- The Man Behind the Cards: Waite’s Theological Background
- How Waite Used the King James Bible to Rebuild the Major Arcana
- The Minor Arcana: Biblical Parables in Card Form
- Where Waite Parted Ways with Orthodox Christianity
- The King James Language in Waite’s Writings
- Common Misconceptions About Waite and the Bible
- Closing
A man sits in a London library in 1909, a thick Bible open on one side of his desk and a stack of Renaissance grimoires on the other. He is Arthur Edward Waite, and he is stitching together two worlds that most people of his era considered opposites: Christian mysticism and the esoteric tradition of the Tarot. The King James Bible is not incidental to his project. It is the frame on which he built his entire symbolic system, the source of the language he used, and the emotional register he aimed to evoke. We can trace the debt on nearly every card of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
Arthur Edward Waite’s work, especially the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, draws directly on the language, imagery, and theological structure of the King James Bible, reframing Christian mysticism through an esoteric lens. He did not replace scripture with occultism. He treated the Bible as a symbolic text that required esoteric interpretation to reveal its deeper meaning. The deck is not a pagan artifact. It is a Protestant mystic’s attempt to illustrate the soul’s journey through a Christian universe, rendered in the vocabulary of the King James Version.
The Man Behind the Cards: Waite’s Theological Background
Arthur Edward Waite was born in 1857 in Brooklyn, New York, to an American mother and an English father who died when Waite was a child. The family moved to England, and young Arthur was raised in a strict Roman Catholic household. He remained formally Catholic until his twenties, when he began exploring Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the occult revival sweeping Victorian London.
By 1890, Waite had joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but he never abandoned his Christian roots. He described himself as a “Christian mystic” and wrote extensively on the history of magic, alchemy, and the Holy Grail. His 1911 book The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail argued that the Grail legends were coded Christian esotericism. His 1924 work The Holy Kabbalah attempted to reconcile Jewish mysticism with Christian theology. Every major project Waite undertook returned to the same question: what did the Bible mean when read as an esoteric document?
The King James Bible was the version Waite knew by heart. It was the standard English text of his era, the one he heard in Anglican services and quoted in his writings. When he wrote about the “wasteland” or the “New Jerusalem,” he used the King James phrasing. When he designed the Tarot with Pamela Colman Smith in 1909, he told her to base the figures on the Bible’s descriptions, not on the crude woodcuts of earlier decks.
How Waite Used the King James Bible to Rebuild the Major Arcana
The Major Arcana of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck is not a sequence of random archetypes. It is a structured narrative of spiritual descent and redemption that mirrors the biblical story of Fall and Restoration. Waite wrote in his 1910 book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot that the Tarot “is the story of the soul’s pilgrimage from the heights to the depths and back again.” The King James Bible provided the vocabulary for every stage.
The Fool, the first card, carries a small bundle and walks toward a cliff. Waite described him as “the spirit in search of experience,” echoing the King James phrasing of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” The fool does not know what he is leaving or what he is approaching. He is Adam before the Fall, innocent and ignorant.
The Magician, card I, stands with one hand raised to heaven and one pointing to earth. Waite explicitly connected this to the Lord’s Prayer as rendered in the King James Bible: “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” The Magician is the human channel between divine intention and material manifestation. He is what a person becomes when they align their will with God’s.
The High Priestess, card II, sits between two pillars labeled B and J (for Boaz and Jachin, the pillars of Solomon’s Temple as described in 1 Kings 7:21). The King James translation reads: “And he set up the pillars in the porch of the temple: and he set up the right pillar, and called the name thereof Jachin: and he set up the left pillar, and called the name thereof Boaz.” Waite placed her there deliberately. She guards the entrance to the sanctuary, the place where the divine presence dwells.
The Hanged Man, card XII, is the most direct biblical quotation in the deck. Waite described him as “the martyr of the mysteries,” and his posture is taken directly from the King James description of Peter’s crucifixion: “He was crucified with his head downward.” The nimbus around the Hanged Man’s head is a halo, the same word the King James Bible uses for the glow on Moses’ face after he spoke with God (Exodus 34:29).
The Devil, card XV, is not a horned monster. He is Baphomet, the goat-headed figure of medieval Templar lore, but Waite placed him on a pedestal that exactly matches the description of the “abomination of desolation” in Daniel 9:27. The two chained figures below him echo the King James phrasing: “And they shall be gathered together as prisoners are gathered in the pit.”
The Judgement card, card XX, is the most explicit. Angels blow trumpets, the dead rise from their graves, and the figures stand on water. Waite took this directly from the King James version of Revelation 20:13: “And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them.”
The Minor Arcana: Biblical Parables in Card Form
Waite treated the Minor Arcana differently. The numbered cards and court cards in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck are not copies of earlier designs. Waite wrote extended descriptions for each one in his 1910 book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, and those descriptions are saturated with King James Bible references.
The Four of Cups shows a man sitting under a tree, ignoring three cups while a hand offers a fourth. Waite wrote: “He is the man who has seen the vision and despises the gifts of earth.” The phrasing echoes the King James version of Hebrews 11:13: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off.”
