Feast · 25 October
Tomb of Papus
Address · Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, division 93, 75020 Paris
Metro · Père-Lachaise (2, 3)
Today · Free access. Père-Lachaise Cemetery, during opening hours.
The story
Opened in 1804 and named after Louis XIV's confessor, Père-Lachaise is the largest green space in Paris. Gérard Encausse rests there. Born on 13 July 1865 in A Coruña, to a French chemist father and a Spanish mother, he grew up in Paris, became a doctor of medicine there in 1894 and took the name Papus, a genius of medicine in the Nuctemeron of Apollonius of Tyana, which Lévi had translated as an appendix to his Dogme et rituel.
A prolific author, notably of Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889) and Traité méthodique de science occulte (1891), he founded the review L'Initiation, created the Martinist Order in 1891 with Augustin Chaboseau, co-directed the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross and in 1893 received the episcopate of Jules Doinel's Gnostic Church. He travelled to Russia in 1901, 1905 and 1906 to see Nicholas II. A military doctor during the Great War, he contracted tuberculosis and died in Paris on 25 October 1916, aged 51.
Papus is a link in the history that Crowley inherited. On 24 June 1908, at an international Masonic conference he organised in Paris, he received from Theodor Reuss a charter for the Rite of Memphis-Misraïm in France, and probably also the Xth degree of the O.T.O. for France; he then helped Reuss create the Gnostic Catholic Church attached to the O.T.O. Reuss and his associates held from him the right to work the Martinist rites. Crowley, admitted by Reuss in 1910, included “Docteur Gérard Encausse” among the saints of the Gnostic Mass. The sources document no personal meeting between the two men.
According to the association Amis et passionnés du Père-Lachaise, the grave is in the 93rd division, avenue Greffülhe. Two plaques appear on it: one presents him as physician, philosopher, writer and Grand Master of the Martinist Order, with a date of death engraved as 23 October 1916; the other bears a thought by Papus on prayer. His son, Dr Philippe Encausse (1906-1984), is also named there. Every 25 October, the map suggests a gathering at the grave, the reading of the eleventh collect of Liber XV and a laying of flowers.