Fellowship of the Rosy Cross (Waite)

Arthur Edward Waite was the Golden Dawn's mystic, the one member of the founding generation who thought magic was beside the point, and the person who put the Order's Tarot into more hands than everyone else combined.

He was born in Brooklyn in 1857 to an American sea captain and an English mother, raised in London as a Catholic, and spent his twenties in the British Museum reading room working through the whole of the occult literature. He joined the Golden Dawn in 1891, left, rejoined in 1896, and after the schism of 1903 took the London temple with him as the Independent and Rectified Rite, from which he removed the magic, the Enochian and the practical work, and turned the grades into a Christian mystical ascent. That body dissolved in 1914. The next year he founded the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, an order whose grades follow the sephiroth up the Tree of Life as stages of the soul's return to God, worked as ceremony but understood as sacrament. It exists still, quietly, in London. Waite was also a Freemason from 1901 and a member of the SRIA, and his Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (1924) and Holy Kabbalah (1929) are the sober, footnoted histories that the tradition had lacked. He translated Lévi into English in 1896, and it is through his translation that most of the English-speaking world met him.

The deck came out of the schism. In 1909 Waite commissioned Pamela Colman Smith, a member of his branch of the Order, a stage designer and illustrator who had worked with Yeats and Ellen Terry, to draw a Tarot to his specifications. William Rider & Son published it in December 1909, and Waite's guide, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, followed in 1910. Smith was paid a flat fee and never received a royalty. She died in Cornwall in 1951, in debt, and it is only in the last twenty years that her name has been restored to the deck on the box.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck did two things that no deck had done before. It gave every one of the fifty-six minor cards a full picture, a scene with people in it, so that a card could be read without a book. And it encoded the Golden Dawn system in plain sight without ever saying so. Waite was bound by his oath and was, in any case, a coy writer. So the deck carries no Hebrew letters, but Strength and Justice have swapped their traditional numbers to VIII and XI, because the Golden Dawn had assigned them to Leo and Libra and the zodiac had to run in order; the High Priestess sits between the pillars B and J, Boaz and Jachin, from the porch of Solomon's Temple; the Hierophant is the Order's Hierophant. The imagery is Masonic, Rosicrucian and Kabbalistic throughout, and the Pictorial Key tells you almost none of it.

That is why the deck matters on this map more than the Fellowship does. In 1971 Stuart Kaplan's US Games licensed it for America, and it became the standard from which nearly every deck since has been drawn. The great majority of Tarot readers alive today learned on it or on a deck cloned from it, and in learning it they absorbed the Golden Dawn's attributions, sequence and planetary assignments without ever seeing a Hebrew letter or hearing the name Mathers. Lévi's counting and the 1888 rearrangement of the seven planets reach the kitchen table through Pamela Colman Smith's drawings. The error travelled further in pictures than it ever did in text.

Waite would have said the pictures were the point. He thought the Tarot was a book of the mystical life, not a magical instrument, and his deck was meant to lead the reader upward. It does. But it leads them up the Golden Dawn's Tree, and the map of that Tree is the one thing on the deck he did not draw for himself.