Arthur Edward Waite

Waite was the most cautious and the most learned of the Golden Dawn generation, and he disliked practical magic. His instinct was mystical and Christian; he wrote long, careful, exasperatingly circumlocutory books on the Grail, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry and Kabbalah, and he was scathing about occultists who claimed pedigrees they could not document, a discrimination that reads well in retrospect, given the company he kept.

He is nonetheless remembered almost entirely for the tarot deck published by Rider in 1909, which he designed and Pamela Colman Smith drew. The single innovation that made it dominant was hers as much as his: fully illustrated scenes on the thirty-six numbered minor cards, where earlier decks had shown only arrangements of suit signs. That decision is why the deck can be read pictorially by a beginner, and it is the reason it displaced everything else.

Smith was paid a flat fee, given no royalty, and for most of a century was credited as an illustrator or not at all. The deck is still widely called the Rider-Waite. The scholarship correcting this, the Kaplan, Greer, O'Connor and Parsons volume of 2018 is the substantial one, has established her as a designing collaborator rather than a hired hand, and the name Waite-Smith is now standard in careful writing. Waite himself, to be fair to him, described the work as done to his designs but under her hand, and did not conceal her.

Waite's lasting oddity is that he was an occultist whose chief occupation was checking the occult's homework. In thick volumes on the Rosicrucians, on ceremonial magic, on alchemy and on freemasonry, he did something the revival around him rarely attempted: he went to the sources, dated them, and said plainly when a cherished lineage was a fabrication. His Real History of the Rosicrucians treated the manifestos as documents with authors rather than dispatches from hidden adepts; his Book of Black Magic and of Pacts printed the grimoires while pronouncing most of their pretensions absurd; his masonic encyclopaedia is still consulted.

The style in which he did it, orotund, qualified, faintly disdainful, earned him mockery, Crowley's above all, and his scepticism had limits, for he believed to the end in a genuine secret tradition, a hidden church behind the failed societies, whose sacrament he sought in the Grail literature. That conviction shaped his last order, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, founded in 1915 after the Golden Dawn fragments fell away: a mystical rather than magical body, its grades rewritten as a path of sanctity rather than power. The double stance, debunker of pedigrees and believer in the thing the pedigrees counterfeited, made him the revival's resident historian and its resident scold, and later scholarship has been kinder to his method than his contemporaries were to his prose.