#papus

Visual signal, fire! Dance

Until you give me an answer, eternal infinity loop

Signals echoing in the void with nowhere to go

Always offline, any reply will never come

A scream without an echo, for you

Is it a parallel line? Am I alone? This never-ending wait

Hey (Hello?), where are you now? Try waving your hand

Um, you’re alive, right? If you're dead, answer me

Life is beautiful when you find a strawberry teapot to your strawberry thee cup

Helping Gadget (fan doodle)

Original Music Video: Helping Gadget (Помогатор) by The Fixies (Фиксики)

Death (Scorpio), Temperance (Sagittarius) and The Devil (Capricorn): An Analysis

The fifth ternary of the Major Arcana in Tarot is composed of XIII Death, XIV Temperance, and XV The Devil. In Papus’ ternary system, any triad expresses the dynamic of י (Yod), ה (He), and ו (Vau): impulse, receptivity, and synthesis. Not only that, but it sequentially reproduces the zodiacal sequence of Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn, from the eighth to the tenth houses.

In this specific case, Death represents the י (Yod), the initiating impulse of dissolution, transmutation, and the symbolic death of the ego. It is aligned with the sign of Scorpio, the fixed and subterranean Water where all forms decay to release their essence. This is a destructive current governed by Mars, the nocturnal malefic, who feels at home when the Sun has set and shadow begins its reign. The somber eighth house of the Zodiac, a succedent house, is its natural dwelling.

Appropriately, the martial force of Scorpio appears in geomancy as Rubeus, the most violent and brutal of all the sixteen figures, embodying the energy of decomposition itself, where the only active element of the four is Water and where its element is Water itself. In the Tree of Life, Death corresponds to the Path of נ (Nun), the Fish of those putrid waters, ascending from Netzach to Tifereth, the passage through which the egoic desire perishes so that the Higher Will may arise. More at The Mirror of Sienna.

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Egyptianized Tarot card, with Hathor headdress

Papus (ru Папюс) and painter Gabriel Gulin

In the spring of 1948, three sisters – Leah, Margaret and Kate Fox, living in a rural town near Rochester in the state of New-York – claimed to have communicated with the dead, thanks to a turning table. People became obsessed with this trio of mediums and their poltergeists, and this was the start of the “spiritism craze”. This passion for communicating with the spirits soon reached Europe – and nor France, nor its capital Paris escaped it. In the upper classes of the capital, or in the “avant-garde milieu”, everybody tried to invoke the souls of the deceased inside tables for a little chat. Turning tables became one of the main entertainments of the time – or rather, a “spiritual sport”. It was the “greatest phenomenon” of the century, for many. But for the Church of France, it was something quite different… To quote the Chevalier Gougenot des Mousseaux, in his “La magie au dix-neuvième siècle” (Magic in the 19th century), “Magic, magnetism, somnambulism, spiritism, hypnotism – they are all but Satanism!”. The situation was taken very seriously by the religious authorities, to the point that the abbot Mautain, vicar of the archdiocese of Paris and doctor in theology, published a text tiled “Avertissement aux Chrétiens sur les tables tournantes”, “Warning for Christians about turning tables”. In it he described his experience seeing one day a basket twist itself “like a snake” and flee by crawling in front of a Gospel. The abbot Chevrojon, vicar of Saint-Roch, rather confessed having to battle against a “possessed stool”. For all the men of God of the time, spiritism was the work of the devil. As for the scientists of the Académie des sciences, it was all just charlatanism. For these rational and rigorist scholars, these tables could only turn through magician tricks, or by the subconscious muscular impulsions of the participants. For them, it was all just collective hallucinations, or autosuggestions.

But despite all the condemnations, despite all the warnings, despite all the debunking, people never stopped being obsessed with spiritism. In 1856, the emperor Napoléon III himself received officially in the Tuileries the Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home. During the séance they organized, a tale, several chairs and several furniture pieces started to float, while a host of famous spirits were invoked: Hortense de Beauharnais, Napoléon Ier, Marie-Antoinette, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal! But Home wanted to impress his imperial hosts too much, and this was his downfall: he was proven a fake when the Imperial Court went with him to Biarritz. There, “ghost hands” caressed the face of the empress Eugénie – but it was revealed to be the foot of the medium, wearing a glove! As it turns out, Home wasn’t a medium but a talented illusionists and hypnotists. Home was asked to leave France immediately – but despite this disgrace at the highest level of the government, secret societies and occult organizations of all sorts kept flowering and multiplying throughout France: spiritualists, theosophists, martinists, Rosicrucians, kabbalists, gnostics, neo-pagans, luciferians, Satanists… But three men in particular became extremely famous.