The Seven of Cups shows cups filled with strange objects: a castle, a jewel, a serpent, a dragon, a head, a veiled figure. Waite called them “the visions of the brain” and connected them to the King James translation of Proverbs 14:12: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”
The Ten of Swords shows a man lying face down with ten swords in his back. Waite wrote: “It is the card of the ultimate defeat of the material life.” The image is a visual rendering of the King James version of Ezekiel 21:28: “The sword, it is made bright, it is furbished for the slaughter.”
Where Waite Parted Ways with Orthodox Christianity
Waite did not treat the King James Bible as inerrant scripture. He treated it as a symbolic text whose literal meaning was only the surface. He wrote in The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail that the Bible “is not the revelation itself, but the record of the revelation.” The true revelation was hidden beneath the words.
This distinction is crucial. Orthodox Protestantism held that the Bible was sufficient for salvation. Waite held that the Bible pointed to something beyond itself, something that required esoteric training to perceive. He called this hidden knowledge “the Secret Tradition” and argued that it had been passed down through alchemy, Kabbalah, and the Grail legends.
The King James Bible provided the symbols. The esoteric tradition provided the interpretive tool to read them.
Three specific departures mark Waite’s break with Protestant orthodoxy.
First, Waite rejected the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura. He believed that scripture alone was not enough. The reader needed initiation into the Secret Tradition to understand what the text actually meant. This is why his Tarot deck includes symbols drawn from alchemy, astrology, and Kabbalah that have no direct biblical source.
Second, Waite rejected the Protestant insistence on faith alone. He wrote that salvation required not belief but gnosis, direct experiential knowledge of God. The Tarot was a tool for achieving that gnosis, not for teaching doctrine.
Third, Waite rejected the Protestant iconoclasm that stripped churches of images. He wrote in The Pictorial Key that “the pictures are not decorations. They are revelations.” The King James Bible was a text. The Tarot was an image. Both were necessary, and neither was sufficient without the other.
The King James Language in Waite’s Writings
Waite did not only borrow biblical images. He borrowed the King James rhythm and phrasing. His prose in The Pictorial Key reads like a Jacobean sermon. Sentences are long, clauses pile on clauses, and the vocabulary is deliberately archaic. He wrote “thou” and “thee” well into the twentieth century. He used “hath” and “doth” when “has” and “does” would have been standard.
This was no affectation. Waite believed that the King James language carried a sacred weight. The words themselves were part of the revelation. When he wrote about the Fool, he used the King James phrasing of Psalm 14: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” When he described the World card, he quoted Revelation 21: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth.”
The result is a body of work that sounds biblical without being the Bible. Waite created a secondary scripture, a Tarot that could be read alongside the King James text, amplifying and interpreting it.
Common Misconceptions About Waite and the Bible
Misconception: Waite rejected Christianity. Waite described himself as a Christian mystic until his death in 1942. He wrote that the Tarot was “a Christian document in the truest sense” and that the Bible was “the greatest of all esoteric books.” He did not reject Christianity. He rejected what he saw as the church’s failure to understand its own scriptures.
Misconception: The Rider-Waite-Smith deck is a pagan tool. The deck is filled with Christian imagery: crosses, halos, angels, saints, and biblical scenes. The Temperance card shows an angel with a sun on her forehead. The Judgement card shows the resurrection of the dead. The World card shows a figure that Waite explicitly identified as “the Divine Logos.” Calling the deck pagan requires ignoring everything Waite wrote about it.
Misconception: Waite invented the Tarot’s Christian meanings. The Tarot was already used in Christian contexts before Waite. The earliest known decks, the Visconti-Sforza tarots of the fifteenth century, depict Christian virtues, saints, and biblical scenes. What Waite did was systematize the Christian reading and connect it explicitly to the King James Bible.
FAQ
Did Arthur Edward Waite believe the King James Bible was literally true?
No. Waite treated the Bible as a symbolic document whose literal meaning was only the outer shell. The true meaning required esoteric interpretation.
Why did Waite use the King James Bible instead of another translation?
The King James was the standard English Bible of his era. It was the version he knew from Anglican worship and the one he quoted throughout his writings. Its archaic language also suited his mystical style.
Does the Rider-Waite-Smith deck contradict the King James Bible?
Waite did not see contradiction. He saw the Tarot as a tool for interpreting the Bible. The deck makes visible what the text describes symbolically: the soul’s journey, the Fall, and the return to God.
Closing
Waite’s relationship with the King James Bible is not a footnote in Tarot history. It is the foundation of the deck that tens of thousands of readers use today. The images on every card carry the rhythm of that Jacobean prose, the weight of those seventeenth-century translators, and the belief that scripture could be read as a map of the soul. To understand Waite is to understand that he was not creating something new. He was translating something old into pictures.
For more on the figures and texts that shaped the esoteric Tarot tradition, see our related Tarot guides. The symbols Waite borrowed from the King James Bible have their own histories: the pillars of the temple, the angel of Temperance, the trumpet of Judgement. Each one appears in the glossary of sacred symbols maintained in this library. And for the full story of how Waite and Pamela Colman Smith worked together to create the deck, read our guide to the Rider-Waite-Smith collaboration.