Papus

Papus was the pen name of Gérard Encausse (1865–1916), a French physician and occultist born in A Coruña, Spain. He was one of the busiest figures of the Paris occult revival of the 1880s and 1890s, a founder of the Martinist Order and a prolific writer. His book Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), translated as The Tarot of the Bohemians, built on Éliphas Lévi by tying the 22 trumps to the Hebrew alphabet and to Kabbalistic number schemes, and it reproduced Oswald Wirth's new Major Arcana. The book did much to fix the idea of tarot as a key to esoteric knowledge. Its claim that the cards came from the Romani is not supported by history. See Papus and Oswald Wirth.