Papus — Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889)

At a glance

Papus (the pen name of the physician Gérard Encausse, 1865–1916) published Le Tarot des Bohémiens in 1889 and subtitled it "the absolute key to occult science" — the most systematic statement of the French occult tarot, and the book that carried Éliphas Lévi's tarot-Kabbalah equation to a wide readership.

One source, one deck. Every card here carries Papus's chapter for that arcanum, and nothing else. His text used to be pasted as a third voice into the Golden Dawn, Wirth and Court de Gébelin decks; it now stands on its own, where you can tell it is his.

The imagery

The plates are Oswald Wirth's 22 arcana — the designs Wirth drew in 1889 under Stanislas de Guaita, which Papus's own book reproduces to illustrate its majors. The two men belonged to the same Parisian occult circle and the book and the deck are of a piece, so the pairing here is the historical one rather than a modern mash-up. The same scans serve the `oswald-wirth-tarot` deck, which reads them through Wirth's own commentary instead — Wirth's plates, two different books about them.

Numbering — note the divergence

Papus and Wirth keep the Marseille order: VIII is Justice, XI is Strength, and the Fool is unnumbered and placed near the end. The Golden Dawn (and therefore the Rider-Waite-Smith deck) swapped VIII and XI to fit Leo to Strength. Do not reconcile the two systems: this deck follows Papus, and the Hebrew-letter assignments here differ from Book T's accordingly.

Majors only

Papus's book gives a chapter to each of the 22 majors. Its minor-arcana material is structural — a general theory of the four suits and their ten numbers as a self-reproducing Tetragrammaton, argued suit-wide rather than card by card — so there is no per-card Papus text for the 56 minors to carry, and none is invented here.

Counter-voices

Papus writes as if he is recovering an ancient Egyptian science preserved by "Bohemians" (Roma). He is not: the Egyptian origin story was invented in 1781 by Court de Gébelin, and the attribution of tarot to Roma transmission has no evidentiary basis and repeats a period stereotype about the people it names. Read the book as a primary source for what the French occult revival believed, which is genuinely important, rather than as history of the cards.

Sources & further reading

• Papus, Le Tarot des Bohémiens (Paris, 1889); English tr. A. P. Morton — public domain.
• Michael Dummett & Ronald Decker, A History of the Occult Tarot — for the corrective.
• `oswald-wirth-tarot` and `court-de-gebelin-tarot` in this repo for the neighbouring voices.

Where the pictures come from: who holds this deck's pictures, how sharp they are and what their rights allow: Sources: Papus.