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Liber XIII · High Magick

Liber XIII · High Magick · Chapter V: Golden Dawn

Arthur Edward Waite: Golden Dawn Mystic and Tarot Scholar

A. E. Waite (1857–1942): his life, translations of Lévi, Golden Dawn career and Rectified Rite, the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot and his Christian mysticism.

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Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942) was an Anglo-American scholar, translator and mystic who became one of the most prolific writers on the Western esoteric traditions. A member and later leader of a branch of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he devised the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot with the artist Pamela Colman Smith, translated Éliphas Lévi into English and wrote long studies of Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, alchemy, Kabbalah and the Holy Grail. He died in Kent on 19 May 1942, having steered much of English occultism away from ritual magic towards Christian mysticism.

Who Was A. E. Waite?§

Waite occupies an unusual position in the history of modern esotericism. He was an initiate and ritualist, but also a sceptical historian who attacked many of the myths his fellow occultists cherished: the Egyptian origin of the tarot, the claims of self-styled Rosicrucian orders and the sensational exposés of Satanism circulating in the 1890s. His prose is famously dense and allusive, and his books are often read more for their bibliographies than their arguments. Yet few writers did more to define what English readers understood by "the secret tradition".

He saw the esoteric traditions as different paths toward a single goal, the mystical union of the soul with God. Magic interested him chiefly as a phase in the history of that quest, and much of his career was an effort to recover its Christian and sacramental core.

Early Life: Brooklyn, London and Éliphas Lévi§

Waite was born on 2 October 1857 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Captain Charles F. Waite, an American merchant seaman, died at sea while Arthur was a baby, and his English mother, Emma Lovell, brought him to England. They lived in modest circumstances in north London; his mother became a Roman Catholic, and the liturgy of the Catholic Church left a lasting mark on her son's imagination.

After a brief schooling Waite worked as a clerk and tried his hand at poetry. The death of his sister in 1874 turned him toward questions of survival and the spirit world, and in the Reading Room of the British Museum he discovered the works of Éliphas Lévi. His first substantial occult book, The Mysteries of Magic (1886), was a digest of Lévi's writings, and The Real History of the Rosicrucians (1887) followed. In 1888 he married Ada Lakeman, and their daughter Sybil was born soon after.

Translator and Historian of the Occult§

Through the 1890s Waite produced a remarkable flow of editions and translations. He edited The Hermetic Museum (1893), a seventeenth-century alchemical anthology, and the Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus (1894). His translation of Lévi's Dogme et rituel de la haute magie appeared as Transcendental Magic (1896) and became, for English readers, the standard text of Lévi's thought. Devil-Worship in France (1896) dismantled the fraudulent revelations of Léo Taxil about a Masonic cult of Lucifer.

The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts (1898), revised in 1911 as The Book of Ceremonial Magic, surveyed the grimoires from the Key of Solomon to the Grimorium Verum. Waite printed long extracts while making clear his distaste for their demonology, and for decades this book was many readers' only access to the texts. To support himself he worked from about 1900 for nearly a decade as a manager for the malted-milk manufacturer Horlicks, editing its company magazine.

Waite in the Golden Dawn and the Independent and Rectified Rite§

Waite was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in January 1891. He withdrew in 1893, rejoined in 1896 and entered the Second Order in 1899, just before the crisis that broke the Order apart. After the revolt of the London adepts against S. L. MacGregor Mathers in 1900, factions quarrelled over the purpose of the Order. Waite argued that its rituals should be understood as sacramental and mystical rather than as instruments of practical magic.

In 1903 he and his supporters took control of the Isis-Urania temple and reconstituted it as the Independent and Rectified Rite. Waite rewrote the rituals to remove much of the magical content and to stress the soul's ascent and union with God. Rival groups, notably the Stella Matutina, retained the magical curriculum. Waite's Rite survived until 1914, when internal disagreements led him to close it. He had meanwhile become a Freemason in 1901, joined the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia and, in 1903, received grades of the Rectified Scottish Rite in Switzerland.

Aleister Crowley, who had left the Golden Dawn in acrimony, mocked Waite repeatedly in print, but even critics acknowledged the breadth of his reading.

The Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot and The Pictorial Key§

Waite's most lasting influence came through the tarot. Around 1909 he commissioned Pamela Colman Smith, an American-born artist and fellow Golden Dawn member, to draw a new deck under his direction. Published by William Rider & Son at the end of 1909, it was the first widely available deck to give all fifty-six minor arcana cards full pictorial scenes rather than simple arrangements of suit symbols. Waite reordered Justice and Strength to fit the Golden Dawn's correspondences and gave the major arcana a Christian and mystical symbolism. The deck's design and history are traced in our article on the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot.

His accompanying Key to the Tarot, expanded with Smith's illustrations as The Pictorial Key to the Tarot at the end of 1910, explained card meanings in deliberately guarded language, since Waite was bound by oaths not to reveal Golden Dawn teaching. He dismissed the popular claim that the cards descended from ancient Egypt, a position supported by later historians of the tarot. The deck's success, especially after its American reissues from the 1970s, made Waite's name familiar to millions who never read his books.

Christian Mysticism, Freemasonry and the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross§

In July 1915 Waite founded the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, a small order whose rituals he wrote himself and whose purpose was explicitly contemplative and Christian. Its members included the novelist and theologian Charles Williams. Through the Fellowship and his books Waite sought to show that Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Kabbalah and alchemy all pointed toward a "secret tradition" of mystical experience within Christianity.

His major studies in this vein include The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal (1909), The Secret Tradition in Freemasonry (1911), The Secret Doctrine in Israel (1913), A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry (1921), The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (1924), The Secret Tradition in Alchemy (1926), The Holy Kabbalah (1929) and The Holy Grail (1933). In the alchemy volume, for example, he concluded that most historical alchemists had sought physical transmutation, and that a purely spiritual reading of their texts found little support in the sources. Ada died in 1924, and in 1933 he married Mary Broadbent Schofield.

Death in 1942 and Waite's Reputation§

Waite published his autobiography, Shadows of Life and Thought, in 1938. He spent his last years in Kent and died at Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, on 19 May 1942, aged eighty-four. By then the occult world he had helped shape was changing, and his mystical, Christian style of esotericism seemed old-fashioned beside Crowley's Thelema or Dion Fortune's psychological magic.

His reputation has risen since the 1980s. R. A. Gilbert's biography and bibliography established the scope of his work, and historians now value Waite as a translator, a critic of occult forgeries and a central figure in the transition from Victorian occultism to modern esotericism. Through the tarot, his symbolic vocabulary remains part of popular culture.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was A. E. Waite?§

Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942) was a British writer, translator and mystic, born in Brooklyn and raised in London. He was a member of the Golden Dawn, founded the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross and is best known for the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot deck.

Did Waite draw the Rider–Waite tarot?§

No. The cards were drawn by Pamela Colman Smith following Waite's instructions and symbolic scheme, and published by William Rider & Son in 1909. Many modern writers therefore call it the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.

What was the Independent and Rectified Rite?§

It was the branch of the Golden Dawn that Waite led from 1903 to 1914 after the Order split. He rewrote its rituals to emphasise mystical union with God rather than practical magic.

When and where did A. E. Waite die?§

He died on 19 May 1942 at Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury in Kent, at the age of eighty-four.

Sources and further reading§