A closer look
Gérard Encausse, better known as Papus, wanted his Martinist Order to look as intimidating and mystical as possible. His solution was to design a pantacle that essentially copy-pasted every esoteric symbol he could find—from Kabbalistic letters to Masonic hexagrams. It was the 19th-century occult version of cramming all your bumper stickers onto one car. The result was a chaotic visual salad intended to look profound, but it just exposed his massive plagiarism.






