Ephraim Waite

Ephraim Waite is a fictional character introduced in H. P. Lovecraft's 1937 short story "The Thing on the Doorstep". Waite is a wizard who has the power to transfer his consciousness into another's body; in the course of the story, his spirit inhabits the body of his daughter Asenath Waite, and then Asenath's husband Edward Pickman Derby.
==Overview==
Waite is described as "a prodigious magical student"; aside from the power of mind transference, it is said "he could raise or quell storms at sea according to his whim." He would sometimes visit Miskatonic University in Arkham to "consult forbidden tomes at the college library." 
Waite is a resident of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, living in a "half-decayed mansion in Washington Street" whose "attic windows were always boarded." His "unknown wife...always went veiled"; the fact that their child Asenath had "overprotuberant eyes" indicates that this spouse, like many residents of Innsmouth, was of Deep One heritage. Asenath is described as "the child of [Ephraim's] old age".
The elder Waite is said to have "died insane—under rather queer circumstances—just before his daughter...entered the Hall School." This insanity would mark the transfer of the father's consciousness into his daughter's body: "Old Ephraim—he had known the secret, and when he grew old did a hideous thing to keep alive," his son-in-law Edward Derby explains. "He wanted to live forever...." Derby's friend Daniel Upton, the story's narrator, notes that Asenath "had been his morbidly avid pupil and looked fiendishly like him at times."
In life, Waite is described as having a "wolfish, saturnine face" and a "tangle of iron-grey beard".
== Inspiration ==
Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price has suggested that the wizard Ephraim Waite is based on Arthur Edward Waite (2 October 1857 – 19 May 1942) , a British author, poet and occultist who helped create the popular Rider-Waite tarot deck. He belonged for a time to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the organisation that inspired Chaosium's Silver Twilight Lodge.
Category:Deceased (In Mythos)
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Magic Users