Papus

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all the Elementary Treatise of Occult Science (1888) and The Tarot of the Bohemians (1889).

The method of analogy

Occult science, as Papus teaches it, differs from the science of the schools by its method. Science studies facts one by one and climbs from them to laws; the occultist uses analogy, reasoning from the known to the unknown by correspondence, since what is above is like what is below and every level of the world repeats the others in its own matter. A law found in the body is sought in the soul and in the universe, and a law found in one is a key to the others.

Everything falls into three: the world of nature, the world of humankind and the world of God; and in a person, the body, the astral body and the spirit. Papus pictures them as a carriage. The body is the coach, the astral body is the horse that draws it, and the spirit is the coachman who holds the reins. The astral body, the plastic mediator of the old writers, carries the life of the body and does its unconscious work, and the spirit governs both, or should.

The law of the divine name

The key of the whole system is the four letters of the divine name, Yod, He, Vau, He, which Papus reads as the law of every process. Yod is the active, the beginning, the masculine; the first He is the passive, the receptive, the feminine; Vau is the neutral, the link that joins the two and is born of them; and the second He is the passage to a new cycle, in which the whole becomes the first term of a new series on the next level. Every creation, from a thought to a world, runs through these four.

To numbers he applies two operations. Theosophic reduction adds the figures of a number until one is left, so that 10 and 19 both come back to 1; theosophic addition adds all the numbers up to a given one, so that 4 gives 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, which is 10. By them he shows that every number returns into the first four, the four of the divine name.

The tarot as an absolute key

The Tarot of the Bohemians builds the whole pack on that law. Each suit runs through the four letters, the king for Yod, the queen for He, the knight for Vau and the knave for the second He, and the four suits themselves answer to the letters, wands to Yod, cups to He, swords to Vau and pentacles to the second He. The twenty-two trumps, set on the Hebrew letters after Lévi, fall into three sets of seven, the divine, the human and the natural, with the Fool between the last two cards. The pack, for Papus, is the absolute key of occult science, a whole philosophy in figures.

Reintegration

His Martinist Order teaches the doctrine of Martinez de Pasqually and of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, the Unknown Philosopher: the reintegration of the human being. Humanity was emanated as a spiritual being, glorious and free, and fell by its own error into matter, into the body and into a world of division; its task is to return, to be reintegrated into the state it lost and into God. The way the order follows is Saint-Martin's inward way of the heart, prayer, the purifying of desire and the work of the spirit within, rather than the ceremonial theurgy of his teacher.

Its initiation passes from one initiate to another, and its chief symbols are the mask, which teaches the initiate to work unknown and without vanity, and the cloak, which teaches withdrawal into the inner life and the discretion that guards it. Its highest grade is the Unknown Superior.