by Marcus Katz
Waite himself notes that several of the aphorisms are taken from De Senancour’s Libres Meditations d’un Solitaire Inconnu (1819). He had actually translated De Senancour’s book Obermann three years prior in 1903, having been drawn to this French essayists’ work through Matthew Arnold’s poetry. It may be that Waite identified strongly with the lonely, pained, unrecognised, and highly sensitive writings of the “unknown recluse.” He wrote in his introduction to that work that “the important point about Obermann is that it is a soul recounting its experiences, recording its speculations and registering its questionings in the valley of the shadow.”56
Waite saw Meditations as a spiritual sequel to Obermann.57
In the preface to Steps, Waite wrote succinctly about the Kabbalah and the grade system of the mystical and magical orders. He remarked, “It is by many stages and through many slow graduations that we approach the great things.” The word “grade” means “step,” so it is no doubt he was considering these grades of advancement in his book of aphorisms.
He also states, without naming the Kabbalah other than as “an ancient secret doctrine,” that the four worlds of Kabbalah relate in reverse to the four stages of human thought. Here we present a table of these correspondences, using Waite’s own words and allusions to the biblical journey of the Israelites, which is also referred by Waite. As the four worlds and levels of thought relate to the court cards, we can clearly see a useful relationship.
Court Card
Journey
Level of Experience
Kabbalistic World
Nature
Page
Egypt
The Dark Night of the Soul
Assiah, the world of Action
Shadows and rebellion, divorced from grace, inhibition, normality
Knight
Red Sea
The Great Discontent
Yetzirah, the world of Formation
Diverse quests, first signs of awakening, seeking for the land of true patrimony
Queen
Sinai
The First Lights
Briah, the world of Creation
The waking soul following the light to where it will be taken; grace operating
King
The Promised Land
The Promised Land
Atziluth, the world of Emanation
All time flowing into the mystery of God; working to make sure both the calling and the election
The allusions of Steps are carefully and secretly constructed according to kabbalistic principles, whether on purpose or just out of habit, it is difficult to tell. The book is divided into four sections, corresponding again to the four worlds and court cards.
Page: The Fashions of This World
Knight: Thresholds of Many Sanctuaries
Queen: Shadows of a Secret Light
King: Consolations of the Greater Law
Finally, in the penultimate aphorism, Waite again clearly references all the Sephiroth of the Tree of Life without mentioning the Kabbalah. This can be used to apply to the ten numbers of the four minor arcana suits as we show in the following table.
Minor Number
Sephirah
Nature
Tens
Kingdom
Shadow of the divine
Nines
Foundation
Qualification and guardians
Eights
Glory
Movement against rejection
Sevens
Victory
Seeing the heights, preparation
Sixes
Beauty
Advancement, proscription, asceticism, concupiscence
Fives
Judgement
Judgement and clemency
Fours
Mercy
Compassion and consolation
Threes
Understanding
Exalted light of understanding
Twos
Wisdom
Exalted light of wisdom
Aces
Crown
The great light in concealment
Waite and the Lady of Stars
The secret of the twenty-two major arcana of the tarot as seen by Waite is the secret of the Shekinah, a Hebrew name used in Jewish mysticism for the “divine presence” or “holy spirit.” His unpublished writings and several recently published private notes clearly demonstrate that he saw the major arcana as an illustrated narrative of the relationship of our soul to this divine presence. It is specifically a manifest presence, one that can be experienced by the mystic or magician in the heights of esoteric rapture.
The establishment and fulfilment of this relationship was taken by Waite as the aim of the mystic, and he set out its course upon the kabbalistic Tree of Life upon which the tarot was arranged as a sacred map. Whilst this had earlier been done by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which Waite had been a member, he later developed his own map—one more suited to a mystical rather than a magical perspective—and taught it in his secret order, the F. R. C. (Brothers of the Rosy Cross).
It is that map which was revealed in Abiding in the Sanctuary (2011) for the first time in a century, and to which we now return, to show particularly how certain cards represent different stages in our spiritual path to the divine. We will introduce the concept of the Shekinah and then use Waite’s own words to explore different cards. We will also show how these can then be used in deep spiritual readings for oneself or others. Finally, we will map out the course of spiritual ascent as viewed by Waite, using his own secret mapping of the tarot on the Tree of Life.
The Shekinah
The leading kabbalistic scholar, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), describes the Shekinah as the “divine presence” and corresponding to Malkuth, the final Sephirah on the Tree of Life. That is to say, it is the ultimate manifestation of the divine, through the ten stages and twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life. The Shekinah is often seen as a feminine presence; Scholem writes, “The emphasis placed on the female principle in the symbolism of the last Sefirah heightens the mythical language of these descriptions. Appearing from above as ‘the end of thought,’ the last Sefirah is for man the door or gate through which he can begin the ascent up the ladder of perception of the Divine Mystery.”58 The Shekinah is also the nature of divine providence in the world, the action of the divine in our reality, even if it is based on higher—more spiritual—principles.
