Quick Answer
Almost every historical claim in this book is false, and it is still one of the most interesting things ever written about tarot. Papus was wrong about Egypt, wrong about the Romani, wrong about the antiquity of the deck, and wrong about the Hebrew letters. What he did was treat the seventy-eight cards as a single mathematical structure in which every card's meaning is determined by its position, and nobody had done that before. Read it for the architecture. Do not cite it for anything.
Key Takeaways
- The history is fabricated, and the documented origin is a fifteenth-century Italian card game.
- The structural insight is real. Meaning derived from position rather than memorised.
- Twenty-two letters and twenty-two trumps is a coincidence of counts, not a key.
- It assumes a Marseille deck with unillustrated minors, which changes everything about the method.
- Not a book for beginners, who will absorb the false history and get no card meanings.
🕑 16 min read
What This Book Is
Le Tarot des Bohemiens was published in Paris in 1889 and appeared in English translation soon after. Its subtitle announces it as the absolute key to occult science and describes it as the most ancient book in the world.
Neither claim is true and both tell you what kind of book you are holding.
What it contains is a systematic treatment of the seventy-eight cards as a philosophical instrument. Papus is not interested in what the pictures depict. He is interested in the deck as a structure: how many cards, in what groups, in what relations, and what can be derived from those relations.
The bohemians of the title are the Romani people, whom Papus credits with preserving the deck across centuries of wandering, which is another claim with no support.
On reading it now. The book is in the public domain and freely available, and there are good modern printings. Whichever you use, the diagrams and tables are essential and any edition that reproduces them badly is worth avoiding.
Who Papus Was
Gerard Encausse was born in Spain in 1865 to a French father and Spanish mother, raised in Paris, and qualified as a physician. He took the name Papus from a figure in a late antique text.
He was, more than anything, an organiser. He founded and led occult orders, edited journals, ran a publishing operation, and produced a very large number of books at speed. If the French occult revival of the 1880s and 1890s had an administrative centre, he was it.
He is also reported to have had contact with the Russian imperial court in its final years, which has attracted more attention than it deserves.
He died in 1916, aged fifty-one, of tuberculosis contracted while serving as a physician in a military hospital during the war. That detail is worth knowing: whatever one makes of his occultism, he was a working doctor who died doing the work.
The World He Worked In
The context explains the book's confidence.
Late nineteenth-century Paris had a dense occult subculture with its own journals, orders, feuds and canon. Its immediate ancestor was Eliphas Levi, who had already linked tarot to the Hebrew alphabet and to a systematic magical philosophy, and whose influence over everything that followed is difficult to overstate.
The intellectual habit of the period was correspondence. Everything was assumed to align with everything else: planets with metals, letters with numbers, cards with paths, colours with tones. A system's value was judged by how completely it connected.
Historical evidence was not what the period ran on. Assertion was, and the assertions were made by people who genuinely believed them and had no methods for checking.
This is why a reader today encounters a book that is exacting in its internal logic and careless about every factual claim it makes, and finds the combination strange. It was not strange then.
The Origin Claim
Papus states the standard occult account as established fact.
The tarot, on his telling, is the surviving fragment of the Egyptian sacred books, encoded into images so that it could be carried by illiterate wanderers when the temples fell. The Romani carried it across Europe. Its apparent triviality as a card game is the disguise that preserved it, because nobody destroys a game.
He adds that its true antiquity is enormous and that it encodes the whole of the ancient wisdom.
It is a wonderful story. It has the shape every good esoteric origin claim has: a lost golden age, a catastrophe, a coded survival, and a present-day rediscovery.
What Actually Happened
The documented history is well established and considerably duller.
Playing cards reach Europe from the Islamic world in the later fourteenth century, in four suits corresponding closely to a Mamluk pattern.
In northern Italy in the early fifteenth century, a fifth suit is added to the standard pack: a series of trump cards that beat the ordinary suits. The earliest surviving examples are luxury hand-painted decks made for aristocratic families in Milan and Ferrara.
The game was called trionfi, and later tarocchi. It was a trick-taking game with a trump suit, and it was played for centuries by people with no interest in anything esoteric. It is still played in parts of Europe.
