French Occultism: Lévi, Papus and the Paris Occult Revival

French occultism is the movement, centred in Paris, that gave modern Western esotericism its name, its tarot and many of its institutions. Rooted in the illuminism of the eighteenth century, it was defined by Éliphas Lévi in the 1850s and organised in the 1880s and 1890s by Papus (Gérard Encausse), Stanislas de Guaita and Joséphin Péladan, whose Martinist and Rosicrucian orders, journals and salons made the Belle Époque the golden age of the French occult. Its influence reached British magicians, Symbolist painters and, through René Guénon, twentieth-century Traditionalism.

Eighteenth-Century Roots: Illuminism, Egypt and the Tarot§

French occultism inherited a rich prehistory. In the 1760s and 1770s Martinès de Pasqually taught a theurgic Christianity in his order of Élus Coëns, and his disciple Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, "the Unknown Philosopher", turned it into an inward mysticism that later occultists would claim as the source of "Martinism". In 1781 the Protestant scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin argued, in the eighth volume of Le Monde primitif, that the tarot was a book of ancient Egyptian wisdom disguised as a game. A Parisian card reader who called himself Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette) soon produced a tarot for divination built on this theory. Historians have shown that the Egyptian origin was pure speculation (see history of tarot), but the idea became a foundation of occult teaching.

Two early nineteenth-century writers added a philosophy of history and language. Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, in La Langue hébraïque restituée (1815–1816), claimed to recover the hidden meanings of Hebrew roots in Genesis, and later sketched a vast esoteric history of humanity. The Polish mathematician Józef Hoëne-Wroński, living in Paris, proposed a "messianism" that would unite religion and science through an absolute philosophy. Lévi met Wroński in the early 1850s and was deeply influenced by him. The Rosicrucian and Masonic high degrees that flourished in France gave all these ideas an initiatory setting.

Éliphas Lévi and the Invention of Occultism§

The movement's founder was Alphonse-Louis Constant (1810–1875), a former seminarian and radical socialist writer who, after 1848, reinvented himself as Éliphas Lévi. His Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–1856), Histoire de la magie (1860) and La Clef des grands mystères (1861) presented magic as a single ancient science founded on the "astral light", a universal medium of will and imagination, and keyed the twenty-two tarot trumps to the twenty-two Hebrew letters. Recent research, especially by Julian Strube, has shown how closely Lévi's occultism grew out of the socialist and Catholic reform movements of the 1840s, rather than marking a flight from politics.

Lévi had few disciples in his lifetime, but he left an outline that later writers filled in. Jean-Baptiste Pitois, writing as Paul Christian, published a popular Histoire de la magie in 1870, and Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre developed the political doctrine of "synarchy" and wrote of a hidden spiritual centre in Asia called Agartha. Meanwhile Allan Kardec's Spiritism, founded in Paris in 1857, became a mass movement that occultists both borrowed from and criticised.

Papus, Guaita and the Orders of the 1880s§

The organised revival came with a generation born in the 1860s. Gérard Encausse (1865–1916), a medical student who took the pen name Papus, published a Traité élémentaire de science occulte in 1888, founded the monthly L'Initiation in the same year, and in 1889 produced Le Tarot des Bohémiens, which claimed the tarot as the key to all occult science. His Traité méthodique de science occulte (1891) was a thousand-page textbook of the subject. Papus was a tireless organiser: he founded a school of occult studies, built up a Martinist Order with a Supreme Council by 1891, and gathered writers, doctors and artists into its lodges. He also became a visitor to the Russian imperial court and served as an army doctor in the First World War, dying in 1916.

His friend the Marquis Stanislas de Guaita (1861–1897), a poet from Lorraine converted to occultism by reading Lévi, founded the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross in 1888. Its members studied Kabbalah, Hermetic philosophy and the history of magic, and received degrees by examination. Guaita's own unfinished trilogy, Le Serpent de la Genèse, interpreted evil and black magic in Lévi's terms. Oswald Wirth, his secretary, drew a set of twenty-two tarot trumps under Guaita's direction in 1889, an influential "rectified" design.

