(portrait of A. E. Waite)

Arthur Edward Waite (1857-1940) was a prolific writer on all aspects of the Western esoteric tradition. Topics of his books include such wide-ranging material the Kabbalah, the Tarot, the grimoires of ceremonial magic, Rosicrucianism, alchemy, mysticism, and Freemasonry. In addition to his original nonfiction works, he did numerous translations of classic occult texts such as the Latin alchemical work Turba philosophorum and the French Histoire de la Magie by Eliphas Levi. Today, he is best remembered as the designer of the Rider Tarot, which was drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951) following Waite's directions.

It would be impossible to deny the importance of Waite's work to modern students of the occult, yet perhaps no figure in esoteric literature has been so disliked. This was due to two factors -- Waite's writing style, and his attitude toward both his subjects and his readers.

His style is difficult to read, due to the excessive complexity and awkward construction of his prose. He was writing in the school of the esthetic dilatants of the late 19th century, exemplified by the works of Walter Pater and William Morris. Far from wishing to make his meaning plain for the common man, Waite had an abhorrence for anything that might be classed as common. This arose from his own very humble beginnings.

Coupled with his prolix and convoluted prose is an attitude of condescension and contempt that almost seems calculated to enrage anyone reading his work. He gives the impression of despising his subjects, which he often dismisses as balderdash, and equally despising his readers for wishing to learn about them.

Since he so obviously held all aspects of magic and the supernatural in low regard, the great mystery of Waite's personality is why he spent his entire life studying and writing about these subjects. He seems to have been drawn to the fantastic and occult against his will, and to have hated himself for this compelling fascination. This self-loathing found expression in contempt for his topics and his readers.

Waite was by nature one of the least mystical men who has ever lived, yet he had a veneration for mysticism, in contrast to his dismissal of all forms of practical occultism. He longed for the elevation of consciousness that mystics achieve in periods of religious rapture, yet was utterly incapable of attaining these states himself.

Waite was born in the Brooklyn, New York, on the second day of October, 1857. Following the death of his father, at two years of age he was taken along with his infant sister, Frederika, to north London by his English mother, whose maiden name was Emma Lovell. His father, Charles Waite, a captain in the American merchant marine, died at sea. Since his parents were never legally married, both Arthur and his sister were illegitimate, a condition that carried a serious stigma in the middle of the nineteenth century. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy English merchant who had prospered in the East India trade, but due to the hushed scandal of her having borne children out of wedlock, she was forced to live in poverty, rejected by her relations.

In England he received his basic schooling, but for financial reasons a higher education was out of the question. Waite did his best to educate himself through an omnivorous course of reading. His mother had converted to Roman Catholicism, and inducted young Waite into the same religion. Waite enjoyed its pomp and ceremony. Money was difficult to come by, and while still a youth he began to work as a clerk. He also composed poetry, which reveals the more romantic aspect of his mind. The death of his sister in 1874 caused him to lose his enthusiasm for Catholicism and to begin the study of Spiritualism, which was just then gaining in popularity. He progressed from Spiritualism to the Theosophical Society of Madame Blavatsky, but it was not until he began to study the occult writings of Eliphas Levi that he found his calling in life.

Waite tried his hand at the sale of novels and poetry as a source of income but was soon forced to the realization that his talents were not those of a writer of fiction. He turned his energies to commenting on various aspects of the occult tradition. By age twenty-one he was an habitual visitor to the famous Reading Room at the British Museum Library, where he gained access to many of the rare occult manuscripts and books that would in later life serve as the basis for his income as a translator and editor.

In 1885 his first book, The Mysteries of Magic, was published. The income from its sale must have emboldened Waite to look to his personal future, since a year later he married his first wife, Ada Lakeman. She bore him a daughter.

At the British Museum Reading Room Waite often ran into a strange, mystical man named Samuel Mathers, who would later take to calling himself MacGregor Mathers and would become the leader of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It is revealing of Waite's character that he always held Mathers in disdain, even though others who knew Mathers at this time spoke of his personal magnetism and otherworldly quality. Mathers was something Waite was not, a serious practicing occultist. The subjects Waite merely read and wrote about, Mathers lived.

Given his low opinion of Mathers, it is surprising that in June of 1891 Waite joined the Isis-Urania temple of the Golden Dawn. He assumed the Latin motto Sacramentum Regis (The Sacrament of the King). He was initiated along with his wife at Mathers' private house, near the Horniman Museum where Mathers worked at the time.

Despite Waite later pretensions of high attainment in secret occult schools, he never achieved the rank of Adeptus Minor in the Golden Dawn under Mathers. His personal difficulty of advancement up the Golden Dawn ranks may have been one reason Waite held the society in such low regard in later years. After being urged to resign by one of the senior members, Dr. Berridge, he left the Golden Dawn for a time, but rejoined on the seventeenth of February, 1896, and in March of 1899 was at last permitted to enter the Second Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ordo Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis.

In 1901 Waite became a Freemason, perhaps with the practical consideration that it would make it easier for him to gain access to secret Masonic texts that he needed to consult for his writings. However, his interest in Freemasonry was genuine and continued throughout the remainder of his life. Around this time he left the original Golden Dawn for good and joined an off-shoot order called the Stella Matutina. In 1903 he became disenchanted with it and decided to form his own Holy Order of the Golden Dawn. He named his lodge Isis-Urania after the original Golden Dawn temple in London, and rewrote the Golden Dawn rituals to excise references to the Egyptian gods and practical magic, replacing them with Christian references which he undoubted believed to be more in harmony with a Rosicrucian society.

During this period he continued the prodigious output of written material that he sustained throughout most of his life. He was the editor of the occult periodical The Unknown World and a regular contributor to the Occult Review.

Not long after the death of his first wife in 1924, he married his secretary Mary Broadbent Schofield. His first marriage had not been happy. For years he and his first wife had been on poor terms, and Waite had carried on an affair with his housekeeper, a Mrs. Rand, who had also been a member of the Isis-Urania temple of the Golden Dawn with the motto Vigilate. He took up residence with his second wife at Ramsgate.

Waite's drinking became heavy in the late 1920s. It began to be whispered behind his back that he was an alcoholic. The tenor of his writings show that he was not a happy man. Even so, he continued to churn out books and articles. His final work, a biography of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, was published in 1939.

There is some uncertainty about the date of Waite's death. He is said to have died in London during the Blitz of World War Two. Some authorities give the date of his death as 1942, but since the Blitz ended in May of 1941 and did not resume for over three years, this appears unlikely. A more probable date, if indeed Waite was killed by German bombing, is given as 1940.

Of all the books Waite wrote, translated and edited, his most successful is probably his 1910 Pictorial Key to the Tarot, which describes the meaning of his Rider Tarot cards. The pack is called the Rider Tarot because it was initially published by Rider and Company in England.

Serious students of the esoteric regard his 1929 book The Holy Kabbalah as his greatest original work, although his 1898 edited collection of writings from the grimoires, The Book of Black Magic and Pacts, was far more popular with average readers, perhaps due to its lurid title. This work was revised and published in 1911 under the more dignified title The Book of Ceremonial Magic.

Waite was an unhappy man of glaring and irreconcilable contrasts. He could not overcome an attraction for the occult and a veneration for spiritual and mystical matters that bordered on idolatry, yet he was cursed with an utterly prosaic mind incapable of achieving higher states of consciousness. He could only press his nose against the window of Western occultism, he could never enter in through the door, and this awareness of his own limitations made him bitter. Yet his books, as difficult as they may be to read due to his condescending tone, are of undoubted value to those who can progress further along the path of enlightenment than Waite could ever travel.