Waite's lasting oddity is that he was an occultist whose chief occupation was checking the occult's homework. In thick volumes on the Rosicrucians, on ceremonial magic, on alchemy and on freemasonry, he did something the revival around him rarely attempted: he went to the sources, dated them, and said plainly when a cherished lineage was a fabrication. His Real History of the Rosicrucians treated the manifestos as documents with authors rather than dispatches from hidden adepts; his Book of Black Magic and of Pacts printed the grimoires while pronouncing most of their pretensions absurd; his masonic encyclopaedia is still consulted.
The style in which he did it, orotund, qualified, faintly disdainful, earned him mockery, Crowley's above all, and his scepticism had limits, for he believed to the end in a genuine secret tradition, a hidden church behind the failed societies, whose sacrament he sought in the Grail literature. That conviction shaped his last order, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, founded in 1915 after the Golden Dawn fragments fell away: a mystical rather than magical body, its grades rewritten as a path of sanctity rather than power. The double stance, debunker of pedigrees and believer in the thing the pedigrees counterfeited, made him the revival's resident historian and its resident scold, and later scholarship has been kinder to his method than his contemporaries were to his prose.