Arthur Edward Waite and the Holy Kabbalah
Most people who have held a Tarot deck have held a piece of Arthur Edward Waite's work, though few know the man. The cards that bear his name, the Rider-Waite, or Waite-Smith, deck, were published in 1909 and became the most widely used Tarot in the English-speaking world.
Waite himself, though, hoped to be remembered for something else: a vast, slow, heavily footnoted study of the Jewish mystical tradition titled The Holy Kabbalah, which he published in 1929, near the end of a long life of writing. It is a strange and ambitious book, and its author's aims are as interesting as its content.
A Seeker in London
Waite was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1857, and moved to England as a child after his father died. He grew up in London, worked as a clerk and a writer, and became deeply drawn to mysticism. He translated and edited a great number of works, from alchemical texts to the French occultist Eliphas Levi, and wrote histories of the Rosicrucians, the Holy Grail and ceremonial magic.
In 1891 he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the London magical society, but he was never at home in its practice of ritual magic. He grew more interested in the mystical, devotional side of the tradition. After the order split, he led his own offshoot, and he stayed active in esoteric circles until his death in 1942.
The Book
The Holy Kabbalah, whose full title speaks of "the Secret Tradition in Israel as unfolded by sons of the doctrine for the benefit of the elect," is a long survey of Kabbalistic literature. It covers the Sefer Yetzirah, the Zohar, the doctrine of the ten sefirot or divine emanations, the idea of the Shekhinah, the divine presence, and the later development of the tradition.
Waite drew on the Latin and English translations available to him, as he relied largely on translations. The book is a work of synthesis and of opinion. It does not read like a modern academic study. Waite's prose is dense and ornate, with long sentences, and he liked to argue with other writers as he went along.
A Christian Reading
The distinctive feature of the book is its thesis. Waite believed that the Kabbalah was the vehicle of a "secret tradition" about the hidden side of religion, and that this tradition pointed toward Christian truth. He treated Jewish Kabbalists as the bearers of a message whose full meaning they did not always see.
This view had a long history among Christian occultists, going back to the Renaissance, and Waite was one of its last major voices.
Jewish scholars have not accepted this view. The great historian of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, is generally reported to have found Waite's reading unreliable. Modern scholars treat the Kabbalah as an expression of Jewish thought in its own right, with its own history, and are cautious about Waite's reconstructions.
The Shekhinah
One of the book's most moving parts concerns the Shekhinah, from the Hebrew word meaning "dwelling," the divine presence in the world. In Kabbalistic literature she is often pictured as feminine, as the last of the sefirot, and as the figure who shares the exile of Israel and longs for union with the divine. Waite devoted much attention to her and drew parallels with Christian ideas of the indwelling spirit.
This theme is where his devotion shows most clearly. For Waite, the story of the Shekhinah's exile and return is a story about the soul, and it is a hopeful one.
The Tarot Connection
It would be a mistake to think that Waite's Tarot and his Kabbalah are separate. He saw the Tarot as a set of symbols for the soul's path, and he worked with the artist Pamela Colman Smith to produce images rich in references.
The deck is still printed and sold today. Whether the cards themselves have anything to do with the Kabbalah is disputed, since most historians say the link was imposed by nineteenth-century French and English occultists, and Waite shared this habit.
A Word of Care
Books on the Kabbalah by non-specialists, including Waite's, mix scholarship and opinion, and the Kabbalah of modern popular movements often departs from the Jewish tradition. Readers who want to learn about it seriously should look to historians such as Scholem and Moshe Idel, and to teachers within the Jewish community.
Closing
Waite wrote his Kabbalah as a pilgrim, not as a historian, and his book is a record of a search. It has been criticized and corrected, and yet it kept readers company for generations. Like the deck that carries his name, it invites people to look for hidden meaning in symbols, and it reminds us to check the guide against the map.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- Arthur Edward Waite and the Pictorial Key to the Tarot: The Rectified Spirit
- The Zohar and the Mystery of the Sabbath
- Papus and the Tarot of the Bohemians
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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