ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
May 19
A.E. Waite: Death of the Scholar
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Somewhere in the world right now, someone is laying out a Tarot spread. The cards they’re using almost certainly descend, in image and arrangement, from a deck first published in December 1909. The Fool stepping off the cliff. The High Priestess between her pillars. The Tower struck by lightning. The Ten of Pentacles with its multigenerational family and its archway of vines. Every one of those images was drawn by a single hand, in six months, for a flat fee, with no royalties, and no name on the box.
Arthur Edward Waite died on May 19, 1942, at the age of eighty-four. He died with his name on the deck—the Rider-Waite Tarot, as the world has always called it. The woman who actually drew the cards, every last one of the seventy-eight, died nine years later in a Cornish boarding house, penniless and almost entirely forgotten. Her name was Pamela Colman Smith, and she was a synesthetic artist, a Jamaican folklorist, a suffragette, a Golden Dawn initiate, and one of the most consequential visual artists of the twentieth century—though the twentieth century largely declined to notice.
There is no telling the story of A.E. Waite without telling the story of Pamela Colman Smith—who, only in recent years—has found her name finally officially associated with the Tarot deck that her own brilliance and imagination conjured into being.
The Brooklyn Magnus
Arthur Edward Waite was born in Brooklyn, New York, on October 2, 1857, to an English mother and an American father who died when Waite was very young. His widowed mother Emma returned to England, raised her son in North London, and converted to Catholicism when he was six—a faith that left its mark even as Waite grew steadily away from orthodox Christianity and toward something considerably stranger. Not unlike the fictional Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the 1874 death of Waite’s sister, Frederika pulled him toward psychical research—the Victorian obsession with proving, through nearly-obsessive investigation, that consciousness survived bodily death. From there, it was a short distance to the British Museum Reading Room, where Waite spent his twenties devouring every esoteric text he could locate. There, in 1881, he discovered Éliphas Lévi—the great French occultist whose synthesis of Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and ceremonial magic had transformed Western esotericism. Inspired, Waite would spent the rest of his life as one of the English-speaking world’s most systematic chronicler of the Western esotericism.
By most accounts, however, a particularly warm or patient man. Aleister Crowley—who disagreed with Waite on almost every substantive matter of magical practice—immortalized him as the villainous “Arthwate” in his novel Moonchild and would often refer to him, rather cheekily, as “Dead Waite” within the pages of The Equinox. Not to be outdone, H.P. Lovecraft apparently based a sinister wizard named Ephraim Waite in “The Thing on the Doorstep” on him. But, like his fictional counterparts, the real A.E. Waite was, nonetheless, regarded as a major authority on occult history and philosophy—despite his personal reputation.
But occultism didn’t always pay the bills; from 1900 to 1909, Waite earned his living as a manager at a malted milk manufacturing company called Horlicks; at night, however, he wrote volumes on ceremonial magic, Kabbalah, alchemy, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, the Holy Grail—and, most importantly for his legacy—the Tarot. (His biographer, R. A. Gilbert, later called him “the first to attempt a systematic study of the history of western occultism—viewed as a spiritual tradition rather than as aspects of proto-science or as the pathology of religion”—in many ways, laying the path for future occult philosophers, such as the late Peter J. Carroll.
Pixie
Waite’s life is truly solidified with the partnership between him and a brilliant artist over twenty-years his junior. Pamela Colman Smith was born in London on February 16, 1878, to American parents. She spent her childhood moving between New York and Jamaica—an unusual upbringing that left her with two gifts that made her stand out among her later occultist peers: an intimate knowledge of Jamaican Anansi folk traditions, and a unique understanding that storytelling is a living, breathing facet of magic itself. Lovingly known as “Pixie” to her family and friends, she eventually studied figure drawing and illustration at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, but left to return to London after only two years.
For a dedicated feminist and suffragette, abandoning such a prestigious art education was a risky move—and yet it paid off. Back in London, Smith was soon surrounded by some of the most creative and innovative freethinkers of her day: Ellen Terry—one of the greatest actresses of the Victorian stage; Bram Stoker; J.M. Barrie; and Sir Arhtur Conan Doyle. (It’s no coincidence that her cousin was William Gillette, the first actor to play Sherlock Holmes—and the one responsible for bringing the fictional detective’s legendary deerstalker hat and pipe to the stage.) But Smith also got to know the Yeats brothers and, in 1901, it was through W.B. Yeats that she was introduced to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; there, she eventually became acquainted with A.E. Waite. By then, Smith was already heavily regarded within artistic circles; she was not only a published illustrator, but was publisher of her own hand-colored art journals, and a stage and costume designer. Most importantly, she had created a method of working she called “synesthetic painting,” during which, she could see music; to her, sound produced genuine visual imagery in her mind, which she then translated directly onto the page. To the occultists who witnessed it, Smith’s new method was nothing short of visual automatic writing.
