Agreed - Pictorial Key has many inaccuracies.
Agreed - Waite is pedantic, bombastic, annoying and a lot of other things,
OTOH, he's also written an excellent book that's worth going back to - again and again. There's far more to it than is apparent on the surface. His history is the most accurate of the time - indeed more accurate than most books prior to Dummett and Kaplan. He's studied and attempted to integrate a range of "traditional" tarot interpretations. He seemingly obfuscates many things but, when examined, it's obvious that in his section on the Secret Tradition (his main interest), he takes you as far as words can go and after that only mystical experience will suffice. He values (and recommends) intuition when reading the cards. He only hints at the mystical and magical meanings of the symbols but if you follow these up in his other books and in Golden Dawn magical sources you will find that he was very knowledgeable and precise. For all that it seems a simple book, it demands a sophisticated and dedicated reader.
On TarotL we spent a month or two going line-by-line through Part II: "The Doctrine Behind the Veil" and I think everyone involved in the discussion ended up with a deep appreciation for what he was actually conveying. It helps to look up his terms in a good 19th c. British dictionary and in his books on the Grail, Freemasonry, the Rosicrucians, Alchemy and mysticism. Plus it doesn't hurt to read his translations of Eliphas Lévi, too.
On a slightly different track, it turns out that he did have specific stories and sources for the Minor Arcana. I explain all this in an article in Llewellyn's Tarot Reader 2006 (just out). The key can be found in his statement about the Ace of Cups - "It is an intimation of that which may lie behind the Lesser Arcana." The same year as the deck was published his first book on the Holy Grail also came out - "The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal" - duh! Yep, it's all in there! He summarizes the main Grail myths, which you will find in the suits. Pentacles goes beyond this, though, to concentrate on a Grail descendent - Freemasonry (the parallels have been noted by many plus I found several more). Anyway, read the article and you might find Waite of more interest than you thought.
Mary
