Gérard Encausse, who wrote under the mystical pseudonym Papus, was a massively influential occultist in Belle Époque Paris who managed to infiltrate the Russian imperial court.

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Gérard Encausse, who wrote under the mystical pseudonym Papus, was a massively influential occultist in Belle Époque Paris who managed to infiltrate the Russian imperial court. He introduced Tsar Nicholas II and his wife to the esoteric practices of Martinism, conducting ghostly seances to summon the spirit of the Tsar's dead father to ask for political advice on how to handle revolutionary uprisings. The dead father allegedly told the Tsar to crush the rebellion at all costs, a piece of supernatural guidance that ultimately helped doom the entire Romanov dynasty. It is a sobering historical reality that one of the most powerful empires in the world made critical geopolitical decisions based on the table-tapping antics of a French guy who named himself after a minor demon of medicine, proving that absolute power usually comes with absolute gullibility