according to Grand Orient.
Although Grand Orient is one of the pseudonyms used by Arthur Edward Waite, there could not have been a greater distinction between these two personas.
If we drop politeness and respect-fuelled hypocrisy, the booklet provided by A. E. Waite for the Rider-Waite Tarot is absolutely rubbish.
While the interpretation of the thirty-six numerals (Pipes) and the Court Cards is only a rough translation of Etteilla’s work, the notes on the twenty-two Major Arcana cards are rather instructions for Pamela Colman Smith on how to depict those cards, then useful instructions for their interpretation.
Waite did not reveal any Golden Dawn mysteries and didn’t break any secrecy oath.
Thus, quite surprisingly, his work, “A Manual of Cartomancy, fortune-telling and Occult Divination,” published in 1909 at the same Rider publishing company under the Grand Orient pseudonym, contains considerably more useful information regarding the Tarot and various card reading techniques.
In the following, I combined the chapter dealing with the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana and the alleged myth of the Egyptian Book of Thoth with the chapter dealing with Cartomancy and the so-called English Method of fortune-telling. These two chapters offer a complete and functional guide to using any traditional Tarot deck, including the Rider-Waite Tarot.
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