1) Allan Kardec

Born in Lyon in 1804, Hippolyte Léon Rivail settled at a very young age in Paris, where he opened a school (35, rue de Sèvres) where he taught based on the modern methods of the Swiss pedagogue Jean-Henry Pestalozzi, himself a fervent follower of Rousseau’s theories. Unfortunately, Rivail’s schools barely hold for a few years before closing – Rivail switched to the writing of manuals of grammar, arithmetic, chemistry and biology. It is when he was writing a chapter about the magnetism of animals that a friend of his told him about his personal “table experience”. Rivail had reached his fifties when he first took part in a séance of turning tables. He soon regularly visited these mediumnic séances – one rue de la Grange-Batelière, another rue Tiquetonne, a third rue de Rochechouart… One medium claimed that Rivail was actually the reincarnation of an old Breton druid by the name of Allan Kardec – and so the former teacher took this pseudonym as his new name. In 1857, the “new” Allan Kardec published the first and the most famous of his books, “Le Livre des Esprits”, The Book of Spirits, that he claims to have written under the command of… spirits! On the first day of April 1858, he creates in his home (8, rue des Martyrs) la Société spirite de Paris (The Spiritualist Society of Paris), and a newspaper by the name of “La Revue spirite” (The Spiritualist Review). Since his apartment becomes too small to welcome his many friends and disciples, Allan Kardec starts hosting reunions at the Palais-Royal, first in the galerie de Valois, than in the galerie Montpensier, and finally at the rue Sainte-Anne. Kardec created a true religion, whose influenced reached all of Europe – and even Brazil! He wrote many, many books: Qu’est-ce que le spiritisme? (What is spiritism?), Instruction pratique sur les manifestations spirites (Pratical instructions about spiritualist manifestations), Le Livre des médiums (The Book of mediums), L’Evangile selon le spiritism (The Spiritism Gospel), Le Ciel et l’Enfer ou La Justice Divine (Heaven and Hell, or the Divin Justice), and finally, La Genèse, les Miracles et les Prédictions selon le spiritisme (The Genesis, the Miracles and the Predictions according to spiritualism). In 1869, Allan Kardec did not die – but rather was “disembodied”, and his empty body buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. His grave, in the shape of a dolmen, is still one of the most famous tombstones of the entire cemetery.

2) Éliphas Lévi

Eliphas Lévi was the man who invented in the French language the word “occultisme”, “occultism”. Born Alphonse-Louis Constant in 1810, in the Odéon neighborhood, son of a shoemaker, he soon enters the seminary of Saint-Sulpice and he could have become a priest… if only he could “keep it in his pants”, if you excuse the expression. Young Constant was sent to a young girl’s house to catechize her, only for him to seduce and flirt with her – which officially put an end to his possible priestly career. His mother, who was a very pious woman, was so despaired and heartbroken by this she killed herself. Gifted for drawing, the young Constant started to live and work in artists studios, while enjoying a very lustful and un-chaste life. He notably was the lover of Flora Tristan, a socialist and feminist activist who would later become famous for being the grandmother of Paul Gauguin. Constant then became part of the staff of the collège oratorien de Juilly – and it was during this time that he wrote his first book, La Bible de la liberté (The Bible of freedom).

As soon as it was published, the book was pulled out of libraries, forbidden from being published, and both the author and edtor were summoned in the assize court of Paris for “attack against the public and religious property and moral”. Constant was locked up in the Sainte-Pélagie prison for eleven months, and when he got out he married Marie-Noémie Cadiot, an eighteen year old woman (he was over thirty!). He wrote a pamphlet called “La Voix de la famine” (The Voice of famine), and he was once again condemned to one year of prison. He however only did half of his time in prison – which allowed him to participate in the revolution of February 1848. He was now a wanted man – in fact, a revolutionary who happened to look like him was shot dead rue Saint-Martin! A few years later, in the 120 boulevard du Montparnasse, he wrote the book that truly started his legend: Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Dogma and ritual of the high magic). To publish this book he took the pseudonym of Éliphas Lévi, which was the Hebraic translation of Alphonse-Louis. In this book, the author created the portrait of a fantastical creature that was then copy-pasted and spread through the press: Baphomet, the so-called idol worshiped by the Templar Knights. Lévi described the creature as having the head of a goat, the breast of a woman, hooves, wings, and a pentagram on the forehead – sitting cross-legged while flames burn over its head. After this first success, Lévi kept producing best-sellers: Histoire de la magie (History of magic), La Clef des grands mystères (The Key of great mysteries), La Science des esprits (The Science of spirits), Le Grand Arcane (The Great Arcana)… Admired by the occultists of his time, he regularly gave tarot readings or chiromancy readings, and he started practicing alchemical experiments. He became friend with Alexandre Dumas, wrote several songs, became a guest in several literary salons, and he even was presented to Victor Hugo throughout the daughter of Théophile Gautier, Judith Gautier. He died in 1875 and was buried in the cemetery of Ivry.

