Arthur Edward Waite, Bibliographer of Grimoires and Ceremonial Magic

Among the writers who at the end of the nineteenth century made books of magic accessible to the English public, Arthur Edward Waite holds a special place. While other occultists looked in grimoires for tools to be used, Waite studied them above all as documents, with an attitude that was often sceptical and sometimes openly polemical. The result was a series of books that are still read today as a first, imperfect attempt at a critical history of magical literature.

A life among books and initiatory orders

Waite was born in 1857 in Brooklyn, in the United States, but grew up in England with his mother. A tireless reader, he too frequented the reading room of the British Museum and came to occultism through the works of the Frenchman Éliphas Lévi. In 1891 he joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, in which he later led one of the currents that emerged from its internal divisions.

His output was enormous. He translated Lévi, publishing in 1896 the English version of the Dogme et rituel de la haute magie under the title Transcendental Magic. He edited alchemical texts, such as The Hermetic Museum of 1893, a translation of the Frankfurt Musaeum hermeticum, and a collection of writings attributed to Paracelsus. He also wrote on the Rosicrucians, the Grail and Christian mysticism.

The book of black magic and of pacts

His most important work for the history of grimoires is The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts, published in 1898 and reissued in 1911 under the more sober title The Book of Ceremonial Magic. In it Waite described and summarised the main texts of the tradition: the Key of Solomon, the Lemegeton, the Heptameron, the Grimorium verum, the Grand Grimoire, the Grimoire of Pope Honorius and other French books printed between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The volume was furnished with numerous illustrations taken from the original editions, with circles, seals and title pages reproduced in black and white.

His approach was at once descriptive and judgemental. Waite compared editions, pointed out the false dates on title pages, tried to establish which text derived from which, and all the while made no secret of his contempt for the parts he considered superstitious or morally unacceptable. It is precisely this detachment that makes the book interesting: it is a view from within occultism that nonetheless rejects many of its myths.

The tarot deck and posthumous fame

Waite's name is best known today for the tarot deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith under his direction and published by Rider of London in 1909. The following year Waite explained its symbolism in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. The success of the deck, still among the most widely used in the world, has ended up overshadowing his work as a bibliographer and translator.

Waite died in 1942. Many of his claims have been corrected by later research, and his pompous style does not make for easy reading. Yet he remains one of the first authors to have treated grimoires as a genuine literature, with a history, sources and editions, paving the way for the studies that in the late twentieth century would make them a subject of university research.