“PAPUS” – DR GÉRARD ENCAUSSE [continued]
An Elementary Treatise on Occult Science
One of the charms of buying examples
of French occult publishing of a hundred years or so ago is that you are never
quite sure what you will be getting. It was a period when Papus and his friends
were learning the ropes of self publishing – which could lead to quite
astounding surprises in quantity and quality. Not that one was ever likely to
be short changed – their success meant that they had plenty of money and so new
printings of books could be considerably expanded in extent.
So it is with my copy of Papus’
first book-sized book, the Traité Elémentaire de Science Occulte. First
appearing in 1888, as a volume of 229 pages, it appears that my copy was in
fact turned out to be of indeterminate date by which time it had become bloated to 625 pages. Bibliographic
histories were not helped by their custom of calling reprints ‘new editions’.
Thus the copy I have is called the 16th edition but is apparently a
reprint of the 7th edition of 1903 by which time they had proudly logged up a sale
of 10,000 copies. As Papus says in his Preface ‘its success had progressively
grown with each new transformation of the volume.’
So, something of a dog’s breakfast
in fact, but none the worse for that.
“Also,” he writes, “we have once
more taken care to perfect our work, while conserving its elementary character
which is one of the causes of its success.” I have to say I am not too sure
about this ‘elementary character’. He launches off into some very erudite, not
to say obscure, and even irrelevant, number theory. But perhaps the French
esoteric mind differs somewhat from the Anglo-Saxon. We will return to this
when we take a look at his book on the Tarot.
On the evidence of the number and
extent of the quotations he uses it could be said that this is obviously a
first book by an intellectual young man in a hurry. Of the original 229 pages
about thirty percent of the text consists of extracts from other writers,
fifteen of them, ranging from Mme. Blavatsky to Eliphas Levi with the lion’s
share going to the early 19th century savant Fabre d’Olivet and the contemporary
esoteric recluse Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. The first, a great favourite of his,
was author of a book on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras and also La Langue
hébraïque restitué (The Hebraic tongue restored) speculations on the
origins of Hebrew language in light of
ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, a fair amount of which was subsequently
invalidated when the Rosetta Stone was discovered and translated.
The main drive of the young Papus’
original book, (the first 229 pages) is to emphasise the difference between the
approach of modern with that of ancient science. In a telling and simple image
he likens modern science to the close examination of a closed book.
“Let us first examine the way that
moderns treat a natural phenomenon the better to know it, as opposed to the
ancient way. What would you say to a man who described a book to you like this:
‘The book you have given me to study is placed on the mantelpiece at 2
metres 49 centimetres from the table where I am sitting; it weighs 545 grams 8
decigrams, and is formed of 342 small paper pages on which 218,145 characters
are printed and which have used 190 grams of black ink.’
“If this example shocks you, open
modern books of science and see if they do not correspond exactly to the way of
describing the Sun or Saturn by an astronomer, who describes the position,
weight, volume and density of stars, or a physicist who describes the solar spectrum
by counting the number of lines.
“Returning to the printed book that
served as our first example, we note that there are two ways of looking at it,
because we realise that the characters, the paper, the ink, that is to say the
material signs, are only the representation of something that we cannot see
physically – the ideas of the author.
“The visible is the manifestation of
the invisible. This principle, true for this particular example, is so for all
other things in nature, as we shall see. We will then see more clearly the
fundamental difference between ancient science and modern science.
“The ancient is concerned only with
the visible in order to discover the invisible that it represents. The modern
is concerned only with the phenomenon itself without bothering about its
metaphysical connections.
“The science of the ancients is the
science of the hidden, of the esoteric. The science of the moderns is the
science of the visible, the exoteric.
“The hidden science, the science of
the hidden, the science which hides what it has discovered – is the triple
definition of OCCULT SCIENCE.”
The rest of the
book, and of all the books that he and his colleagues are destined to write, is
concerned with solving this by no means easy problem.
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