The war of the magicians§

The Paris occultists were also a press sensation. In the late 1880s Guaita and his circle denounced Joseph-Antoine Boullan, a defrocked priest who led a small sect at Lyon, as a practitioner of sexual magic and sorcery. When Boullan died in 1893, the journalist Jules Bois and the novelist J.-K. Huysmans, whose Là-bas (1891) had portrayed Parisian Satanism, accused Guaita of killing him by occult means. Challenges followed, and Bois fought duels with both Guaita and Papus without serious injury. At the same time, the hoaxer Léo Taxil was publishing lurid "revelations" about a Luciferian Masonic cult, which he admitted in 1897 that he had invented. These episodes show how occultism was entangled with Catholic and anti-Masonic polemic in the Third Republic.

Péladan and the Salons de la Rose+Croix§

The most theatrical figure of the revival was the novelist Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918), who styled himself "Sâr". A Catholic aesthete, he broke with Guaita's order around 1890–1891 and founded a Catholic Order of the Rose-Croix of the Temple and the Grail. Between 1892 and 1897 he organised six Salons de la Rose+Croix in Paris, exhibitions of idealist and Symbolist art that excluded realism, landscape and genre painting. Artists such as Fernand Khnopff, Jean Delville and Carlos Schwabe exhibited, and Erik Satie, then in his twenties, composed music for the order. Robert Pincus-Witten's study remains the standard account of this meeting of occultism and art, a theme continued in occult symbols.

Gnostics, Traditionalists and the Twentieth Century§

The French occult world also produced new churches. In 1890 the archivist Jules Doinel founded a Gnostic Church claiming to revive the Cathars (see Cathars and Bogomils), and Papus and his associates became its bishops. After 1900 the movement fragmented. Papus's death in 1916 and the losses of the war weakened the orders, though Martinist and Gnostic lineages survived into the present.

The most important critic to emerge from this milieu was René Guénon (1886–1951), who passed through Papus's school and Gnostic Church before attacking Theosophy and Spiritism in books of 1921 and 1923. Guénon's doctrine of a single primordial Tradition, opposed to modern occultism, founded the Traditionalist school. Between the wars, the mysterious alchemist known as Fulcanelli, whose Le Mystère des cathédrales (1926) read Gothic sculpture as alchemical code, gave French esotericism a new emblem; his identity remains debated. For the connections with Britain see British occultism.

The Legacy of French Occultism§

French occultism gave the modern West several lasting ideas: the tarot as a key to the Kabbalah; the notion of a single "occult science" uniting magic, astrology and alchemy; and the initiatory order as a school of esoteric study rather than a merely social fraternity. The Golden Dawn's attributions, the occult tarot decks of the twentieth century, Martinist orders worldwide and Traditionalist thought all descend in part from Paris. Historians such as Christopher McIntosh, Joscelyn Godwin and David Allen Harvey now also stress its political dimensions, from socialism and Catholic reform to nationalism, as part of the wider occult revival.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was Papus?§

Papus was the pen name of Gérard Encausse (1865–1916), a Spanish-born French physician and the leading organiser of French occultism in the 1880s and 1890s. He wrote textbooks on occult science and the tarot, edited L'Initiation and led the Martinist Order.

What was the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross?§

It was an initiatory society founded in Paris in 1888 by Stanislas de Guaita, with Papus and Péladan among its early council. It awarded degrees in Kabbalah and occult studies on the basis of examinations and was one of the models for later Rosicrucian and magical orders.

What is Martinism?§

Martinism is a form of Christian esotericism named after Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin and, indirectly, his teacher Martinès de Pasqually. The Martinist Order organised by Papus around 1887–1891 created a system of initiation that claimed descent from Saint-Martin, though historians regard this lineage as largely reconstructed.

Sources and further reading§

• La Langue hébraïque restituée — Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, 1815
• Dogme et rituel de la haute magie — Éliphas Lévi, 1856
• Le Tarot des Bohémiens — Papus, 1889
• Traité méthodique de science occulte — Papus, 1891
• Là-bas — Joris-Karl Huysmans, 1891
• Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival — Christopher McIntosh, 1972
• Occult Symbolism in France: Joséphin Péladan and the Salons de la Rose-Croix — Robert Pincus-Witten, 1976
• The Theosophical Enlightenment — Joscelyn Godwin, 1994
• A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot — Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett, 1996
• Beyond Enlightenment: Occultism and Politics in Modern France — David Allen Harvey, 2005