← Encyclopedia of Tarot · lesson 120/121
Arthur Edward Waite
Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942) was a prolific English writer on mysticism, magic, Freemasonry and the Grail legend, and the man who planned the tarot deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew and William Rider & Son published at the end of 1909 — the Rider–Waite–Smith deck. His book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911) has been in print almost ever since, and for many English-speaking readers it set the meanings of the cards and the shape of the most famous spread.
His life
Waite was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 2 October 1857. His American father, a ship's captain, died when he was a baby, and his English mother brought him to London, where he grew up. He began as a poet and journalist and turned early to the history of esoteric ideas, writing on the Rosicrucians, alchemy and ceremonial magic. In 1889, under the pen name "Grand Orient", he published a handbook of fortune-telling with cards, and in 1896 he translated Éliphas Lévi's Dogme et rituel de la haute magie into English as Transcendental Magic.
He joined the Golden Dawn in 1891. When the Order broke apart in the early 1900s he led one faction, which from 1903 worked as the Independent and Rectified Rite, recasting the rituals in a Christian and mystical rather than magical spirit. He dissolved it in 1914 and in 1915 founded the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, which he led for the rest of his life. He thought of himself as a mystic, not a magician: the aim he wrote about again and again was the soul's return to God. He died in Kent on 19 May 1942.
The deck and the book
By 1909 the Golden Dawn's tarot teaching was beginning to leak into print, and Waite took the initiative of producing a complete, commercially sold deck of his own. He directed the Major Arcana closely, following the Order's structure — Strength at VIII and Justice at XI, "for reasons which satisfy myself", as he put it — while keeping its correspondences veiled, as his vows of secrecy required. For the numbered cards he seems to have supplied the suits' elements and lists of traditional meanings, many going back to Etteilla, and left most of the scenes to Smith.
The Key to the Tarot came out in 1910, and The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, with all seventy-eight pictures, in 1911. It describes each card, gives short meanings upright and reversed, and sets out "an ancient Celtic method of divination" in ten cards — the Celtic Cross. It is also sceptical about the tarot's supposed history, and patronising about the fortune-tellers whose meanings it nonetheless reprints; elsewhere Waite called the Egyptian origin claimed by Court de Gébelin "a phantom son of the fancy".
Character and contradictions
Waite's style is ornate and often deliberately evasive, and he wrote about the tarot in two voices at once: as a historian who doubted every grand claim, and as an initiate who hinted that a deeper "secret tradition" lay behind the cards, one he could not reveal. Later in life he said he was not satisfied that the trumps truly corresponded to the Hebrew letters — yet in the early 1920s he commissioned a second, private set of symbolic designs from the artist John Brahms Trinick for use on the paths of the Tree of Life in his Fellowship. Historians read him as a genuine scholar of esoteric literature with a gift for ambiguity.
His legacy
For most of the century the deck carried his name and the publisher's but not the artist's, and modern readers often credit Smith more than Waite for its lasting appeal. Still, the structure, the Major Arcana's symbolism, the Celtic Cross and the habit of reading reversals all reached the English-speaking world largely through him.