The Pictorial Key to the Tarot
By Arthur Edward Waite

Summary
The Rider-Waite Deck, as it has come to be known, is one of the most popular classic Tarot decks available. Developed under the direction of scholar and mystic, Arthur Edward Waite, and executed by the artist Pamela Colman Smith, it clearly, cleanly, and simply embodies centuries of lore that has developed around the Tarot in its many forms. This book is the "key" to this version of the Tarot in particular, and the Tarot overall in general. As its subtitle attests, Being Fragments of a Secret Tradition under the Veil of Divination, Waite deals with the inner, esoteric side of the Tarot as a key along the path of development. At the same time, he treats fully of the use of the deck as a means of "divination" or of seeing into the structure and processes of the cosmos as the shape the destiny of the individual. Fully illustrated with the complete Major and Minor arcana represented.

Arthur Edward Waite (October 2, 1857 - May 19, 1942) was a scholarly mystic who wrote extensively on occult and esoteric matters, and was the co-creator of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. As his biographer, R.A. Gilbert described him, "Waite's name has survived because he was 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." Born in the United States, and raised in England, A.E. Waite joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1891, became a Freemason in 1901, and entered the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia in 1902. The Golden Dawn was torn by further internal feuding until Waite's departure in 1914; a year later he formed the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, not to be confused with the Societas Rosicruciana. By that time there existed some half-dozen offshoots from the original Golden Dawn, and as a whole it never recovered.

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