The Pictorial Key to the Tarot Book. This item is unavailable.The Pictorial Key to the Tarot Book

Arthur Edward Waite was a profound scholar of the occult. He was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn and made the tarot accessible to the reader with the release of his seminal work, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, in 1909. The book is broken into three parts: "The Veil and Its Symbols" which provides a history of the tarot along with traditional symbols associated with each card; "The Doctrine of the Veil" comprising 78 black and white images of the Rider-Waite deck along with regular and reversed meanings; and "The Outer Methods of the Oracles" which discusses the art of tarot divination, including the now famous Celtic Cross Spread. Paperback contains 340 pages with black and white illustrations.

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."