Oswald Wirth (1860-1943) was a Swiss esotericist, writer, and Freemason, who became one of the major figures of Western symbolism at the turn of the 20th century. A disciple and secretary of the occultist Stanislas de Guaita, he developed an early interest in Hermetic traditions, astrology, and Kabbalah.
In 1889, together with de Guaita, he created a tarot deck composed of the 22 major arcana, now known as the Wirth Tarot, which remains a key reference in the history of esoteric tarot. His written work, notably The Tarot of the Medieval Imagists (1927), greatly contributed to spreading an initiatory and symbolic interpretation of the tarot, placing it within a tradition of spiritual knowledge and transmission.
