Rider-Waite-Smith: The Man Behind the System

This week we are looking at the man whose name is on every one of the boxes. Arthur Edward Waite. We started this series with the deck as a whole, then last week we gave Pamela Coleman Smith her due as the artist who actually drew the cards. Now we go to the person whose name sits on the front, his mind, how he shaped the deck, and the feuds he had with others in the tarot world. They are pretty interesting.

Here is the thread through all of it. He is the reason this deck exists. Arguably Pamela Coleman Smith is too, because she created the cards we all use, and maybe with somebody else drawing it the deck would never have caught on the way it did. But you cannot deny that without this man, this deck does not exist. And here is the irony that runs through the whole episode. The thing most people use it for, fortune-telling, he thought was beneath him. Not serious work at all.

A Scholar, Not a Fortune Teller

Arthur Edward Waite was not a fortune teller. He was a scholar and a Christian mystic. By Christian mystic I mean somebody who traces a direct, personal experience of God through contemplation and inner work, rather than just following the church rules and the doctrine. To him this deck was a kind of coded spiritual map. A tool for inner study. It was not a way to predict somebody’s future.

He was also an initiate of the Golden Dawn, the leading occult society of the late 1800s. It was where people gathered to study magic, mysticism, and tarot as one complete system. So when he wrote the deck’s guidebook, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, he says he deliberately held the deepest layer back. What he gave us was the surface meanings. The real system was kept for the insiders.

The Layer He Kept Back

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that this deck is the reason the major arcana sits in the order it does, because Waite decided to swap the Strength card and the Justice card. And the reason he gave for it was, and I quote, “for reasons which satisfy myself”. What a wanker, right? He just refused to explain it.

The real reason, if you dig into it, was tied to the Golden Dawn’s astrology, something to do with the way those cards aligned with the numbering system of the astrology. But he kept that back on purpose. He did not want people to know. He was very much a man of many secrets. A secretive man.

Waite and Crowley

I told you he had some feuds. The most famous of the lot is with the creator of the Thoth Tarot, Aleister Crowley. Now if you know me, or you have heard me talk about the Thoth deck before, you know I fucking hate it. I do not get on with it at all. It is probably why my copy is buried somewhere beneath the craziness of my deck shelf.

Crowley was one of the most notorious occultists of his age. He and Waite were around at the same time, both of them in the Golden Dawn. Crowley was seen as the wickedest man in the world, and a horrendous person in many ways in terms of how he treated people. The two of them wanted completely different things. Waite wanted a quiet, Christian-based mystical path. Crowley wanted transgressive, theatrical magic, breaking taboos on purpose.

And maybe that is why I am on Waite’s side here and not a fan of Crowley. I am not a Christian anymore, but I have a real interest in Christian mysticism and that whole world. A lot of what Crowley was into is quite provocative, and I am just not a fan. At some point in his career Waite took over the society’s main temple and began to steer it his way, and Crowley’s lot, the ones who wanted to break taboos and do the more theatrical, risqué magic, got pushed out. Crowley was not happy. He spent a long time attacking Waite in the print media of the time, and he famously called him “a pompous, turgid rigmarole”, which I think is a fantastic insult. I wish we had insults like that these days.

So Crowley made his own rival deck, the Thoth Tarot. It was his answer to what tarot meant, his answer to the whole project Waite took on when he made what we now call the Rider-Waite-Smith. Two people, two opposite ideas of tarot. I have let my feelings about Crowley and the Thoth deck be known, but I do not deny its influence, and I do not deny that some people really connect with it. If that is you, I fucking love that for you, and tell me more about it, because maybe I have just not experienced enough of it.

Crowley basically wanted to be Waite. Waite was all about telling stories that anyone could read. Crowley hid his system so only insiders could crack it. Waite kept plenty behind closed doors too, but he wanted the cards themselves to be readable by anybody, and that is exactly why he got Pamela to put so much imagery into them. He was just secretive about a lot of the other stuff. Tarot was not really his forte, and it definitely was not his priority, even though it is what he is most known for now.

Above the Fortune Tellers

He also had a rivalry with the French fortune tellers, and he scathed about most of the popular tarot voices that came before him. Back in week one I talked about Antoine Court de Gébelin, who reckoned tarot came down from ancient Egypt. Well, Waite thought that was nonsense. The Etteilla tarot, the first deck made specifically for fortune-telling, he called vulgar. He used strong terms about all of it. He absolutely positioned himself above the popular tarot of his day, as somebody who knew something the rest of them did not.

The System Underneath the Cards

And so he shaped the deck and the system most of us now use. He decided what these cards meant. He decided the structure. He decided the correspondences, the way the cards link to one another, the astrology, the four elements, the way we understand the elements in tarot, the numbers, the Hebrew letters you find on some of the cards. All of that came from him.

He wrote pages of notes on the major arcana. If you look in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, the Magician gets a good two pages on what he wanted it to look like, plus about a page of critique on how everyone before him had read the Magician. It is like that for every major arcana card. But when it comes to the minor arcana, it is barely a paragraph, because the actual description is basically a sentence, followed by the divinatory meanings he looked down on anyway. He gave that to Pixie because she needed something to go off.

So for the Two of Swords, all it says is a hoodwinked female figure balances two swords upon her shoulders. For the Three of Pentacles you get a little more. “A sculptor at work in a monastery. Compare the design which illustrates the Eight of Pentacles. The apprentice or amateur therein has received his reward and is now at work in earnest.” Which is interesting, because he is connecting those cards together. He is telling a story. He never fully introduced the way we understand tarot now, the fool’s journey and all that, but he was intentional about it, and Pixie even more so, in telling a story and carrying repeating themes through the cards.

The High Priestess and the Hierophant

The deck you hold and that we use is two people. It is Pamela Coleman Smith’s warmth and intuition on the surface, and it is Arthur Waite’s hidden scholarly system underneath. Pamela is the High Priestess, deeply connected to her intuition, making this artwork through her softness. Arthur is the Hierophant, dictating the divine message in a very legalistic way, off the back of the rich scholarly system and all the research he did. Neither one is bad, by the way. It is only bad if you ignore the other one.

Waite built the scaffolding for a deck meant to carry serious spiritual knowledge. And it is kind of ironic that all of that intention, all of that posturing above the people who use it for fortune-telling and divination, ended up producing probably the most popular divination tool out there. Aside from maybe dice, but if you are talking about a single version of a tool, this is the one. What Phillips is to screwdrivers, what Henry is to hoovers, the Rider-Waite-Smith is to tarot decks.

His own words, again from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, the guidebook he wrote for his own deck: “We are not at all sure that Tarot was intended primarily for divination. Still less for the usually base purpose of the fortune teller.” So that is the legacy he has, and maybe that is the reward he gets for being such a pompous prick. There is this tension in your hands every single time you use this deck, or a deck inspired by it. Pamela’s heart, Waite’s hidden system. The High Priestess and the Hierophant. A deck made by somebody who would raise an eyebrow and judge you hard for using it to read whether Barry is going to get back together with Natalie. Probably not, by the way. But that is the tension, and it is worth feeling it the next time you lay the cards out.