The Key to the Tarot

Arthur Edward Waite was born in America in 1857. He was raised and educated as a Catholic in England. Beginning at the age of 21, he pursued research and writing on psychical and esoteric matters. Soon after joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he became the Grand Master and redirected the focus of the order from magic to mysticism.

The Golden Order, whose structural hierarchy was based on the Kabbalah, is considered the single most significant 20th-century influence on the occult. Arthur was a prolific author of occult texts, works on the Holy Grail, and the body of mystical knowledge, which comprises the basis of modern Tarot. He is best known as the co-creator of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck and author of its companion volume, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, first published in 1910.

Pamela Colman Smith was born to American parents on February 16, 1878, in Middlesex, England. She spent her childhood years between London, New York, and Kingston, Jamaica. During her teens, she traveled throughout England with the theatre company of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. Thereafter, she began formal art training at Pratt Institute of Brooklyn, graduating in 1897.

Pamela returned to England, where she became a theatrical designer for miniature theatre and an illustrator, mainly of books, pamphlets, and posters. Around 1903, she joined the Order of the Golden Dawn. In 1909, under the guidance of Arthur Edward Waite, she undertook a series of seventy-eight allegorical paintings described by Waite as a rectified tarot pack. The designs, published in the same year by William Rider and Son, exemplify Pamela's mysticism, ritual, imagination, fantasy, and deep emotions.