Papus and Oswald Wirth
People · 3 min read · updated
Papus and Oswald Wirth were the two key figures of French occult tarot. In 1889 Papus, the pen name of the physician Gérard Encausse, published Le Tarot des Bohémiens, the first full book to present tarot as a system of Kabbalah, numbers and magic, and Wirth, a Swiss artist and Freemason, drew a set of 22 trumps for it, one of the first tarot designs made for study rather than play. Between them they turned Éliphas Lévi's ideas into a book and a deck that readers could use.
- Papus
- Gérard Encausse, 1865–1916, physician
- Oswald Wirth
- 1860–1943, artist and Freemason
- Key year
- 1889
- Book
- Le Tarot des Bohémiens (Papus), 1889
- Deck
- System
- Lévi's: the Fool on Shin, between XX and XXI
The Paris occult revival
In the 1880s Paris was full of occult societies, magazines and salons. The young writers at the centre of it, among them Stanislas de Guaita, Joséphin Péladan and Papus, looked back to Éliphas Lévi, who had died in 1875, as their master. In 1888 Guaita founded the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, with Péladan and Papus among its leaders, and tarot, which Lévi had called the key to all occult knowledge, became a set text.[1]
Who was Papus?
Gérard Encausse was born in 1865 in A Coruña, Spain, to a French father and a Spanish mother, and grew up in Paris. He trained as a doctor and wrote under the name Papus, taken from a spirit of healing in a work attributed to Apollonius of Tyana. He was astonishingly busy: he founded journals and the Martinist Order, lectured, practised medicine, wrote dozens of books and visited the Russian court. He served as a medical officer in the First World War and died of tuberculosis in Paris in 1916.
His Tarot des Bohémiens, translated into English as The Tarot of the Bohemians in 1892, follows Lévi: each trump has a Hebrew letter, a number and a place in a scheme built on the four letters of the divine name. He added his own diagrams, often wheels and triangles of numbers, and printed Wirth's new trumps as plates. The book's title repeats a 19th-century belief that the Romani carried tarot to Europe; there is no evidence for it, since tarot was being played in Italy before the Romani are recorded there.[2] See Myths about tarot's origins.
Twenty years later Papus wrote a more practical book, Le Tarot divinatoire (1909), on reading the cards, with a full deck drawn by Gabriel Goulinat. It mixed occult symbols with the fortune-telling meanings of Etteilla that the occultists claimed to despise.
Who was Oswald Wirth?
Oswald Wirth was born in 1860 in Brienz, Switzerland, and spent most of his life in France. He was a magnetic healer, a Freemason who wrote widely read handbooks on the meaning of Masonic degrees, and Guaita's secretary. Guaita asked him to redraw the tarot trumps as Lévi said they should look, and in 1889 Wirth's 22 cards were printed in a small edition.[1]
He kept the Tarot de Marseille as his base but changed it on purpose, adding a Hebrew letter to each card and details of his own, such as a crocodile waiting for the Fool at the edge of an abyss. In 1926 he issued a revised set, and in 1927 he published Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge, a long study of the trumps as a path of initiation. His designs remain in print and are the classic deck of French esoteric tarot.
What did they leave behind?
- The deck as a teaching tool. Wirth's trumps showed that a tarot could be redrawn to carry a doctrine. The Golden Dawn, the Rider–Waite–Smith and the Thoth all followed that idea.
- Lévi's order in France. French and many continental readers kept Lévi's letter order, with the Fool near the end, while English readers took the Golden Dawn's. See Tarot and the Kabbalah.
- Only 22 cards. Wirth drew only the trumps. To this day many French esoteric books treat the 22 Major Arcana as the real tarot and the other 56 as an afterthought.
Their history is part of the wider story told in Occult tarot.