The imagery on the trumps is not mysterious. It comes from the visual vocabulary of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy: the wheel of fortune, the triumph of death, the cardinal virtues, the pope and emperor, the hanged man as a specific Italian punishment for traitors. These were common images and would have been legible to anyone at the time.
Nobody connected the deck with Egypt, or with divination, for roughly three hundred and fifty years after it appeared.
Where the Egypt Story Started
The whole edifice traces to one man and one essay.
In 1781, a French writer named Antoine Court de Gebelin published a piece in a large speculative work on the ancient world, in which he described encountering a game of tarot at a social gathering, recognising it immediately as Egyptian, and identifying it as a surviving fragment of a lost book of Thoth.
He offered no evidence. He could not have read a hieroglyph, since they would not be deciphered for another forty years. The identification was made on the strength of the imagery looking suitably ancient to him.
An essay in the same volume, by a colleague, added the divinatory meanings.
Within a few years a Parisian fortune-teller had built a practice on the idea, and the association was established. Levi systematised it in the mid-nineteenth century, and Papus inherited it as settled fact.
The lineage is worth holding onto because it recurs constantly in esoteric literature. One person makes an unsupported guess. A second treats it as received knowledge. A third systematises it. By the fourth generation it is the tradition, complete with the claim that it has been transmitted since antiquity, and the original guess has been forgotten. Nothing dishonest happens at any step. Each writer is faithfully passing on what they were given, and the whole structure rests on a single unverified assertion made at a dinner party in 1781.
The Hebrew Correspondence
The load-bearing claim of the book, and it needs examining carefully because a great deal of later tarot rests on it.
There are twenty-two trumps. There are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Papus, following Levi, treats this as evidence that the trumps encode the letters and therefore the whole kabbalistic structure attached to them.
Two problems.
The first is that a coincidence of counts is not a correspondence. Twenty-two is a small number and many things come in twenty-twos. The Italians who added trumps to a card deck in the fifteenth century were not counting Hebrew letters, and there is no evidence anyone connected the two before the eighteenth century.
The second is that even granting the link, the assignment is arbitrary. Which letter goes with which trump had to be decided, and the nineteenth-century systematisers disagreed about it immediately. Levi's assignment and the one later adopted by the English magical revival differ, principally over where the Fool sits, and there is no fact of the matter that would settle it. The dispute continues.
What this means practically: a reader who has learned that a particular card corresponds to a particular letter and path has learned one school's convention, made up in the nineteenth century, and should know that a different school would give them a different answer with equal confidence.
The Four-Letter Engine
Here is the part that is genuinely clever, and it is why the book survives.
Papus takes the four letters of the Hebrew divine name and treats them not as a name but as a universal pattern: an active principle, a passive principle, a mediating principle that unites them, and a fourth term that is the result of the union and also the beginning of the next cycle.
Having established this as his engine, he applies it everywhere.
The four suits become the four principles. Wands are active, cups passive, swords the mediating term, coins the result.
Within each suit, the ten numbered cards are grouped so that the same pattern repeats internally: the ace as active, the two as passive, the three as mediating, and so on through a structure that recurs.
The court cards are treated the same way, with king, queen, knight and page as the four principles in that suit's domain.
And the trumps are divided into three groups of seven, each group representing the same pattern on a different level, with the final card standing outside.
The effect is that nothing in the deck is arbitrary. Every card has a position determined by the intersection of its suit, its number and its group, and its meaning follows from that position.
How the Minors Are Handled
This is where the system does work that modern tarot books cannot.
Papus assumes the Marseille pattern, in which the numbered minor cards show nothing but arrangements of their suit symbols. Five of cups is five cups in a pattern, with no scene and no figures.
A modern reader trained on illustrated minors, where five of cups shows a cloaked figure looking at spilled vessels, will find this baffling. What is there to read?
His answer is that the meaning comes from the intersection of two things: what the suit is, and what the number means in his fourfold pattern.
The number is not a quantity. It is a position in a cycle of manifestation, and the same position in every suit does the same kind of work translated into that suit's domain.
The result is a method that generates fifty-six meanings from a handful of principles, without memorisation, and it is considerably more coherent than the lists of keywords most modern books supply.
The Trumps as a Sequence
His treatment of the twenty-two is structural rather than narrative, which distinguishes it from most later readings.
