Papus and the “Universal Fluids”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: As I delve deeper into The Tarot of the Bohemians by “Papus” (Gerard Encausse), I’ve encountered his mystical take on the Kabbalistic concept of “the Descent of Spirit into Matter.” Although my brain is starting to feel like a pretzel, I’m soldiering on and trying to render the best of it into comprehensible terms.
In his section on “theogony,” Papus proposes that, once the supernal forces enter the realm anterior to manifestation, they divide themselves into the male principles of Will and Power (aka “Father”), which extrude the “Universal Creative Fluid” and the female principles of Intelligence and Authority (aka “Mother”), which beget the “Universal Preserving Fluid.” (Somehow I can’t shake the image of Sterling Hayden as Gen. Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove carrying on about “precious bodily fluids.”)
Mingling the two produces “Universal Love” that has its ultimate expression in humanity as an embodiment of the physical Universe and thus as an exponent of “Universal Attraction,” and that function is symbolized by family dynamics — which even in the age of Papus had begun degenerating into individual prerogatives. (Personally, I’ve always been leery of the phrase “Universal Love” as just so much starry-eyed “New Age hype,” but it seems that Encausse was thinking about it in esoteric terms back in the 1890s.) Eventually he gets around to citing the Kabbalist’s “Law of Emanation” as the engine driving the whole thing, he just indulges in some convoluted word-play to describe what is basically akin to a snowball gathering mass as it rolls downhill. To his credit he does grasp the idea of death as the coming of Spring that melts the snowball and returns its “fluids” to the aetheric sea.
When his model descends into the moral niceties of Christian theology (Prudence, Charity, Hope, etc), I lose interest as I do with all things religious. But — while keeping those ethical principles at the center of his argument — he continues to delineate the alternate male and female currents as they evolve (or perhaps “devolve” is a better way to put it) into Matter until they “bottom out” in objective (that is, mundane) reality. He produced a table that can be brought to bear on correlating all of his assumptions but I probably won’t use it since I’m already deeply invested in the thinking of later occultists. The Tarot of the Bohemians offers an interesting historical perspective and some good fodder for my own writing, but it is ultimately an archaic artifact of its era.
However, all this talk of “fluids” did give me one useful idea. Papus mentioned that the “vitalizing force” moving fluidly through the tarot under the “power of four” (and also animating many other natural phenomena) originates with the Magican’s mastery of the four “elemental implements,” passes through many modalities that reiterate this “fourness” as shown in his various “Tetragrammaton” diagrams, and finally comes to rest when enshrined in the four elemental beings at the corners of the World. The regenerative Fool, as Card #22 at the end of the series, opens the door to the four suits, engendering a second lower-amplitude cycle.
Since Four is the number of concrete reality and of Universal Law, it stands to reason that it would underlie the entire structure from beginning to end. When interpretation of a “pip”card escapes us, it can be useful to contemplate how it facilitates the realization of the matter through its place in the fourfold scheme of Papus as I’m reshaping it for my purpose here: creation (1–3); stabilization (4–6); deconstruction (7–9) and restoration (10).
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on February 3, 2024.
