Contemporary Occultism

Paris, June 1887. A medical student of twenty-one, not yet qualified and not yet famous, sat down to take the measure of the occult revival gathering around him, and signed the result Papus.CONTEMPORARY OCCULTISM was his first book. In some forty pages it lays out the program that would occupy Gerard Encausse for the rest of his life: that the science of the age had accumulated an incomparable stock of verified facts upon foundations it could not explain, while the occult tradition had preserved the principles it could not verify in detail, and that each was therefore false taken alone. 'Only by leaning the one upon the other can they give birth to the scientific, social, and religious synthesis.'Around that argument Papus assembles a survey of his world. He traces the long war between the magnetizers, the spiritists, and the academies, from Mesmer through Braid to the disputes of Charcot’s generation. He recovers two men he believed had been destroyed for attempting the synthesis from the side of science: the chemist Louis Lucas, whose CHIMIE NOUVELLE took him two years to find, and the mathematician Hoene Wronski, who died in near-starvation after his works were sold off by the weight of the paper. He surveys the occultists proper, from Eliphas Levi to Lacuria, Cyliani, Lenain, and Paul Christian. And he turns last to the living figures of his own Paris: Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and his Synarchy, Stanislas de Guaita, Josephin Peladan, Lady Caithness, Barlet, Dramard, and Mme Blavatsky, whose SECRET DOCTRINE was still a year from publication.Written a year before the founding of the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix and the journal L’INITIATION, and two years before his TAROT DES BOHEMIENS, the pamphlet is a photograph of the French occult milieu taken by a young man who had not yet begun to reorganize it. The Theosophical Society is treated with entire sympathy; the Society for Psychical Research’s verdict on the Mahatma letters is two years old and still raw, and Papus answers it in a single sentence that concedes the question and declines to care about it. Half the figures he names are now recoverable only through notices like this one.THIS EDITIONThe translation follows the Georges Carre edition of 1887 throughout, transcribed directly from the page images of the copy digitized by the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Papus’s own footnotes are translated in full. More than a hundred additional notes identify the persons, works, journals, and technical terms that a Paris reader of 1887 would have known without assistance, from the Children of the Widow to the odic force of Baron von Reichenbach.Where Papus is demonstrably mistaken, the text stands exactly as he printed it and the correction is placed in a note. Nothing has been silently emended. A translator’s introduction places the pamphlet in Papus’s career and in the Paris of the occult revival, and sets out the principles followed in the translation.For readers of Martinism, esoteric Freemasonry, Theosophy, and the Western initiatic tradition, and for scholars of nineteenth-century French esotericism.