The modern habit is to read the trumps as a journey: the Fool sets out, meets a sequence of figures and situations, and arrives somewhere. That reading is twentieth-century and it is a good one.
Papus does something else. He divides the trumps into groups and reads each group as an application of the same fourfold pattern at a different level: the divine, the human, and the natural. A card's meaning comes from which group it belongs to and where it falls within it, and cards in corresponding positions across groups illuminate each other.
The reading is more architectural than narrative. It produces relationships between non-adjacent cards that a sequential reading misses, and it is genuinely useful for anyone who has only ever read the trumps as a story.
Deriving Rather Than Memorising
The methodological point, which is the book's real contribution.
Almost all tarot instruction is memorisation. Here are seventy-eight cards; here is what each means; learn them. The better books add that you should also read intuitively from the image, which is a second skill layered on the first.
Papus proposes neither. He proposes that if you understand the structure, you do not need to remember what any card means, because you can derive it. Given the suit and the number, the meaning follows.
Whether the derivations are correct is a separate question and largely unanswerable. What is worth taking is the ambition: a system in which the parts are generated by a principle rather than listed, which is a fundamentally different kind of object from a dictionary of meanings.
Readers who work with card meanings as a memorised list will find this reorienting even if they reject every specific assignment.
Why the Deck Matters
A practical note that determines whether the book will be usable for you.
Papus wrote before the Waite-Smith deck existed. That deck, published in 1909, illustrated the minor cards with scenes, and it has so thoroughly dominated the English-speaking world that most readers have never used anything else.
Scenic minors change the practice completely. You read the picture. The system that generates meaning from number and suit becomes unnecessary, because the card is telling you a story directly.
So a reader using an illustrated deck will find Papus's minor-card material inapplicable, because it solves a problem they do not have, rather than because it is wrong.
Anyone who wants to understand what he is doing should get a Marseille-pattern deck and sit with the unillustrated minors for a while. The experience of having nothing to look at is what his method was built for.
The Divination Chapters
Present, brief, and not the point.
The later part of the book gives a divinatory method and a set of meanings, and Papus's attitude to it is faintly dismissive. Fortune-telling is the deck's least interesting application, and the philosophical structure is what he cares about.
The method he supplies is not one many people use today. The meanings are terse.
A reader coming to this book to learn how to read cards will finish it having learned almost nothing about how to read cards, which is worth knowing before purchase.
What It Set in Motion
The transmission is worth tracing.
Papus consolidated the French occult tarot tradition and put it in a form that could be read by people outside the Paris scene, which mattered enormously.
The English magical revival of the same period was developing its own correspondence system, working from the same Levi inheritance, and arriving at different assignments. The two streams, French and English, have been in tension ever since, and most modern esoteric tarot descends from one or the other.
The general approach, that tarot is a systematic correspondence structure rather than a set of pictures, is the shared ancestor of a great deal of twentieth-century work, including the systems that treat the deck as a map of a kabbalistic tree.
Readers who have encountered tree-of-life correspondences attached to tarot are downstream of this lineage.
What Is Genuinely Worth Having
Three things, separable from everything false in the book.
The structural view. Seeing the deck as one object with an internal architecture, rather than as seventy-eight separate items, changes how you handle it permanently.
The derivation method. Whether or not his specific pattern is right, the idea that card meanings should follow from a principle rather than be memorised is a serious proposal and almost nobody else makes it.
The number work. His treatment of what a number means as a position in a cycle rather than as a quantity is the most useful thing for anyone reading unillustrated minors, and it survives being detached from the Hebrew apparatus entirely.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you already read tarot and want to see the deck as a machine rather than a gallery.
Read it if you use a Marseille deck, or want to, and need a method for the unillustrated minors.
Read it if you are interested in the occult revival and want a primary document from its most productive organiser.
Read it alongside Levi, who is its immediate source, and alongside a good documentary history of playing cards, which will supply everything Papus gets wrong.
Do not read it as a beginner, do not cite its history, and do not treat its letter assignments as anything other than one nineteenth-century school's convention.