In 1907, Alfred Stieglitz (perhaps the most important photography gallerist in America, and future husband of Georgia O’Keeffe) selected Smith as the first non-photographic artist ever to be exhibited at his Photo-Secession Gallery. There, she designed posters for the British suffragette movement and acquired other lucrative illustration assignments. Then, in the spring of 1909, A.E. Waite asked her to draw seventy-eight Tarot cards.
The Great Seventy-Eight
While Tarot had existed for centuries, Waite’s lifelong study of Éliphas Lévi’s writings on Kabbalah and Astrology had inspired his goal to create a modern deck infused with that appropriate imagery, primarily for divination purposes.
At the time, most Tarot decks were decidedly stark in their visual appeal; up until then, the twenty-two Major Arcana had always been drawn with allegorical figures, while the fifty-six Minor Arcana were often represented with repeated arrangements of cups, swords, wands, and pentacles—with no human figures or narrative symbolism to speak of. Waite envisioned a deck wherein each card told a story, where image upon each would be infused with symbols accurately representing the occult correspondences that years of study had revealed. Once he saw samples of Smith’s colorful, surrealistic Art Nouveau style, he knew he’d found the perfect artist to take on such an ambitious project, and quickly provided her with the conceptual framework for the Major Arcana and some general symbolic guidance. Other than that, he granted her completely autonomy to let loose her “synesthetic painting” method.
Smith completed all seventy-eight illustrations between April and October 1909—six months to single-handedly produce some of the most iconic imagery within the history of Western art. Today, over one hundred million copies of the deck are in circulation worldwide. And, if you count each card individually, as one scholar has noted, Smith may be the most reproduced artist in human history. (Take that, Banksy!) Several figures in the cards are portraits of her friends: Ellen Terry appears as the Queen of Wands; the actress Florence Farr as the World. Smith embedded her distinctive serpentine monogram—a signature she’d developed while studying Japanese design—into the decoration of every single card. Criminally, it was, for over a century, the only claim to authorship she would ever have. The deck was published by William Rider and Son in December 1909, accompanied by Waite’s companion volume, The Key to the Tarot. It was called, simply, the Rider deck—then the Rider-Waite deck. And Pamela Colman Smith’s name appeared nowhere on it.
For the task of creating seventy-eight small masterpieces, Smith received a flat fee and received no royalties. Neither she nor Waite could have anticipated that the deck would one day take on a life of its own, becoming the standard by which all subsequent Tarot decks would be measured. While many have created new, modernized Tarots (Aleister Crowley’s legendary Thoth deck being among the most ambitious and highly-regarded), it remains the Rider-Waite-Smith deck that has remained the symbolic template for all divination versions. Following the deck’s completion, Smith continued her art career, and, later, converted to Catholicism. She moved to Cornwall in 1918 and little is known of the last three decades of her life prior to her death in September 1951.
The original seventy-eight Tarot drawings have never been found.
The Magus at Rest
A.E. Waite died nine years earlier, his legacy cemented in the deck that he and Smith had created together. While Smith’s artwork is synonymous with Tarot, it remains that the initial vision for a fully-illustrated Tarot deck was his; as was the narrative architecture of the Major Arcana. The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot—as it is finally, and accurately, known by—has become much more than a mere divination tool. To many ceremonial magicians and other occultists, the deck is complete map of the Golden Dawn’s symbolic universe—or a map of the soul’s journey, itself—merely encoded in imagery.
This is Waite’s genuine contribution: the conceptual architecture that made the deck simultaneously accessible and inexhaustible. While it’s Smith’s genius that translated that architecture into images, it was Waite’s vision to create it. The woman weeping under the swords, the hermit alone on his mountain; the lovers in the garden. These aren’t symbols; they’re people—they’re us.
Not
bad for a manager of a malted milk company.
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