The Spiritual Key to the Tarot: How A. E. Waite Rectified the Tarot

A. E. Waite was responsible for bringing the tarot to a public audience and with artist Pamela Colman Smith created a deck that has become the world’s most popular and recognised set of images.However, Waite’s writing has been overlooked for a century and his Pictorial Key to the Tarot has been relegated to history by hundreds – if not thousands – of tarot books written and published since 1909.Building on our ground-breaking book, Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot (Llewellyn, 2015) we have spent a decade researching the entire life and work of A. E. Waite and have written a new book, The Spiritual Key to the Tarot (Forge Press, 2025) which shares his spiritual and mystical insight for a modern audience.We have also included a complete and authoritative card-by-card commentary on Pictorial Key to the Tarot, clearly explaining for the first time how Waite designed the cards – particularly the Major Arcana – as a map of the spiritual life.Every symbol is seen anew from the point of view of A. E. Waite, alongside our ground-breaking work on Pamela Colman-Smith in Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot and the Waite-Trinick Tarot in Abiding in the Sanctuary.This book is stand-alone and the essential guide to the Waite-Smith Tarot, drawing from his original writings and from ten years of research and a lifetime of experience.You can also enjoy the exclusive Tarot Diploma course which presents the material in this book through ten fully illustrated lessons taught by Marcus Katz at https://www.tarotassociation.net/tarosophy-tarot-diploma/. Read more