The separation of the soul from the divine is given in much of Kabbalah as a story of exile and redemption and of the separation of a man and a woman, often depicted as king and queen. The narrative of the fallen woman and her return to grace is one of many symbolic stories that are more deeply read as the return of the soul to divine union.
It is thr
ough the symbols of the tarot, particularly those depicting a feminine presence, that Waite saw this eternal story, and taught its mysteries in secret.
The Shekinah Cards
Waite saw all the cards as aspects of the Shekinah, but some more than others. He wrote that the cards were illustrations that not only explained but extended the meanings of the paths on the Tree of Life. His writings explore these meanings working from the Sepher Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, a touchstone of kabbalistic study. He also refers to his own correspondences between the Hebrew letters on the Tree of Life and the tarot, which further illuminates his concept of each of these sacred symbols.
We here present the Shekinah cards and their correspondences, and demonstrate for each how this can illuminate our readings and give Waite’s own wisdom through these particular cards.
Temperance: The Lady of Reconciliation
Temperance reconciles water and fire for Waite; it is the “cleansing” and the “saving” of divine connection. As such, it is a far more alchemical understanding that Waite had of this card than the version Pamela painted for his first deck. In fact, his second version of Temperance, in the Waite-Trinick images, shows a far loftier concept of the card. The Golden Dawn had two images of this card, and Crowley took from the alchemical version as Waite did with Trinick, but not with Pamela. He was perhaps keeping the secrets of its alchemical correspondences from the masses.
The World: The Soul of the World
The image of the World is seen by Waite as the archetypal state of Paradise—a Hebrew word meaning simply “garden”—and the divine indwelling in all things. This perfect state, where the divine world and the mundane world are one and the same, is the state to which the symbolic journey of the major cards leads the pilgrim.
Waite and the Way of Faerie in Tarot
The “Great Beast,” Aleister Crowley, was notorious for his lampooning of fellow magicians, occultists, and poets. In particular, he repeatedly attacked Waite, even entitling a false obituary of the poor man as “Dead Waite” whilst Mr. Waite was still alive. This lampooning was so extensive and so successful that even now, a century later, we often consider Waite a “dry stick,” an ex-railway clerk and manager at the Horlick’s food factory who used thirteen pages when just a sentence would have sufficed.
The story is far more complex, and Waite had far deeper currents and emotional appreciation than we might think. In fact, it might even be said that Crowley was intensely jealous of Waite’s natural and developed mystical sense and experience, which gave rise to his critiques. As he wrote: “Any path will lead him who is born to the Quest.”59
In this chapter we will introduce you to a secret side of Waite you may not have encountere—a fey, haunting, romantic, intensely personal, and mystical side, captured in Waite’s The Quest of the Golden Stairs (1927). This was written seventeen years after he designed the tarot with Pamela, and ten years after his second tarot project, the Waite-Trinick tarot.
The Spectator newspaper of the time (July 23, 1927), in a brief and positive review, advised readers not to expect “tawdry glitter and silvery sentiment” with the faerie tale, but instead set off on a pilgrimage into “more than a tale, as admirers of Mr. Waite will recognise.”
This pilgrimage is written in twenty-two chapters, and as we are “admirers” of Mr. Waite, we should immediately recognise that anything written in twenty-two chapters may indeed be “more than a tale,” and perhaps modelled on the same number of paths of the Tree of Life and their corresponding tarot cards. In fact, the book contains “marginalia,” brief titles given at certain points of the text, in much the same way that Aleister Crowley’s Wake World (1907) used, to highlight the correspondences to the Tree of Life used in that text—which was also a pseudo-fairytale.
So if we take a look at a sample chapter title, for example, chapter 13, “The Obscure Night of Faerie,” and its subtitle, “Where is the Hand that Leads?” we might wonder if this is the Hermit card, where the Hermit leads us through the dark night. When we turn to the chapter, in the second paragraph, we immediately read, “Behold now, he stood again in the presence of that Wise Master who was the Hermit of his first quest.” Other chapters mention specifically the Tower, the Moon, the Sun, and the Wheel of Fortune, whilst still other chapters appear more subtle reflections of the twenty-two majors.
