Robert Wang

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Robert Wang became attracted to the occult and tarot at seventeen, a fascination that deepened during his graduate studies rather than fading as many teenage interests do. That sustained interest put him in a position to act when he learned that Israel Regardie, the scholar who had preserved and published much of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's internal material, wished to see a hand copied Golden Dawn tarot deck published for the first time.

Wang wrote to Regardie directly, offering his services as an artist for the project, an unsolicited approach from a young enthusiast to an established scholar that led to Wang creating The Golden Dawn Tarot in 1978 under Regardie's own direction. The deck painstakingly re rendered the tarot images preserved in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's own notebooks, giving Wang direct access to source material that had never before been rendered as a complete, published deck.

Wang later judged his own illustrations for that first deck technically flawed, an assessment he made about the very project that had launched his career as a tarot artist, a self critical view that did not stop The Golden Dawn Tarot from becoming the foundation on which the rest of his work in esoteric art and scholarship was built.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

After creating The Golden Dawn Tarot under Israel Regardie's direction in 1978 and writing a companion volume to introduce it, Robert Wang spent five years working on The Qabalistic Tarot, a study of tarot through the Kabbalistic Tree of Life that moved his work from illustrating an existing historical deck toward original scholarship of his own. The five year span of that project marked a deliberate shift from re rendering preserved Golden Dawn material to developing his own extended interpretation of tarot's structure.

Wang later created a further deck, the Jungian Tarot, extending his esoteric work into a second original interpretive framework beyond the Kabbalistic study that had occupied him for half a decade, a body of work that grew from a single letter he had written to Regardie as a young enthusiast into a sustained career spanning multiple decks and a major book length study.

As of a 2025 statement on his own retained autobiography page, Wang lives in Columbia, Maryland and remains active corresponding with readers interested in tarot and Western esoteric studies, still engaged with the field more than four decades after the letter to Regardie that had first brought him into it as an artist rather than a scholar in his own right.