There is a general lesson in this book about how to hold a tradition you value. Papus was confidently, checkably wrong about where tarot came from, and the structural thinking he did with it is the most interesting work anyone has done on the deck. Those two facts sit together without difficulty once you stop needing the history to be true in order for the practice to be worth doing. A great deal of esoteric material is in exactly this position: a real technique attached to a fabricated pedigree, where the pedigree was invented because the inventors could not imagine that something recent might also be good. You can keep the technique and drop the pedigree, and what you lose is only the claim to antiquity, which was never doing any work.
Wrong about the history, right about the architecture.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. The text is in the public domain and free editions exist. Our account of what the book gets wrong is set out plainly above.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Tarot of the Bohemians?
An 1889 French treatise by Papus presenting tarot as a complete philosophical system rather than a set of images, built on correspondences with the Hebrew alphabet, the divine name of four letters, and a numerical structure applied consistently across all seventy-eight cards.
Who was Papus?
The pen name of Gerard Encausse, 1865 to 1916, a Spanish-born French physician who became a central organiser of the late nineteenth-century French occult revival, founding orders, editing journals and writing prolifically. He died of tuberculosis contracted in wartime medical service.
Is the Egyptian origin claim true?
No. Tarot appears in fifteenth-century northern Italy as a card game with a fifth suit of trumps. There is no evidence of Egyptian origin, and the claim traces to an eighteenth-century French writer speculating without any basis, before Egyptian hieroglyphs could even be read.
What is the Tetragrammaton structure?
Papus organises everything by the four letters of the Hebrew divine name, treated as a universal pattern of active, passive, mediating and resulting principles. He applies it to suits, to numbers within suits, and to the trumps, producing a system where every position is determined.
Does the Hebrew correspondence work?
It is a construction rather than a discovery. Twenty-two trumps and twenty-two Hebrew letters is a coincidence of counts, and the assignment of which letter goes with which card was decided in the nineteenth century and disputed immediately.
How does it differ from modern tarot books?
Completely. Modern books teach intuitive reading from imagery and offer card meanings to memorise. Papus offers almost no card meanings and instead builds a structure from which the meaning of any card can be derived by its position.
Is it useful for reading cards?
Not directly. It contains a divination method in the later chapters and it is not the book's purpose. Its value is structural: it will change how you understand the deck's architecture rather than teach you to read a spread.
Which deck does it assume?
The Marseille pattern, in which the minor cards show only arrangements of suit symbols with no scenic illustration. The book predates the Waite-Smith deck and its method does not depend on pictures, which is why the minors are handled by number.
What influence did it have?
Considerable. It transmitted the French occult tarot tradition to a wide readership, influenced the English magical revival, and is a significant ancestor of the systematic correspondence-based approach that runs through twentieth-century esoteric tarot.
Is it difficult to read?
Yes. The prose is dense nineteenth-century French in Victorian English translation, the argument proceeds through tables and diagrams, and Papus assumes familiarity with the occult vocabulary of his period. It is a treatise rather than a guide.
Should beginners read it?
No. A beginner will find neither card meanings nor a usable method, and will absorb a great deal of confidently stated false history. It is a book for people who already read and want to understand where the systematic approach came from.
Who should read it?
Experienced readers curious about the structural tradition, students of the occult revival, and anyone who wants to see what tarot looks like when treated as a machine rather than as a gallery of pictures.
The deck does not need to be ancient
Tarot has been used seriously for two and a half centuries by people who found something in it, and everything worth having in that practice remains true whether the cards were painted in Milan in 1440 or carried out of a burning temple. The Egyptian story was invented by people who could not believe a recent thing could be valuable, and it has been repeated ever since by people who inherited the same anxiety. You do not need it. A structure that works, used by someone paying attention, does not become more useful for being old, and the fifteenth-century Italian card game turns out to be a stranger and better story than the one that replaced it.
Sources & References
- Papus (1889). Le Tarot des Bohemiens; English as The Tarot of the Bohemians.
- Levi, Eliphas. Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, the immediate source of the Hebrew correspondence.
- Court de Gebelin, Antoine (1781). The essay that originated the Egyptian claim.
- Documentary history of playing cards and of the fifteenth-century Italian trionfi decks.
- Scholarship on the French occult revival and its orders.
- Comparative literature on the French and English tarot correspondence systems.