Augustin Chaboseau he co-founded the Martinist Order. Books, correspondence and organisations gave his teaching several forms, from introductory explanations to discussion within initiatory circles. The Lyon archives preserve letters and papers relating to these activities alongside material associated with Sédir and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. They document a network of writers and institutions behind the public occult identity. Encausse died in Paris in 1916.
The cards as parts of a proposed order
The 1896 George Redway edition of The Tarot of the Bohemians credits A. P. Morton with translation from the French. Early chapters use the sacred name Yod-He-Vau-He as a key to relationships developed through numbers, letters and cards. The contents extend from correspondences to astronomical, initiatory and Kabbalistic interpretation and lessons in divination.
An individual trump acquires meaning through its position within a larger diagram or sequence. Papus’s method moves repeatedly between image and arrangement, inviting readers to recognise a general order in particular figures. His account of an ancient Egyptian initiatory book preserved through Romani transmission belongs to that occult theory. Surviving early Tarot cards instead place the game in fifteenth-century Italy. Keeping this historical distinction clear allows his system to be understood within the tradition it helped shape.