3) Papus

Born in Spain of a French father and Spanish mother, Gérard Encausse was just a child when his parents settled in Montmartre. He had a pretty normal childhood at the Rollin school (today’s Jacques-Decour highschool), where he had already created an esoteric journal and a secret society with other teenagers. Becoming a medicine student, he actually spends most of his time studying divinatory arts, the tarot, the Kabbalah, and the arts of chiromancy, numerology and hypnosis. He takes the pseudonym of “Papus”, the name of a genius doctor of Antiquity. Papus was a “bon vivant”, as we say in France, a man who enjoyed all the pleasures of life and hanged out with the bohème of Montmartre – he notably spent a lot of time in Le Chat noir cabaret. Papus was for a time part of the Theosophical Society created in the United-States by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, but he soon decided to stay independent and create his own organization. Or rather, re-crate, as he resurrected l’Ordre martiniste (The Martinist Order), inspired by the mage of the 18th century, Martinès de Pasqually. The first Martinist loge was in the 24, rue Pigalle. Papus had a clear sense of hierarchy and of mise en scène: as the leader of the Order, he goes by the title “The Unknown Philosopher”, while his right hands take titles such as “The Unknown Brother”, “The Initiated Brother”, “The Associated Brother”. During their ceremonies, the members of the Order wear a red dress, a black silk mask and Egyptian cloth-strips similar to the one wrapping up mummies, while holding a sword. In its peak, the Order had twenty thousand members spread across Europe, Russia and the United-States.

Papus worked however outside of his personal organization: he also worked to rebuild the ancient brotherhood of the Kabbalistic Rose Cross. In 1889, he participates to the first International Spiritualist Congress, that takes place in Paris, rue Cadet, while also founding the GIEE – the Groupe indépendant d’études ésotériques (The Independent Group of Esoteric Studies), which is opened by a conference at the 44, rue Turbigo, and which gathers all of the spiritualists of Paris. All the disciples participating to this opening conference notably obtain a diploma. The next yar, Papus creates with the poet Lucien Chamuel “la librairie du Merveilleux”, the book-shop of the Marvelous, 29 rue de Trévise. In the back-room, Papus and his friend work on creating their journal “L’Initiation”, that Rome itself blacklisted, their monthly publication L’Union occulte (The Occult Union), as well as their weekly “Le Voile d’Isis” (The Veil of Isis), and various almanacs. It was also in the backroom of the bookshop that you could find the seat of La Faculté libre des sciences hermétiques (The Free Faculty of Hermetic Sciences).

In 1902, Papus and Lucien Chamuel sell the book-shop of the Marvelous to open a new bookshop, this one called “librairie d’Hermétisme” (Bookshop of Hermetism), at the 3 and 5 rue de Savoie – plus an annex rue Séguier. By now, the personal office of the occult master looked like an Egyptian temple: he notably wrote there many of the 160 various texts that were attributed to him. In 1905, the tsar Nicolas II invites him to Saint-Petersburg for a spiritism séance: it was said that during this meeting, the French wizard managed to invoke the ghost of Alexandre III (which, according to the rumors, made Rasputin very jealous). In June of 1908, Papus gathers at Paris the Spiritualist Congress, gathering thirty thousand members from all of Europe – it took place in the salle des Sociétés savants, in the 8th of rue Danton. During the Great War, Papus was named chief-physician paramedic, but he did not survive the war, dying of tuberculosis before the end of the conflict. Some whispered that he might have been cursed by an envious Rasputin…

 Some additional notes, to understand the Papus article:

# Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, born in Russia, founded in New-York in 1875 the Theosophical Society, which soon spread world-wide. Her teachings were a syncretism of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianism and esoteric thinking. In Paris, the theosophy received its first disciples in 1883. A journal, Le Lotus Bleu (The Blue Lotus) was founded. The seat of the French Theosophical Society was at the 4, square Rapp, in the seventh arrondissement.

# Jacques Martinès de Pasqually, a Portuguese Jew that converted himself to Catholicism, travelled in France in 1750 and founded there the society of the Order of the Mason Knights elected Cohen (Cohen, in Hebrew, meaning “priests”). Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, nicknamed “The Unknown Philosopher”, was his secretary. The Martinist Order, or Martinism, offered to its adepts to become “beings of God” by mixing spirituality and magic.

Papuroara, Pu! 🌴