There are also clear kabbalistic and Golden Dawn ritual allusions throughout the book; the very first line is “There is a Crown suspended in Faerie … ” which refers to the first Sephirah of the Tree of Life, Kether, meaning “crown.” The final chapter is entitled “enthronement,” referring to Malkuth, the Kingdom, the tenth and lowest Sephirah on the Tree. The word “kingdom” is used on the very final page, “The power shall not pass from Faerie, nor the kingdom fall away … ”
The Golden Dawn teachings of ritual and Kabbalah are given in titles of the characters that accompany or guide Prince Melnor on his way to reunite a ring of power with his bride-to-be. We meet such characters as the “Keeper of the Precincts” although there are also faerie titles including the Daughter of Stars, a title given by Waite in his unpublished notes on the tarot for the Star card itself. Elsewhere in the text we discover allusions to the paths on the Tree of Life, some more explicit than others; “I see a path opening and a crown at the end thereof” is given in the chapter that appears to be of the High Priestess, in turn allocated to the path that connects to Kether, the Crown.
The rainbow bridge of QShTh is described by Waite as a “cloud” between the four lower “towers” of the mundane world and the seven “towers” of the faerie world, i.e. the Sephiroth on the Tree of Life. There is also a clear description of the Abyss, the state that separates the upper three Sephiroth on the Tree of Life from the lower seven that are manifest.
There are also fleeting alchemical references, including an alchemical ritual and nods to the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. That Waite presented all this teaching in a complex fairytale romance is somewhat astonishing, given that the main storyline seems almost incomprehensibly complex even without these layers. However, for the purpose of this section, we would like to present a summary of his view on the tarot as seen through the lens of Faerie—even if it is via complex Kabbalah and Waite’s personal version of Catholic mysticism.
This overview may give you a new appreciation of the major arcana when carrying out readings, particularly if you are using the Waite-Smith deck. If you are working with fairytale-style decks, you might enjoy comparing Waite’s view with your deck.
We have given the cards in the order they appear in the book, which may or may not be a different sequence on the Tree of Life used by Waite at that time. He had certainly already developed his own system of correspondences ten years earlier for the Waite-Trinick tarot (which was different from the Golden Dawn system) and may have continued to further refine his system. This order certainly appears closer to his Waite-Trinick layout than the Golden Dawn/Crowley systems for example, commencing logically (for the Tree) with the Emperor and Empress—male and female duality.
The numbers here are the chapter numbers, not the card numbers. We have also provided a quote from each chapter that may be used as a “faerie oracle” by considering a question, shuffling the twenty-two major arcana, and then selecting one and reading the corresponding oracular quote as your answer.
For example, “What is the situation regarding the project delay?”
Card: The Hierophant—in Waite’s system, this is the Priest of Stars, and the quote we have chosen from that chapter is “A bye-lane, a narrow lane, a very crooked path, a track over green meadows, a path beside the brook. But this is the way into Faerie, and this goes also through.” This means that the project delay is indeed going to go on, but it is the only way to go through.
That was a real reading—and very, very, applicable.
For keen tarot students, we have also provided a three-
card spread based on Waite’s Faerie lore following the list below.
The Major Arcana of Faerie
Emperor: Knight of the Swan—May Day; crown, king, throne, and insignia; hilltop, witness: “Come quickly, therefore, ye who are called in the heart: one shall be chosen perchance” (Quest, 2).
Empress: Queen of Quests—ship at anchor, birth, coast, heritage, traditional knowledge: “To him who can open a door which leads within to Faerie, the end is everywhere” (Quest, 8).
Hanged Man: Master or Chief of the Portal—vision, voice of dole (fate), proclamation: “So did the Twelve Houses of Heaven work through the will of others to reach their proper ends” (Quest, 12).
Wheel: The Haunted Well—Omens and portents: “There is a Wheel of Fortune in Faerie which only Kindness turns” (Quest, 18).
Strength: The Dove—pity, compassion, healing: “The rusty key may open a house of plenty, and a wicket-gate may lead to places of mystery” (Quest, 24).
Temperance: The Phoenix—honouring life, the mission, the quest, history, service: “The way into Faerie is a word of sweetness, clothed in many forms of action” (Quest, 32).
Star: The Daughter of the Stars—vigil, dreaming, vision, divination, humanity: “That is a good finding and true at the heart of things—but the time is not yet” (Quest, 43).
Devil: The Queen of Spells (Beryl)—deception, passion, wildness, strangeness, evil: “All things are wrong between us” (Quest, 50).
Hermit: The Wise Master—travel, mysteries, speech, awakening, clarity: “That which remains is yours and devolves on you” (Quest, 61).
Death: The Passing of the Master—death, ebb and flow, legend, the path of souls, passage, link, inheritance: “Behind the dark and the dole, a treasure of hidden gold” (Quest, 71).
Lovers: The Nuptials of Faerie—union, marriage, health, perfect counterpart: “Moreover, he assured him of the speedy fulfilment of all his wishes” (Quest, 75).